Author Archives: Brandon Adams

Back from the Czech and a Thank You

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It was surreal to stand outside my own front door again last night. After the innumerable miles, an ocean crossed twice, gallivanting through the countryside of the Czech Republic by foot and bus and train, pounding the streets of Prague beneath soaring cathedrals, an entire world laid bare from 35,000 feet in the air, one door remained at the end of the trip to remind me of God’s faithfulness.

It was a great trip. I want to thank all of you who prayed for our effectiveness, finances, and safety over the two long weeks. I’ll share some experiences on the blog shortly.

I also want to thank you for continuing to read and comment on my blog while I was gone. I’ll soon be replying to the comments.

If you’d like to pray for us, please pray about the decompression phase – the come-down from the trip and its adrenaline and highs, the mediocrity of our regular lives and our old battles reasserting themselves, the hardness of saying goodbye. Pray that it goes well and that our hearts are caught by Christ. If you’ve been on mission yourself, you know these times can be tough – like the reentry from vacation, but multiplied by ten. Also pray that God will make grow the seeds that we have been privileged to plant and water in the hearts of the Czechs.

In the meantime, here are links to the Pizza Lessons series I auto-posted while I was gone. I hope you enjoy them while I get back into the regular swing of things, which might delay a Thursday blog post.

Part 1: The God Who Keeps No Score

Part 2: You Never Know

Part 3: Not Crediting God is a Sin?

Part 4: Done With Judging

Part 5: Down the Barrel of the Gun

Pizza Lessons #5: Down the Barrel of the Gun

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pizza4Every once in a while, on a pizza run, I’ll catch a glimpse of a future that worries me.

It’ll be some older male customer who’s living alone, in a tiny, isolated trailer way out on the edge of our delivery range, without a vehicle to his name. Some of these guys have a way of sharing a bit much about their lives, so I know they aren’t getting any visits from people. Just alone, filling their later years with television. Some of them by choice, some of them because of past choices.

I’ll just be real vulnerable for a second: that’s a future I’m afraid of.

I often worry about ending my life alone and broke, driving people away through advanced curmudgeonry. It sounds like overthinking, but my personality does tend that direction, and I worry about it a bit. I’m putting quite a bit of effort these days into avoiding that future.

Now, your typical response might be, don’t worry, Brandon. That won’t happen.

But maybe there’s an even better response.

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Pizza Lessons #4: Done with Judging

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pizza3Being a pizza delivery guy can make you judgmental in a hurry.

I mean, you’re seeing everything. Being a delivery guy takes you into every nook and cranny you didn’t know existed in your own town, and sometimes what you find is ugly. Trailer courts, ghettos, drugs, serious financial problems. It’s easy to take from the surface of what you’re seeing and form a judgment.

(Personal pet peeve: the husband/boyfriend/whatever who sits on the couch watching TV while the woman answers the door trying to juggle a baby, a receipt, and the pizzas I’m handing her. Dude. Help out.)

Or here’s a classic: maybe if you weren’t ordering pizza four times a week, you’d be doing better. I could feed myself for a week on what this is costing you. Heck, McDonald’s is cheaper!

And sometimes I might be right.

But I’m not so sure that that’s the goal anymore.

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Pizza Lessons #3: Not Crediting God is a Sin???

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pizza2Garn. I hate it when God saunters along and slaps the “sin” label on some innocuous thing I do every day.

I mean, how disruptive can God get? One moment I’m sitting there drinking a mineral water and minding my own business, and the next moment he’s blowing up my whole worldview. What’s a man to do?

Well…repent, to start with.

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Yet Another 5 Tips for Christian WordPress Bloggers

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We bloggers are obviously here to become echoers of God’s glory, not our own. Yet there are still valid reasons to seek a larger audience.

I have two previous posts (here and here) in what has now become a series on this subject – just the best things I’ve found have helped me. I’m no expert – just speaking out of experience. Here’s 5 more. (And the last two parts here and here.)

 

11. Don’t like your own posts.

It’s tacky.

12. Respond to every comment.

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Pizza Lessons #2: You Never Know

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pizza1One of the fun parts of my second job (pizza delivery) is that you never know where the good tips will come from.

Our dispatch system works on a rotating basis. The next driver up “clocks out” on the oldest run available once it’s ready, plus a second run (a “double”) if it’s in the same area and if it won’t be too long a wait for the second order’s items to be ready themselves.

Most of the time, we have no way of knowing how much a customer plans to tip when we clock out on that run. Even with the online credit card orders in which the customer has pre-loaded a tip when they first order, the dispatch system doesn’t show it, and digging deeper into our system to view the tip would be impractical given all the other stuff we’re scrambling to do. One could do it, but so far, the honor system has worked for us. Even when we recognize an address and know they tip poorly, we take the run for the sake of avoiding workplace drama.

In this way, pizza delivery is almost a form of morally acceptable gambling! It’s a lot of fun. You don’t know whether each “pull of the lever” will stiff you or bequeath a ten-dollar jackpot of a tip, but since you’re putting in work and earning a wage regardless, it’s hardly sinful. (I know – that’s because it’s technically not gambling at all. But you get the same slight rush.)

Nevertheless, occasionally we get a driver who tries to game the system.

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Pizza Lessons #1: The God Who Keeps No Score

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pizzaSo I traipsed merrily into my evening job (pizza delivery) one evening a few months ago, expecting a night of the usual bizarro shenanigans, and stopped dead in my tracks.

Filling an entire wall in the driver’s station was a big-screen TV I’d never seen before, displaying a map of our town dotted with numbered car icons crawling across it, and on the side, a list of the drivers’ names corresponding to each number.

That’s right – we were now being tracked. We’d been given a new set of car toppers, each carrying sensors that recorded our location, speed, acceleration, deceleration, and turning rates, all factored into our “score” for the shift.

Big Brother, thy name is P…

Nah, I’d better not specify which chain I work for.

One driver quit as soon as he saw the new system. I didn’t, but I was a little incredulous. Do we need to be babysat?

But then I considered the legends of other pizza drivers I’ve known and concluded, Yeah, probably. It was embarrassing to get calls from customers asking if it was our policy for delivery guys to almost drive into their living rooms. It was frustrating when drivers visited their girlfriends for twenty minutes while on a run, leaving a handful of us to drown in dough back at the store during a Friday night rush. I could see the logic behind the system.

But still…a score?

Then it occurred to me: I’m glad God doesn’t score me.

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I Didn’t Know What to Write About Today, So…

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…here’s a poem I had to write for English class once.

What? It doesn’t always have to be all serious up in here.

 

I refuse to write this poem
You can’t make me, I won’t show ’em
No doubt my thoughts would be below ’em
They’ll just laugh (too well I know ’em)
At how clumsily I grow ’em
I’m skilled not, will not write this poem.

I refuse to churn out lines
Or wrack my head to spit out rhymes
To foot and verse I’m not inclined
Regardless of how loud you whine
At every turn, I shall decline
I’d rather plot a nice cosine.

I refuse to ponder men
Passed on fivescore years and ten
Who spent their lives in soggy glens
Staring at some silly flower
For a fortnight and an hour
Or locked away in dusty dens
Pale hands stuck to their pens
Pulling out their hair again
By some tricky verse devoured
Rhyming dictionary scoured
Do not such great poets end
In asylums, looking sour?

I refuse to write these verses
My mind is full of rage and curses
Ugly thoughts of zombie hearses
Not the rhymes that come to nurses
Trust me, you don’t want to know ’em
I just can’t, just shan’t write this poem.

I refuse to wrap my brain
Around these concepts I disdain
Similes blow right past me
Like the wind I cannot see
Lost I am with metaphors
Drifting off that distant shore
Alliteration is insane
Syllables that start the same?
Such a silly subject serves
Only to get on my nerves.

I refuse to waste my time
Grappling with foot and rhyme
To your pleadings I’m immune
Surely you will yield soon
I’ll resist all afternoon!
All assignments, I’ll forgo ’em
I care not, dare not write this poem.

I refuse, with my two hands
To crank out poems on command
Great musings you may demand
But I just do not understand
Iamb, trochee, anapest?
Surely you must be in jest!
Who among the devil’s pests
Sent to earth to cause unrest
Coined THOSE words? But I digress
I simply won’t put on this yoke
Pentameter makes me choke
I’d rather go and take a soak
In massive vats of rancid coke.

I refuse to write this poem
I just will not undergo ’em
My defiance is infinite!
This argument is stubborn, i’n’t it?
I really put my vocab in it
Persist you may, but I will win it
You can’t prevail...wait a minute.

 

(my teacher gave me on A on this poem and used it as the first entry in my class’s collection book)

It’s Okay to Admit that Losing Friends Hurts

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friendsLosing friends hurts.

Sometimes I think that if all the energy we pour into avoiding that fact were spent elsewhere, we’d have cured world hunger by now.

The memes clutter our feeds.

“We never lose real friends, only fake ones.”

“Those who can’t handle your worst, don’t deserve your best.”

“Be yourself and the right people will gravitate towards you.”

“If they didn’t stay, they were never meant to.”

And today I found myself wondering…Who are we trying to convince?

Over the years, I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost them because someone moved. I’ve lost them because they got “too busy to call”. I’ve lost them because they married. I’ve lost them because they got married and wanted to stay friends but were female, and it was no longer appropriate. I’ve lost them because they forsook God and all the awkwardness that causes in the coffeeshop (I should have fought harder for those). I’ve lost friends simply because one of us changed, or revealed their darker side, and the other decided they didn’t like what they saw.

I’m no special case. Life winnows things away, and friends are no exception. It’s left me with a small but committed group of close friends I know I can count on, no matter how many the miles and misunderstandings. We’re in it for the long haul. I want to hurl myself into a lake with joy when I think of those people.

And sure, some people are best left in the past.

But…

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All Paid Up for My Czech Trip!

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Praise God. He has raised all the money I needed for my upcoming mission to the Czech Republic.

(This actually happened a few weeks ago. I would have posted about it sooner, but a medical issue arose that briefly called my participation on the trip into question. I’ll write more about that soon – suffice it to say that everything’s now fine.)

I want to thank you, dear reader, for any prayers you sent up for my fundraising efforts since I first posted about my trip. I really believe that prayer makes a difference, that God allows prayer to make a difference in order to get us involved in his work and draw us closer to him. Today is a great example.

When God provides financially for someone, he gets creative. It’s fun to watch. My barber called my haircut free the other day as a donation. Someone I barely knew offered me a donation in exchange for an old, non-working guitar of mine (her class used it for a project or something). My mission team did a dessert auction. GoFundMe is creativity. A lot of people enjoy GoFundMe because it’s simpler and easier to use – point and click – than a cornucopia of checks and support forms and where do I mail this and what do I write on the check and so forth.

Even if your only contribution to my trip was prayer, that is no small contribution. I now consider my prayer supporters part of the team. Those folks will receive updates and appreciation out of my desire for you to see your investment.

It’s not too late to join that team, by the way. Please pray for the hearts of the Czech citizens I’m visiting. Pray hard.

Anyway, just a little note on my progress. Thanks so much for your support.