About The Man Who Started This
 
I am the thief on the cross.
I am the faithless.
I am also a man who has violated nearly every principle he claims to hold sacred.
I've broken most of the commandments. Some consciously. Some unconsciously. Some willfully. Some carelessly. And a few, if I'm allowed the defense, through the spectacular human capacity to make a complete mess of things while being absolutely convinced we're doing the right thing.
I am a sinner.
There. We can get that out of the way.
For many years, the central character in my life was I.
I think.
I believe.
I know.
I want.
I need.
I deserve.
I am.
And there's an extraordinary arrogance hidden in those last two words when a human being begins using them as the organizing principle of his life.
I spent years saying I am until I began to understand that perhaps the story was never supposed to be about I am.
It was about Him.
He.
God.
I've spent more than three decades in recovery. I've studied psychology, criminology, addiction, crisis, and human behavior. I've walked into the wreckage of other people's lives for most of my adult life. I've sat with addicts, families, the mentally ill, the frightened, the angry, the powerful, the disgraced, and people who had simply reached the end of themselves.
I've also reached the end of myself.
More than once.
And I have learned something about free will.
I believe in it.
I believe God gave it to us because I do not believe God desires slaves.
Love demanded by force is not love. Surrender without choice is not surrender. Faith without the possibility of doubt is merely programming.
But I have also learned that my free will, when placed entirely under the management of my ego, becomes self-will.
And self-will eventually makes me my own god.
I become the authority.
I become the judge.
I become the director.
I become the architect of reality.
There I am again.
I am.
I am remarkably ill-equipped to be God.
Yet I have repeatedly applied for the position.
My ego has been one of the great recurring characters in my life. I've had to confront it, wrestle with it, and, as I often say, smash the ego.
Not because I believe a human being should become nothing.
But because I have seen what happens when I believe I am everything.
There was a time when much of this probably appeared as massive arrogance.
Perhaps some of it was.
The truth today is that I don't particularly care what the world thinks of me.
And I don't mean that as rebellion.
I mean the world is an extraordinarily unstable place from which to derive your worth.
Applause stops.
Reputations change.
Money comes and goes.
People misunderstand you.
People who once loved you may someday despise you.
People who despised you may suddenly discover your usefulness.
If my peace depends upon the world's opinion of Me, I have built my house on moving sand.
For the better part of twenty years, my sense of well-being has increasingly rested somewhere else.
In my relationship with a Power greater than my understanding.
I call that Power God.
Simply, God.
Theologically, I can be a little Old Testament.
I wrestle.
I argue.
I question.
I have occasionally attempted to present God with evidence, a closing argument, and what I considered a remarkably reasonable alternative plan.
God has remained unimpressed.
I know Jesus Christ.
I know the Gospel.
I understand the language of being saved and born again. I have listened to evangelical Christianity explain the road to salvation, and I have been profoundly influenced by men such as Alistair Begg and Jordan Peterson, Father Francis Benedict, Father George Taweel, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and more than three decades of living within the spiritual discipline of Twelve Step recovery.
They do not all agree.
Neither do I agree with all of them.
Influence is not worship.
It is the willingness to listen, to examine, to wrestle, and to ask whether truth is being revealed to me in a language I have previously refused to hear.
I have spent a lifetime watching human beings suffer.
And I cannot accept the comfortable little phrase that God never gives us more than we can handle.
Of course He does.
Life gives us more than we can handle.
I have seen it.
I have lived it.
If I could handle everything myself, I would have no need to surrender.
No need to reach beyond myself.
No need for God.
Perhaps the point is not that I am strong enough to carry everything placed before me.
Perhaps the point is finally admitting that I am not.
The brutality of this world demands that we wrestle with meaning.
I have seen evil.
Real evil.
Not theoretical evil discussed safely in a classroom or from behind a pulpit.
I have watched what human beings can do to one another.
And I continue to wrestle with hell.
I have difficulty imagining a hell more creatively brutal than some of the hells human beings have constructed here on earth.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I reserve the right to be wrong.
That's another thing God and I have had to work on.
But Crozzoverzero was not created because I solved every theological question.
It was created because, after all my education, all my experience, all my recovery, all my arguments, all my ego, and all my magnificent attempts to manage the universe, I keep arriving at the same place.
The cross.
And there is a man hanging beside Jesus.
A thief.
A guilty man.
A man with no time left to repair his reputation.
No time to make amends.
No time to get sober.
No time to study theology.
No baptism.
No ministry.
No résumé.
Nothing.
He cannot even take his hands from the cross and fold them properly to pray.
He has reached zero.
And he looks at Jesus.
“Remember me.”
That's all he has.
And Jesus tells him he can come.
I struggle to say that without emotion because I know that man.
I am that man.
After everything I've done.
After every commandment I've broken.
After the conscious sins and the unconscious ones.
After the willful ones.
After the mistakes.
After the ego.
After the years of I am.
After all of it.
The man on the middle cross said I can come.
He said I can come.
So this ministry is not me standing above anyone.
I have no interest in doing that.
I'm the thief on the cross pointing toward the middle.
I'm the faithless man saying, I believe; help my unbelief.
I'm the recovering man who has learned that self-will creates disorder.
I'm the arrogant man who keeps discovering that the universe functions surprisingly well without my management.
I'm the sinner.
I'm the doubter.
I'm the wrestler.
And I am the recipient of a grace I cannot adequately explain.
The man on the middle cross said I can come.
And if He'll have me, perhaps you should consider the possibility
that He'll have you too.