Update #1.2 - But That's Just Me Personally....

Disclaimer: All stories recorded in this blog are accurate to the memory of the writer, but we know that that can be a faulty guide, so conversations may not be verbatim. Also, all names of individuals have been changed to protect each person's identity.

Well, day two has rolled around and our Lee University hosts (who took us on an evening drive into the mountains around the Ocoee River) have seen us on our way to Knoxville. Now, with some time in the car before we reach our next major city, I will finish my story from yesterday.

I considered first rewinding and telling of a particular episode with a homeless gentleman we encountered during the quarter mile jaunt from Greyfriar's to Starbucks, but for the sake of space, I will leave that for the book. For now, I must be content to re-enter Starbucks: I've already mentioned this episode briefly in my previous post, but I did not describe the conversation which ensued here. As I said before, Alan and I grabbed a newspaper and sat down at a table to read through it, trying to find some interesting "hook" which we could use to reel a person into conversation with us. We were not disappointed as we located a review for yet another vampire movie and this sparked us into a discussion of American culture's dual fascination with secularism and the occult.

A middle-aged man sat along the far wall of the room in which we were the sole occupants, looking intently at his laptop, a number of papers strewn around beside him, and his blackberry. After Alan and I had discussed this seeming paradox of American culture for a few minutes, I decided to try to pull this fellow into our discussion: "Sir, I just have a quick question I want to get your opinion on." "Sure," came the response.

"My friend and I here see that there's another vampire movie coming out and so we've noticed that there seems to be a real fascination in American pop culture with vampires and spirits and occult things like this. But at the same time, guys like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are publishing best-selling books on atheism like God Is Not Great. Which do you thing America tends to gravitate towards?"

"Personally, I would say that America has a greater interest in the occult. I mean, here in the Bible Belt people don't seem very interested in secularism; but again, that's just me personally."

I wasn't sure that I agreed with my new friend's last statement, but we would let it slide for the time being: "Well that's very interesting; why do you think there's such a draw in that direction? And which would appeal more to you? The spiritual or the secular?" I prodded.

"Personally, I'd probably be more drawn to the secular, but I know that not everyone would agree with that, especially here," our friend paused with a smile.

Alan continued the pursuit: "Well what kind of work are you in? Does this ever come up?"

"Well I'm a psychiatrist, but...."

"Oh! You're a psychiatrist! So, I bet you deal with things like this all of the time! I imagine your work leads you into discussions of the spiritual all the time!" I had interrupted rather rudely, but I was hoping to coax him into elaborating on his job. It didn't work.

"Well, yes, sometimes. But really it doesn't seem to interfere all that much with my work. It doesn't seem to matter much. My personal life doesn't really figure in," answered our psychiatrist friend, as if he didn't really understand what he had just been asked. "I'm getting a call from my son, though, so I should probably answer it." After the phone conversation, it appears that he had to leave in a hurry to attend to some small family emergency, thus ending our conversation permanently.

Alan and I were somewhat disappointed; everything had initially suggested that we were in for a great conversation, discussing secularism and the occult with none other than a psychiatrist! Who better to have spoken with! Yet he had so thoroughly divided his personal worldview from his work that he seemed incapable of even relating the two when it was brought up. In his effort to appease everyone, he made sure to qualify almost every statement as "his personal opinion." Sad.

From there, Alan and I left to go eat, and a few minutes later found us sitting at the bar of Mercatino Delicatessen and Coffee on Chattanooga's North Shore. This was to prove our most enjoyable and productive stop yet, and the entry through the door had tipped us off when the waitress who sat us down exclaimed with excitement upon seeing Alan's "Les Mis" shirt. "I saw that play in London! Have you seen it?" she asked with all of the giddiness of someone who has found a kindred spirit with a common obsession. "Indeed, I have," replied Alan, and immediately we had a connection.

As the restaurant was almost empty and clearly over-staffed, Alan and I asked to be seated at the bar, deciding that we might at least try to engage some of the wait staff. First we conversed with our "Les Mis" waitress, whose name we discovered was Grace, but then as she became busily involved elsewhere and we were passed off to another waitress, we began chatting with our new hostess, Megan. Before long, she had asked us where we were from and where we were going. Taking a new approach to directing the conversation, we just laid everything out: "We're on a road trip from Birmingham to Chicago stopping at coffeeshops, bookstores, and cafes along the way. We're testing a theory of ours that coffeeshops are one of few places that it's still okay to engage complete strangers."

"That's really cool! So this right here is the sort of thing you're doing. What kind of things do you talk to people about?"

"Well we're actually Christians, so we want to talk to people about life's Great Questions," we tentatively responded; now was the moment of make or break...

"That's really interesting," one of the other waitresses who had been listening said. "Lots of people around here are Christians, but nobody really goes around and says that. You just said it very openly." Of course, the truth of the situation was that we had been rather reluctant to do so ourselves, but that was not her perception of the situation.

Our original conversation partner, Megan, popped back in now: "I'm a Christian, too, you know," she said with a certain recognizable joy in her voice at having found a couple of fellow believers. She walked off to wait on a table with a little extra bounce in her step.

Our attention turned back to our new acquaintance (Kate) who was busily washing dishes in front of us. A little shy, Kate was a somewhat understated personality, but exuded a thoughtfulness and quiet strength that I've come to recognize and appreciate in other girls I know (without mentioning any names). Still, it was clear that she was willing to talk and was enjoying the engagement and before long, the discussion had turned to her school and her major.

"So what are you studying," we asked, and that started us off talking about psychology. Suddenly our encounter with the psychiatrist earlier in the day seemed far more valuable as it gave us an instant point of connection with her. She told us about her interest in psychology and then about her lack of direction with where to go next with her life. She didn't really want to go to medical school and become a psychiatrist, but at the same time, she didn't want to feel like she was unable to help people with their problems simply because she couldn't prescribe them medication.

"There's this book which is supposed to help psychiatrists diagnose particular problems and then prescribe people medications if they have that particular problem," Kate started with some passion in her voice, "but it was never supposed to become the textbook of everyone's issues where every single person fell into one of those categories! But now, just because it's easy, it seems like every person who is sent to a psychiatrist ends up being put into one of those molds and given a drug to fix their problems! That's not the way it was supposed to work!"

Though Kate was clearly the expert in this field and not me, I could not help but follow up on her thought: "Well, I'm not expert in psychology, and this is just my two bits, so take them for what their worth, but it doesn't seem to me that you need to be able to prescribe people medicine to be able to help them with their problems. Indeed, I think you might be better off not going to medical school so that you didn't always give people drugs to fix their issues. It seems to me that alot of what people are given medicine for is really more of a spiritual and not a physical or chemical issue."

"For instance, I had a friend in high school who was put on medicine for his depression, and it was one of the worst things that could possibly have happened to him! And I knew it too, because I was very involved with his situation and I knew that, at core, the reason he felt empty, meaningless, and hopeless was because he had spiritual problems that he needed to deal with, not because some chemical in his body was acting up. Once he got off of the medicine, he was able to really deal with the core issue in a way that he never could while on medicine. No, I think you would be a very unique and valuable psychologist indeed if you tried to help people confront their real spiritual issues rather than simply give them a prescription and tell them that they'd feel better in the morning; besides, you could always send them to get a prescription from the plethora of people who could give it if you really felt like they needed it."

Kate simply listened quietly and nodded her approval when I finished; it seemed that this might have been an articulation of something she'd been trying to put her finger on for awhile, but that could just have been my interpretation.

Time wore on as they were all busily engaged in preparation for the evening while Alan and I ate the bread and olive oil that had been set out for us. We talked with Kate about several small things: a web networking site called couchsurfing.com, the interesting decorative scheme on the back wall of the restaurant, more about Kate personally or perhaps Alan and myself. Eventually, we were given the opportunity to give the conversation a spiritual turn once more, as the Bible's everyday relevance came up and Megan rejoined our conversation (who had never really left it, but had simply been listening from a short distance):

"Yes, it really is applicable. For instance, I've been going through Romans 8; I mean, I've read it before, but I've been going through it carefully and really looking at what it has to say and it's amazing! And I've also been going through a devotional book about prayer, and it's really interesting what he has to say about applying prayer in daily life and the verses he uses to build his case and how he uses them." Megan was speaking with an infectious enthusiasm about her Christian walk; it truly was fun to witness. She talked more and highly recommended that we look at the book. We agreed that we might and then asked what the book was called and, after an ironical sort of pause, Megan told us that the book was titled Becoming a Woman of Prayer. "It's a great book though, and you would like it, I promise," Megan reassured us, guessing our thoughts, I'm sure. We had a good laugh, and began developing strategies for how we could read the book undercover without losing face; covering the book behind a newspaper or something, perhaps.

Dinner continued until it was about time for us to leave, but I had one more card to be played, and I was not about to leave before it had found it's way onto the discussion table: "Well before we leave, Kate, there's just one more thing we have to tell you," I said, trying to make my soon-to-be-serious-point as light-hearted as possible. "You can't be like this psychiatrist friend we met today, okay?" She looked puzzled and I continued. "You see, earlier today we were talking with a psychiatrist about a newspaper article we had seen about a vampire movie coming out, so we had asked him about his opinion of American culture's fascination with the occult and what how he saw that professionally. But he was almost completely unable to relate to the question on a professional level because he had so thoroughly separated his work and personal lives. He could modestly respond for himself as a person, but he was incapable of seeing how this (his personal opinion) had any bearing on his life at work. You see, he had completely separated his worldview as a person from his work, and that's not good. Your worldview (Christianity), should completely permeate the way you approach your work."

Kate had been listening very intently and now spoke, "Well, I was going to try working for a Christian counseling center, but that didn't really work out and now I'm going to......" she began to trail off, as if she had just said something very terrible that we would surely be disappointed with. Alan, thinking quickly back to a previous topic we had touched on, brought up Chattanooga's Yellow Deli (a very fascinating restaurant entirely deserving of its own blog entry, but that must wait until a far future date; for now, let it suffice to say that it is a very famous deli run by a commune of people who keep entirely to themselves and claim to be following Christ's orders when they do so. We might say that it is the doctrine of Christian unity run amuck):

"No, no, no. Don't worry; we're not talking about you going off and working in some place that simply says "Christian" on the side of the building. We mean something much more fundamental. You remember what we were talking about with the people at the Yellow Deli? Well they went and worked for a place that was Christian, but in the process they've isolated themselves and made themselves irrelevant in the culture. They're not fulfilling Christ's command in the Great Commission."

"So basically," I said, "we're not necessarily encouraging you to go work for a Christian counseling center (though that would be fine). Indeed, you might be more useful in the normal, secular culture. What we need are Christians in the popular culture who are doing their jobs through a Christian perspective. So, for instance, I often get irritated with Christian music when I look at how much talent some Christians have that could have been used to reach a much wider audience with the same message if they had just stayed in the secular market. But then, on the other hand, take a look at the rock band who I feel confident will be dubbed the greatest rock band of all time by the time they retire - U2. They're hugely successful and popular in the secular market, and yet their music has Christianity written all into it; sometimes subtly and sometimes more explicitly, but their Christian worldview is always there, permeating their views on everything. And Bono's very open about the fact that he's a Christian, too."

Kate looked very thoughtful. She clearly appeared to be taking this idea in carefully. "But I've always thought people like that kind of distorted the message and encouraged its message to be used with things like drugs and wild parties and that sort of thing. Like Evanescence when they first came out claimed to be Christian, but their music was always so dark and depressing, and now they claim they're not Christians anymore."

"Well certainly alot of things can be called Christian and abused as Christian that are not. But I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb when I say that Evanescence was not a Christian band ever. Just look at their lyrics; they're pretty creepy. Especially if they claim to reject it now."

"So basically you're saying that I should do my psychology and relate it to Christianity wherever I am," Kate finished. "Exactly," Alan and I responded almost in unison, thoroughly satisfied that we had achieved our goal.

After this, our bill was taken, we paid and made our way to the door, saying goodbye to our warm and friendly hosts. Leaving the restaurant I felt greatly encouraged and left with a bounce in my own step this time. Meeting mature believers in unlikely places, like Megan, is always a rewarding treat, and I felt encouraged that God was working powerfully in places other than simply Birmingham, Alabama. Not only that, but I felt like Alan and I had perhaps caused Megan to be a little more brave with her faith than she might have been otherwise; once we had stepped out with our admission of faith, it seems that it paved the way for her to do likewise. And now her colors are thoroughly declared and Kate knows where to look for support.

And that was the other reason I felt so encouraged; meeting Christians like Kate is always an exciting experience as well. In her first day on the job, it seems that Alan and I gave her an experience she probably will not soon forget. I perceived that we had helped her connect her Christian life with a few unconnected dots and that a light bulb or two went off while we were talking; perhaps it was just my imagination, but Kate seemed to understand how her Christianity connected with her daily life significantly better at the end of the conversation than she did at the beginning. Her whole expression as we left revealed the thoughts of a person who is on the verge of making a very significant discovery, and if we were the means of bringing this about, it is only because God saw fit to use us.

Finally, I was encouraged that we had connected not only with our two waitresses, but more importantly that we had managed to connect the two of them with each other! And not just on some superficial level where they found a mutual interest in a particular movie or something like that, but on the deepest of all possible levels - they had found in one another Christian allies. Now, long after Alan and I are gone and even in a different state, they will still have each other to build off of and to encourage and challenge one another. Result: stunning success.

Thus it was evening and it was morning a first day.

--Michael Taunton