The safety of imperfection

It's an awkward thing to have people come to me for guidance about their lives, about their relationships with other people and with God. It seems I've spent most of my life either avoiding relationships or hurting the people closest to me, and fairly well, making just about every mistake a man can make without winding up dead or in jail. If you think God has no sense of humor, consider how He has placed me amidst scores of young adults who, bless their souls, think I have some wisdom to give them.

Perhaps it's not a sense of humor but a sense of justice, because nothing stings quite like having a young man look to me for guidance at being a man, given all the ways I've avoided doing precisely that. Nothing feels quite so fraudulent as stating plainly what a man or woman ought or ought not to do, with the knowledge lurking in the back of one's mind that one has done precisely the opposite more times than he cares to recall.

And yet there they are, and here I am, and while our interactions are ostensibly concerned with business and economics and management, quite often the conversations go to the personal, the spiritual. Young people are thirsty for plain talk about life, about God. Maybe we're all thirsty for it. We're thirsty for something beyond the platitudes and rote sayings and overly familiar verses, and some of us are ashamed that we're thirsty for those things, ashamed that we hurt, ashamed that we yearn for a communion we can't describe.

We want a real conversation, young people in particular, and for some reason some of us have trouble finding it, and we feel guilty that we can't, like there's something wrong with us when our preacher or our priest or our parent seems to be speaking in unfamiliar tongues. Maybe what we want most is to say that we are hurt, or scared, or angry, and not hear---for a while at least---how that hurt or fear or anger might be corrected in us. Maybe when we hear someone admit that he carries these burdens, that he loves the Lord as best he can and is just about as imperfect as a man can be, we feel safe enough to say what's on our own hearts.

They certainly deserve better than me to talk to. Maybe that's why they feel comfortable with me in the first place. I don't know what to do with that, or what it means for my far-more-together Christian friends. And I don't know what to do with the fact that I have stumbled into this place where I, weak and fumbling fool that I am, should be expected to offer anything like wisdom. But there you have it, and here I am, and I pray to God I don't mess it up.