Heading back to Milpitas is an hour long BART ride to Warm Springs (+30 minutes with the Fruitvale/Hayward construction shuttle) plus a 15 minute Uber to my sublet, and I made the fatal mistake of LEAVING AMERICANA WITH A DEAD PHONE >:0
Fatal mistake because:
- My M.O. for transit time and any other sort of free time I have to myself is to spend it listening to my sick Spotify jams.
- I need an Uber to get home.
For point number one, my thought progression went like, “OK, so I have music on my iPad… but I dunno, I’m not really feeling it. I have my laptop and a mouse, so I could always pull up Minecraft in single player mode (Sam, Peter, Charles, Dom, what have I become??).” But I ended up deciding to spend the time talking to God, and that was a choice that felt good to make. One of my resolutions for the future is to grow in having a personal understanding of God’s nature (like having Him speak to me with emojis or something like that), and I feel that will definitely come through accumulating time spent in communication with Him.
So I started talking to God about how thankful I was for the people I got to hang out with over Memorial Day weekend up in Berkeley, then to specific relationships, then to my feelings, then to what I wanted to do in the future. At around Hayward stop, I started to ask God to provide someone to help me charge my phone for the Uber ride back.
I really didn’t want to get up and ask people, so I prayed accordingly; “Lord, to avoid having to get rejected by strangers and maybe seeming like a sketchy person in the process, would you please make one person with an iPhone be in my car at Warm Springs that will be willing to lend me a battery pack.” But as the cars started to clear out, I got the sense that I shouldn’t only ask God to work in the way that would make me the most comfortable. So instead I prayed for confidence, got up, and started asking people for an extra iPhone battery in my car.
After asking about ten people and moving a car over, I finally found someone to lend me his battery pack. When I asked, he smiled and started to rummage through his backpack.
“Are you going to run away with it?” he laughed.
“No! I’ll just sit here.”
I sat down in the seat in front of him and plugged my phone in. The man was a black male in probably his late twenties/early thirties with dreadlocks and a pair black headphones.
“How did you know I had a battery pack?” he asked. That wording in my mind immediately triggered testimonies I’ve heard of evangelists giving words of knowledge (like insights about another person’s life) to people in cold-contact evangelism, and they’re like “OMG how did you know my father is in the hospital for heart failure?” and the evangelist is like “The Holy Spirit told me wooOOOoooOoOO.” But skeptically, I brushed the thought of a Holy Spirit arranged encounter aside and factually told him I had asked everyone before him.
“I hope this act of giving you my charger will be good karma for me. I’ll chant for it. I’m actually Buddhist.”
“Oh you are? Have you always been?”
The man went on to explain that he had been Buddhist for six months now, and that he was originally Christian and went to a Christian college.
“But understanding the inequalities around the world that Christianity has justified and created, and being black and experiencing the injustices that result from those institutions made me realize that I can’t support and believe in that.”
I felt like I could really understand where he was coming from. There are so many unsettling historical cases of how Christian rhetoric and principles have been used to justify things like colonialism (Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden) and slavery, which arguably build the scaffolding for modern day racism (red-lining, public health issues, incarceration, police brutality, etc). Even now Christian culture is in many spaces failing to build bridges, like with the LGBTQ and Women’s health communities. Being aware of this, ever since high school, sharing my faith was something I never felt comfortable doing because I didn’t know how to justify Christianity for these examples, and I didn’t know how to justify my claim in believing it.
But as this man and I continued to talk, never did I feel the obligation to interrupt him, whip out my Bible and theologically sound arguments, and comprehensively make the case that he needed to reconsider Christianity RIGHT NOW. I mean, that’s what I used to think talks about faith would be like because my mindset was focused on defending the legitimacy of Christianity. Instead, I felt the desire to just listen to his story. And as I did, he talked about how his ancestors were deferred even the ability to read for their labor in picking cotton, how Buddhism allowed him to clear his mind to make sound decisions, how strongly he believed that before anything else, one needs to allow their self-confidence to motivate agency. A moment I really liked was when at one point, I noticed he was listening to Kendrick’s DAMN on his iPhone, and he recommended the songs XXX and God to me when I told him the only song I’d listened to was Humble.
“Praying to a God and Jesus who you can never see or meet, to me that’s ignorance. Why pray to a God and hope and wait when you’re talking to a god right here?” he said pointing to himself. “I have a degree, a job, two daughters. I’m young, and I’m handsome, no for real! I have so much to be grateful for.”
As the BART rolled into Fremont station, the man got up to leave. Returning his charger to him, he shook my hand and gave me his name (I wish I weren’t so bad with names TT). “My name is Anny,” I said back, “and coincidentally, I’m Christian!”
“That’s OK!” he smiled. “It’s all about finding what’s meaningful to you.” I thanked him again for the charger and for the conversation before he stepped off the train.
For a moment, I just sat there in awe and in beaming joy. That conversation was flippin’ awesome!!! To have been able to talk about faith because of such a random, coincidental context like needing to charge my phone, to have that conversation not only feel completely organic but also edifying and meaningful to the other party, and to have been there to listen and create the space for someone to talk about something that meant so much to their own life and outlook was more than my high school self could have ever guessed this kind of conversation would pan out. I think representing Christianity in just listening and providing that space for him to openly express himself spoke volumes more than any doctrinal debate would have in that encounter, and was a form of representing my faith that I really enjoyed.
So I started to sing this. I was the only one on that Bart car at that point, so I sang with an unusual loudness! I was so happy, I wished in the corner of my heart, “God, it’d be super awesome if I could continue this kind of conversation with my Uber driver.” And bam, my Uber driver turned out to be a Messianic Jew, I shared what I just experienced, and he shared his testimony of encountering God in prison, and with this year being his 5th year clean from drugs and alcohol.
WHAT THE HECK GOD IS SO COOL. I love that He’d place me in such cool encounters. I love that these encounters are ways for me to grow in the joy and confidence of sharing my faith, which is becoming such an important part of who I am.
Sorry Peter, I know I said I’d go to sleep at 12:35, but here I am. Twoamjam.
twoamjam 