About a decade ago I was done with Christianity in my heart. I didn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure there was a God. (Full disclosure: still struggle with that one.) Beyond that, I didn’t really like Jesus either. The gospel I knew seemed all about getting to heaven after I die and being forgiven of my sins through believing a series of less-than-logical facts in my head. Since I was a pastor, I wasn’t telling people this stuff. I was just looking for a way out – a way out of my job and ultimately a way out of my faith.

And then I met Dallas Willard.

Dallas WIllard

Not, literally. I never actually met him. But he brought me to Jesus.

I didn’t know Jesus until I read The Divine Conspiracy.

I don’t know how else to put it: That book saved my life.

Dallas passed away today. It broke my heart to hear it. I feel like I lost my Ben Kenobi. If there’s one thing he taught me, it’s what he says in response to John Ortberg’s question at the 2:10 mark of the video below. The bottom line is that Dallas is in Heaven today, not because he died, but because he lived there in the first place.

*If you read my blog in an RSS feed you may need to go directly to www.joeboydblog.com to watch the video.

A few years ago I went through a series of fairly intense assessments while making some major life and career decisions. The person I hired to help me figure out my life, after reviewing my tests, came to a quick and firm conclusion: Joe Boyd is a performer.

When she said that to kick off our meeting I had two distinct and immediate emotional reactions:

1. Yep.
2. And that’s a bad thing.

The truth is that I am hard-wired to perform – to speak, teach, produce, improvise, act and write. And I’m not at all a pure artist. I only like doing those things with people watching. At the bottom of it all are some very dark and scary motivations: to be popular, to be needed, to be important, to control others, to acquire money or fame. I hate those things, but I’d be lying to myself to say they aren’t there. The truest thing I can say is that they are there, but they aren’t there nearly as much as they used to be.

Truth is, I should have had a third reaction to her comment:

3. It’s also a good thing.

The older I get, the more comfortable I am in my own skin…and with my own faith journey. I’m never going to not be a performer. My only hope is to become a redeemed performer: to use my urges to be seen in away that benefits others more than myself.

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be the leading actor in a movie coming out in over 40 theaters nation-wide, I would have acted humble but been inwardly proud. I would have thought about the perceived glory in that. The truth is that the greatest thing God has ever done for me is to consistently give my all of my life dreams AFTER I don’t want them anymore.

When I was 25 I wanted to be a mega-church pastor.
When I was 30 I didn’t want that at all.
It happened when I was 35.

When I was 30 I wanted to be a movie star.
When I was 35 I gave up on that dream.
Now at 40, I am not movie star, but I am starring in a pretty darn legit movie.

I tried to get out of acting in A Strange Brand of Happy no less than ten times. Every time I tried to quit, Brad Wise, the film’s director and my friend and collaborator, convinced me that I was the best man for the job. The main reason I didn’t want to act in the movie was that I was worried about people questioning my motivations. Brad pushed and pushed. Luckily, I find the release of this movie timing up perfectly with a true inner sense of not needing anyone to approve of my motivations. Think whatever you want to think about why I do what I do. I honestly don’t care if you think bad things about me. Thank God, I’m not that way anymore except for occasional short bouts of ego-inflated remission. (Side note: Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward closed the deal for me on this. I recommend it to anyone ready to move beyond needing approval or success in life. There is a second half of life that is exponentially more fulfilling than the first half.)

So here’s the deal: I’m starring in a movie opposite Shirley Jones, the Academy Award winner for Best Actress in Elmer Gantry, a favorite movie of mine somewhat ironically about both preaching and acting. That’s a cool thing, but it’s not a big deal to me. What is a big deal to me is that I have been allowed co-tell stories of hope and faith in a world that needs that more than anything else.

I feel like the luckiest preacher in the world…I get to proclaim good news outside of the church walls to people who don’t even know they are getting it. I love that God is letting me do this – and to top it off, I get to do it with my friends. I can’t prove this to anyone, but all I care about in regard to this project is the story. I want people to believe, if just for a second, that perhaps there is a God…and perhaps that strange brand of happy you feel when everything suddenly feels right…perhaps that is a taste of heaven. Maybe what Jesus called the “Kingdom of Heaven” can break in anywhere. Like a movie theater in Canton, Lexington, Las Vegas, Kansas City or Dayton.

So here’s what all this means for you:

I need your help.

I don’t want you to help me become famous or make money or be successful. I need you to help me get people to see this movie. My friends and I have devoted three years of our lives to create a story that sparks hope and action. We want people to see it. Of that, I am unashamed.

So here’s how you can help me get this story to lots of people:

1. Fork over some American greenbacks and pre-buy a block of tickets for you and your friends. I know it’s really silly to buy tickets for a movie four months in advance. I’ve never bought tickets for a movie more than one day in advance. But the bottom line is that we haven’t yet proven to the Hollywood decision makers that we can sell tickets to our movies. If we sell tickets now, they will take notice. (Money is their love language.) More tickets now = more theaters opening in more cities on September 13th = more people seeing the movie in more cities = a little more hope bubbling up in the world.

It’s that simple. So please reserve your seats today.

2. If you live in any of the 42 markets currently booked, please consider connecting us to your pastor or a community leader who can help us get the word out. Or volunteer to join one of our street teams in each city.

3. If you live in another city where the movie isn’t scheduled to play and you think you can lead an effort to pre-sell 500 tickets, then we can open up in your town. Again, contact us. (Pastor friends, we can work with you to sponsor it through your church as an outreach for non-churchgoers.)

4. Sign up for weekly email updates and stay in the know.

5. Help us spread the word on social media by linking the website and trailer.  Follow the movie on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

6. Have a little patience with me if I talk about it too much. It’s important to me. I’m eerily silent during presidential elections, so maybe I’ve bought a little grace to talk about my passion area? I will try to be careful not to annoy you…

7. Pray for all of us involved. Sign up for Rebel Pilgrim prayer updates by sending an email to pray@rebelpilgrim.com. We sincerely believe this matters more than anything else.

I just asked for a lot. But I think I’m ok with that.

We have but one life…and when we find what we were put here to do it seems best to me to talk about it and to invite others to join the adventure.

So, join me in telling this story. I’d be honored.

Here’s a video explaining more about the movie:

And here’s the trailer:

*If you receive my blogs via email, you may have to go to www.strangehappymovie.com to see the videos.

I haven’t been blogging for many months. Primarily because I have had nothing worth saying. Today I have something to say.

I will first confess that it takes a lot for a news story to get to me emotionally. In part because I am by default rather cynical and fatalistic. Nothing surprises me.

This shooting in Newtown, Connecticut today is hitting me harder than other horror stories that pass through my twitter feed. Maybe it’s because I have a son in an elementary school right now as I type. Maybe it’s because it seems fractionally worse to kill little children than it does to kill adults or even teenagers. (That may be a strange thing to say – but this is sending me spinning more than Columbine did.)

I have a lot of different kinds of friends. I count that as a blessing. I have a lot of right-leaning Evangelical friends. They have taken to Facebook offering prayers, bible verses and outrage. I’m good with that.

I have liberal Christian friends who jump to looking for a societal fix like gun control reform, etc.  I get that too. (Sadly, it never takes long for my conservative and liberal Christian friends to fight over politics on an issue like this before we even have a body count.)

I also have plenty of atheist and agnostic friends. They are also outraged. They tend to speak of the need for love and justice. I get it. Some of them get upset at people of faith for praying, saying that God could have stopped it in the first place if he is even there. They think us naïve. Again…I get it. I have always been honest with my doubts about the whole God thing. But I say to them, let us process the way we process.

The words of Paul in Romans 12 have been pounding in my head like a throbbing migraine today. I can’t shake them. I tweeted them earlier today. I think all of us – Christians of all stripes, people of other faiths or no faith at all – I think maybe we can at least for today rally around this ancient Jewish rabbi turned Christian apostle’s simple statement:

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.

My hope is that all of my friends would take these words to heart today. This is how we move forward – together. In love. United against evil and clinging to the good. And honoring one another as we go, even if we are different. Because we are more the same than we are different. We all want love. We all want hope. If nothing else, a story of despair like this fuels the fire in my heart to continue telling stories of hope. I’m blessed to have a career that let’s me do that, but you can do it too. We all can – in a hundred different ways.

So what do we do now? After something like this?

We pray if we are able. But ultimately we love. It’s the only way out of this darkness.

I am excited to speak this weekend at the Vineyard after a long break. My topic assigned months ago was “simple love.”

Seems like what we all need…maybe me most of all.

I have been honored to have Dave Nixon write this series on my blog. This is his last post for now. If you are new to the party, you can find his other posts by scrolling back on my blog.

Reflections on Stability Part 6:

I am excited that Scot McKnight will be coming to The Vineyard this Saturday morning, April 21,  to speak to us about his latest book The King Jesus Gospel. This is an event for the Vineyard Shareholders, but we are opening it up for anyone in Cincinnati who would like to come.

Join us at 9:00 a.m. for a continental breakfast. Scot will be speaking around 10 a.m. It’s a free event, so I hope you will take advantage of it.

Scot has been a strong influence on me, helping me grasp the gospel as the story of Jesus and his Kingdom come.

RSVP if you are coming at this link.

You can also read Scot’s blog here.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much for over the last few weeks. I have good reasons. There is a lot going on with me these days that I will be able to share more about in the weeks to come. Luckily, my pal Dave Nixon is filling the gap. Here is Dave’s fourth essay in his series on stability.

This is a guest post as part of an ongoing series from Dave Nixon of Sustainable Faith. You can read his first article here.

One of the most grating experiences about moving into our neighborhood was a language issue. Adults I both met and overheard regularly used words that rhymed with truck, mitt, ram, more, hitch, runt, hick, rock and …. need I say more? Yes — because the language wasn’t confined to adults. I saw that the proverb “train up children in the way they should go, and when they’re old they won’t depart from it” applied in this area, too. Young kids would utter things that would curl my toes. And because we had three young children, I wanted badly to insulate them from the potty-mouthed adults and children all around us.

We homeschooled our kids up until their high school years, but that wasn’t because we were opposed to public schools and all their “ungodliness”. It was simply because we were both trained teachers who thought we could do a better job and because it gave us great flexibility with our schedules. (We loved taking family vacations after Labor Day when crowds and prices were down, and we loved going to the zoo and other places on Monday, our day off.) Yet I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think homeschooling conferred a certain protection against what I considered the harsher elements of our neighborhood, with the welter of 4-letter words being near the top.

But our children walked the streets, made friends, and our oldest child started high school down the street. That would be Kim. She was intelligent, creative, determined, impulsive and emotionally intense. If her younger sister ever frustrated her sufficiently she would often, well, snap. The reptilian part of her brain would instantly overthrow the decision-making, analytical center, and then she would drill her fist into the arm of her younger sister, Carrie.  (I share their names because (1) it would be stylistically awkward to conceal them: (2) you could find out their names if you really tried; and (3) they carry not an ounce of shame over the matter I’m about to share.)

These brief, violent episodes always caused lots of parental anguish, and we tried a variety of techniques and punishments to generate more loving, mature responses in our oldest child. Eventually the incidents began to subside. But one day Carrie came down the stairs in tears, clutching her upper arm. My heart sank. Once again our ultra-compliant, emotionally reserved and circumspect daughter had suffered at the hands of her pugilistic older sister. “What’s the matter? Please tell me what happened.” She confirmed what I already knew, adding, “She also called me a bitch!”

I was horrified and livid. It was one thing to hit your sibling, but to call her such a vile thing in our household?! That was not going to happen! My anger roiled over as I bounded up the stairs, burst into the room, towered over our daughter to intimidate and instill fear, then read her the riot act. It had its effect, and just as I was about to spell out the consequences, Kim blurted out, “But dad, she called me a …”

I’m not going to tell you what Kim reported Carrie as saying, but believe me, it would have held up brilliantly against anything I had heard in our neighborhood up to that point. And when those choice words hit my ears, it was as if someone had thrown a bucketload of cold water at my face. I stood there shell-shocked, uncomprehending. After a few seconds I did an about face, walked out of the room, went down the stairs, and entered the room where my wife was. The first words off my lips were, “We’re moving.”

Of course we didn’t move, and there was simply no way we could’ve shielded our kids from what was all around them. There was (and is still is) no Christian bubble that eventually doesn’t get popped if one intends to live like Jesus. His life, unlike that of the Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes, took him toward people whom others ignored and marginalized.

So once again my own desire to have the neighborhood other than the way it actually was came into clear focus. I also wanted our children to experience it other than how it actually was. But if this was a part of the the local patois, then I had to come to terms with it and not let something so trivial get between me and my neighbors. I had to be able to go toward them in spite of different vocabularies, keeping in mind that my goal wasn’t to get them to say drat instead of the word that rhymes with truck. These days I can hear the vilest of words without flinching. I notice them, of course, but they’ve been drained of emotional force. I’m now more concerned about the vitriol, disrespect and frustration that fuel such words, and that same anger, scorn and exasperation fuel language that outwardly looks very nice. The words themselves are in one sense just veneer. The emotions and attitudes that spawn them constitute the substance.

In this and similar experiences, questions that I’ve come back to repeatedly are, “Why does my heart still gravitate toward safe, similar and unchallenging? Why do we Christians want and establish for ourselves an insular life? Why aren’t more Christians moving to and settling in the ‘Pain Centers’ of this world?” Through movies and books and other media we’ll go there almost daily … but only vicariously. Can we imagine more direct and daily engagement? And in the end what would keep us there? What pins our feet to the land?” I would only invite you to reflect on these questions with me.

I’ll finish this with an epilogue. Our three children turned out fine. This isn’t a Hollywood “Happy Ending.” After all, they occasionally still use very naughty words. But they love each other, love God and seem fairly well adjusted. We cared for their needs as well as we were able, held them frequently, told them constantly that we loved them, prayed with and for them, surrounded them with community, and then released them into the wild. We mostly (though not always) trusted that God, whom we understood to be the author of the invitation to stay put, would see to their welfare.

This is a guest post as part of an ongoing series from my friend Dave Nixon of Sustainable Faith. You can read his first article here.

If you have the resources, and if you’re American, you settle into places that are appealing to you. You look at things like the school district, how attractive the neighborhood is, the crime statistics, the resale value of homes, how close it is to good medical care & key retail spots & public transportation … whatever you value. That’s what Christians look at, too. After all, it would be poor financial and vocational stewardship to buy a home you could get stuck with, limiting your capacity to make a profit and go wherever God called you next. And it would be unloving not to give your children the best educational opportunities possible. And it would be irresponsible to put yourself in an unsafe neighborhood. And, and, and.

I did this “anding” for most of my life. I would value and want something. Then I would retrofit God into what I wanted. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more aware of my capacity for self-delusion, and I’ve reflected more and more on what it actually looks and feels like to be led. I mull over this often because it’s a fundamental aspect of the Christian life: We relinquish assumed rights and the desire to control. We become like children — vulnerable, trusting, dependent. We go on an adventure whose end we can’t predict. We go with a God deserving our trust. We are led. And of all the things necessary for this journey, nothing matters more than the death of our self-will. Without it we plan a poor life rather than experience a rich one.

Prior to pastoral work I had planned on becoming a university professor. Prior to the vow of stability we had planned to plant the church and move on. But like pastoral work — which for years I swore up and down I’d never do — taking a vow of stability had, for us, the quality of being led. It had a simultaneous “repulsion-attraction” aspect to it. The repulsion was that it cut deeply against the natural grain of our wants. The attraction lay in that cutting as well, yet without any sense of martyrdom or spiritual heroism or stoicism. Instead it felt like an invitation to something bigger than we could’ve imagined on our own. What’s more, internal peace came immediately in the wake of the decision. It was as if something that had been out of joint a long time was finally put right.

At the time we took our vow of stability Norwood was a lower income, almost exclusively white, working-class neighborhood facing many challenges: a high percentage of subsidized housing, poverty, racism, litter, graffiti, slum housing, violence, drug activity, alcoholism, vandalism, a few murders, truancy, a 25% dropout rate at the local high school, child neglect, and more. A local police officer, in a moment of supreme frustration, once confided to me that the only way to solve the problems was to “wipe out all the white trash scumbags once and for all, to nuke them.” That night I was tempted to side with him, but where’s enriched uranium when you most need it?

There was also the noise issue. It was typical in the culture of our neighborhood to shout down the street to people you wanted a word with. Carrying on a conversation while separated by a distance of, say 40 yards, was entirely normal. From an anthropological viewpoint it was fascinating, but at 3 a.m. it usually made me despise my neighbors. There was also the routine practice of laying into your car horn again and again until the person you were picking up came to the door. (We called it “the Norwood doorbell.) There was never an inappropriate time for this form of summons … or the occasional response, when someone would scream out the window: “Hey, I’ll f***n’ be there in a minute! Jesus, would you just hold on?!”

The aesthetics of our neighborhood were also grating to me. The housing was cramped, old, non-uniform, and largely uncared for; lawns didn’t have that suburban, manicured look I had come to see as a marker of respectability and civilization; the streets were narrow and lined with cars, many of them looking one drive away from the junkyard; TV cable lines snaked up the side of houses; old telephone poles relayed black wire down and across streets, cluttering the sky and eliminating space for trees; the sidewalks and curbs were cracked or crumbling. Litter was everywhere on the streets.

In short, there was nothing naturally attractive at the time that made me want to stay. There were simply no analogs for my own natural affinities. I liked clean; I liked uncluttered; I liked quiet. Wide open spaces appealed to me: mountaintops, deserts, big sky. I enjoyed almost every form of music except the heavy metal and country music I heard. I had been to graduate school, had studied and taught several languages, had lived and traveled in Europe, had refined tastes. I cared about my diet and exercised and looked for ways to improve myself. (In retrospect, I was shot through with arrogance, above my neighbors and neighborhood.) So the choice to settle here permanently made no worldly sense at all.

Our own incongruous experience led me to ask questions that were foreign to me earlier, and I still ponder these: As Christians who believe in a personal God who speaks to and nudges his creatures, do we allow space for God to overwrite our own leanings, our own desires? Has the ethos of a hyper-narcissistic, entitlement-riddled culture left any space to talk about divine contradiction? Has the atmosphere of an i-generation rolled over us like silent waves, diminishing (if not erasing) our capacity to yield to the Spirit’s work? What does “dying to oneself,” repeated mantra-like in Christian circles, actually look like? I’m reminded here of Aldous Huxley’s line: “The corollary of ‘Thy kingdom come’ is ‘My kingdom go’ “.

At least one piece of our kingdom was dismantled in the vow of stability. There have been moments when we’ve privately questioned our decision, but that’s to be expected, and those moments usually come when we’re very tired or something doesn’t go “our way”. We try to note that. The larger and fuller experience, emerging slowly over time, has been one of deep satisfaction, having a “I wouldn’t trade this for anything” quality.

Don’t conform to the ways of thinking and acting that dominate a culture cut off from God. Instead, be transformed by a complete overhaul of both perspective and behavior. If you do this, you’ll know how God wants you to act. You’ll also know by experience that what God wants for you is good, satisfying, and perfect. (Romans 12.2)

This past weekend I was honored to guest speak at Southbrook Christian Church, just south of Dayton. I was assigned the following text from Luke 22:

 ⁶³ The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him. ⁶⁴ They blindfolded him and demanded, “Prophesy! Who hit you?” ⁶⁵ And they said many other insulting things to him.

What struck me in the passage was that Jesus was blinded. The one who brought sight to so many loses his own in the end. The one who brought freedom is enslaved. The one who brought dignity to the poor is stripped naked and humiliated. I believe the blinding of Jesus runs concurrent with a theme in the book of Luke. If you are interested in more, you can watch the teaching below.

If the embedded video isn’t working with your browser, you can find it here.

This is a guest post as part of an ongoing series from my friend Dave Nixon of Sustainable Faith. You can read his first article here.

Reflections on Stability: Part 2
By Dave Nixon

I don’t remember the exact year this occurred — maybe 1997 or ’98, but maybe it was long enough ago that I can now tell the story without being prosecuted.

A year or so after taking our vow of stability we had a difficult summer. It was exceptionally hot and humid, so without AC, sleeping at night was often hard, but it was made harder by the emergence of a drug house on our corner. Each day the dealers would begin their business in the afternoon and wouldn’t stop until about 4:00 a.m. And because of two facts — our windows were always open for ventilation and the acoustics of the corner made it sound as if their activities were right outside our window — we were subjected to a constant stream of cars, profanity, raucous laughter, shouting, and beer bottles breaking.

We confronted them. We prayed for them. We called the police on them. Through it all nothing changed. Because the dealers had scanners in their apartment, they always knew when the police were on the way. Within seconds the corner would become a ghost town. Then gradually they’d return when the coast was clear.

As the summer dragged on into the swelter of August, I became more and more sleep-deprived and angry. If God and the police wouldn’t do anything, then I sure as hell would! (I think I started occasionally cussing then.)

So one night, after Jody had gone to bed, I reset our alarm for 4:00 a.m., turned the volume way down, placed it near my pillow, and fell asleep like a kid before Christmas. When it rang several hours later I instantly shut it off, slid ever-so-gently out of the bed, and went to the closet where the night before, in addition to my clothes, I had set out a trench coat, a ski cap and some gloves. I put the ensemble on as quietly as possible and slipped out of the room. I then made my way via the back door into the garage where I grabbed a boltcutter, slid it up my sleeve, and then made my way to the corner.

It was sprinkling lightly that night, and I remember the remarkable calm. So still, so very still. Peace had descended over the neighborhood, and I saw no sign of life. And right across from me on the opposing corner, less than 20 yards away, was the supreme object of my attention — the payphone.

The linchpin of the dealers’s operation was this corner payphone. It was how they arranged their meetings. For me it was the motherlode. So without any hesitation I walked directly to it, let the boltcutter slip from my sleeve, grabbed the handles, and in one deft move severed the receiver and cord from the booth. I then wound the cord around the receiver, shoved the bundle into my trenchcoat pocket, pushed the bolt cutter back up my left sleeve, and walked home … via a circuitous route so that in case I was seen, I’d be reported as going in the opposite direction from where I lived. Along the way I threw the receiver into a trash can.

And then I went home and slept. Very well.

The next day, shortly after lunch while I was working in my office, I heard from that corner one of the loudest F-bombs I’ve ever heard. It was from the ringleader. And then I heard it again, and again, and again. Admittedly, an intoxicating thrill of glee shot through me with each outburst. Mission accomplished.

A few days later the phone company replaced the receiver. And a few days later I repeated my crime. A few days later the phone company came again, but this time they removed the payphone.

Fall came, windows closed, the little drug cartel imploded, and life became more bearable.

In one sense it’s a comical story — the vigilante Vineyard pastor dressed up in a trenchcoat and wielding boltcutters in the dead of night. And sometimes in the telling, the story elicits, I suspect, a certain admiration — how daring he was!

But here’s the real truth: I was no different inside than, say, the zealot who shoots the abortion doctor. Whatever makes a person like that snap made me snap. I was “righteously pissed,” was fed up with waiting on God, and had by that time lost the capacity to engage the enemy in a communal, creative, forceful yet loving way.

The vow of stability had been “for better or worse,” but it became clear to me in the wake of my petty crime that I only wanted better … and that I was capable of doing things I never imagined in order to get there.

I was a long way from doing my work patiently and hopefully, and because these two things were lacking, I was unable to do my work faithfully and lovingly. But choosing to stay put for nearly two decades, and doing this as a kind of spiritual exercise, has been changing both me and our community of faith. Our hope is that we can in time learn to be present, faithful and loving in the days we are given, not those we imagine having, even if those days feel difficult, trivial and hidden.

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. (Psalm 37.7)

In case you have any desire to know who you are drinking green beer in honor of tomorrow…

Around 405 A.D. the 16-year old grandson of a priest in Wales was kidnapped by foreign raiders. The boy, by his own admission, was not interested in God or religion at any level until that day. Stolen from his family, he was forced into herding sheep in Ireland – a culture far from his own. It was in these six years of slavery and solitude that Patrick called out to the God of his father and grandfather. God has always had a thing for shepherds. We are all, after all, like sheep going astray until he finds us. He found Patrick in Ireland.

At 22, according to his own letters, in his prayers he began to hear God say that he would soon return home. Then one night he clearly heard, “leave for a ship is waiting for you.” On that night he escaped and began a journey of 200 miles to a port where he boarded a ship for Britain.

Upon his return home, Patrick never felt at home. In a dream he saw a man named Victorious from Ireland pleading with him to “come and walk among us.”

So he left for Ireland.

The slave returning to set others free. The freedman enslaving himself to Christ. The shepherd seeking his lost sheep.

If we look closely into history, Patrick wasn’t the first Christian missionary to Ireland. But he sparked something. He ushered in a communal grace-centered expression of Christianity that swept through the culture like wildfire. He probably didn’t drive out snakes or teach life lessons with shamrocks, but he did something more significant.

He loved his enemies.

So much so that he is remembered today as one of them.

Patrick died 1,551 years ago tomorrow – on March 17, 461.

That is the day the church (and pent-up Americans looking for an excuse to party) celebrate his life.

It’s probably one worth celebrating.

Cheers.