Chapter 1: Final Draft

Perhaps every day and every moment builds upon a previous day or moment to take you to where you stand in the present. Perhaps life has particular moments that really transform your future. Perhaps we remember moments that stand out, as if they were life defining moments, when in reality, were it not for the continuous building of life’s previous moments, they would have been insignificant. Perhaps I have too many friends who philosophize on life and I need to get out more. Then again, I don’t like getting out much, so I’ll continue philosophizing on life.

When I was a kid, I went to a Christian school that had a library. For the most part I liked reading adventure books about five brothers and sisters who somehow were always able to save the World. I’ve always wanted to save the World in some sort of way. When I was a freshman, I wanted to kill myself. I think a lot of freshmen have thoughts about killing themselves. Since I was a Christian kid, and I knew that killing myself would be a sin, and I didn’t want to sin, I decided that the best way to die was to die while saving the World. I would have thoughts of some guy running into my classroom and threatening all my classmates. At that point, I would jump up, beat the snot out of the guy, and somehow in the process take a shot to the heart. Everybody would gather around me and mourn my death. But instead of getting to do that, kids in school started making fun of me for reading books about these five kids who would always save the World.

One day I changed books, and stories. I picked up a book about some guy called Bruce Olson, who wanted to save the World in his own way. Against all odds, the guy went as a missionary to some tribe in South America to speak to them about Jesus. I don’t remember that much about the book, except that one night he woke up because a huge tapeworm was coming out of his mouth. For some reason, at that point, I decided that I wanted to be a missionary. Missionaries got to do cool things, like fight demons, and defeat cannibals, and have awesome tapeworms coming out of their mouths.

But then I grew up, and I realized that the only people who become missionaries are people who can’t really do anything useful in life, and therefore have to go live with some unknown tribe in South America and talk to them about Jesus. I, on the other hand, was a smart kid. I told my mom once that I was pretty sure I was a genius. She laughed out loud. That may sound normal as you read it, but you would need to know my mom’s laugh to know what I mean. My mom has a really loud laugh. I could always tell where my mom was because of her laugh. If she was anywhere within a three-mile radius, and she heard something funny, I could hear her. Apparently she thought it was really funny when I told her I was a genius. But the truth is, most of us geniuses are highly misunderstood.

Look at Einstein; people never really understood why his hair was such a disaster. If you’re smart enough to discover gravity, or whatever the heck he discovered, you should be smart enough to get a haircut. But we geniuses don’t do what other people want us to do, because we live in a whole different dimension. I cut my hair fairly often, though.

Since I used to be a genius, I figured my dreams of saving the World as a missionary were over. I needed to find some other form of saving the World.

Initially, I thought I should be a doctor. Doctors are cool. They all have the same first name, but are allowed to keep their last name. I wanted to be known as Doctor Perez. I’ve always been known as Marquito, which is like little Marco, since my dad is big Marco. We weigh the same now, though, so I think I should be able to redeem the big Marco name, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Anyways, doctors save the World, one person at a time. The only thing is that sometimes you have to study for a really long time to become a doctor. You can’t just go to the national registry and change your name. You actually have to prove that you’ve studied, before they give you the title of Doctor. Some doctors continue studying and get what is called a “specialty”. This doesn’t make sense, because it means that they study for like a hundred years, in order to give people glasses, or tell them to take Prozac. Nowadays, with the advances of Modern Technology (thanks to freak-haired geniuses like Einstein), machines tell the doctor what the persons’ eye prescription is. They still pretend they’re the ones who are helping you figure out the best prescription. They put one lens into a machine and ask you “now do you see better with this lens, or…” switch, switch, “this lens?” I’ve caught on now. It’s the same freaking lens. They just want you to think that they’re giving you the service that only they can give you because they’ve studied for a hundred years, and have the first name Doctor.

After realizing that doctors have to study so long to give you prescription glasses I decided I didn’t want to be a doctor. You can buy those glasses now at Walmart. I switched to engineering. This was a very depressing switch, since engineers don’t often save the World. Honestly, how has going to the moon ever helped anyone? It might be cool, and the Americans may have put a fancy shmancy flag up there, but I can’t even see it from earth. So who cares? Even if I did see it, I’m not sure it would make a difference in my life. I chose engineering because, genius that I am, I was good at Math and Science. People who are good at Math and Science can either teach Math and Science, to people who will teach Math and Science, to other people who are good at Math and Science, or they can be engineers. Math and Science teachers don’t get paid much, but engineers get to go to the moon. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out which of the two career choices you need to pick. That’s when I decided I no longer needed to think of myself as a genius. I could just be a regular guy.

After a while of studying Mechanical Engineering, which is what you study so that you can make those contraptions that you see in the movies so that when the alarm clock goes off in the morning, it hits a little ball that roles on a ruler, down to a little spring board, that shoots a little dart, to a bulls eye that triggers a little domino that falls on the surface of your coffee maker, so that by the time the snooze button goes off, you can have freshly brewed coffee. But then I realized that somebody whose name is Mister Coffee invented coffee makers with preset alarms that just brew the coffee when you need it. Although, I would have to argue that I do believe coffee has helped save the World, I was too late in studying Mechanical Engineering to invent the coffee maker and couldn’t think of anything else that would be useful.

This frustration with life brought one of those life-changing events. There was a man whom I will call Mr. Ian for the sake of this book, whom I met a few years before my life-changing event. He was a fairly old man. He had dedicated his entire life to saving the World in the Bruce Olson way, but not in the doctor or engineer way. He was a major during the World War… you know… the really bad one and as such also was useful in saving the World. But that’s another story. Mr. Ian was in Costa Rica which, by the way, is where I’m from. Because I was frustrated with life and still lived with my parents, my mom told me to sit down with Ian and talk to him about my life. I’ve always been told that we don’t take enough advantage of the wisdom of older men in our Western society and therefore it was time that I showed our society how some of us young people know how to appreciate old men. So I talked to Mr. Ian.

I didn’t mention to him anything about my dreams of saving the World, and how people would really come to like me and appreciate me because of it, since Mr. Ian was kind of a mean guy if you said something he didn’t like. He was very particular about things, like when people asked God to be with them. You would always feel sorry for the guy that said that because Mr. Ian would say things like “Why are you asking Him to be with you? Don’t you know that He is always with you? He has promised to never leave you nor forsake you.” To which the poor guy would never know how to respond, and would leave the room crying. We were only blessing the food for crying out loud. But when you’ve saved the World in a war, you have earned the right to say things like that. Plus, Mr. Ian was British, and British people are all strange anyways.

When I shared with Mr. Ian my thoughts about my future and how I didn’t know what to do with my life, he suggested I spend a year at Bible School. Mr. Ian had started a group of these institutions around the World, and the one he was suggesting was located in England. He started it with his wife Mrs. Ian. Mrs. Ian is really nice and I’m not sure if she would get angry at you if you asked God to be with you. She makes me tea every once in a while and we talk about nice things. They started this school to attract young people from all over the World and teach them about Jesus. It’s kind of like going to speak to the people in South America, but instead of going to them, the people in South America come to you.

I knew about this particular place because, years back, my parents had met there. My mom was from California, and my dad was from Costa Rica. My dad had met Mr. Ian, who was probably old even then and Mr. Ian had invited him to go to the same place, kind of like he was doing with me. When my dad went there as a skinny, big-nosed Costa Rican, he fell in love with an American blonde girl and one week later asked her to marry him.

All Costa Ricans think that American girls are the most beautiful women in the World, and as soon as they encounter one, they ask her to marry them. I did the same, and that’s how I got my American girl… but I’ll save that story for later. To his uttermost surprise, she said yes. Apparently, England doesn’t allow for two foreigners to get married there. At least that’s the story my dad told me. Therefore they had to wait a whole five months before they got married in California.

My grandpa on my mom’s side was a very rich man and let my dad know that he would never get any help from him. Once, my brothers and I got three SeaWorld raincoats as a gift from my Grandpa and Grandma when they were in Costa Rica, which is kind of like getting help, because it rains a lot in Costa Rica. Now, he also gave us many other things, and flew us to the US for family reunions, so I'm not sure he kept his promise.

My mom and dad married. He worked as a custodian for about a year, then packed up all their belongings and drove down to Costa Rica. There they had three boys. Their third boy came a little bit as a surprise, and they wanted him to be a girl. It didn’t quite happen that way, so since they didn’t have any boy names planned, they gave him his dad’s name… except that since he was little, everybody called him little Marco, or Marquito.

Mr. Ian would call me Mosquito, because he didn’t know what my parents were saying. When he mentioned to me the possibility of going to Bible school, I thought of a good answer. The truth was that I didn’t want to go because I had grown up in a Christian home and was a good Christian kid. I had even tried to read the Bible as a kid except that it’s usually so boring that you can’t read too much of it at once. Some parts are interesting, but really if you put it together, the interesting parts would fill a book about the size of Philemon. Some who have never read the Bible probably don’t have a clue what Philemon is about. Philemon is the book where Paul, who was formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, which was a Greek city, writes Philemon to ask him to be kind to Onesimus upon his return because Onesimus was his former slave that ran away but came to know Jesus through the ministry of Paul. Therefore Philemon should receive him as a brother and no longer as a slave. Now, this is a really short book, and as you can probably tell, even the short books seem really boring… so imagine the whole Bible.

Who wants to spend a year of their life studying a book that is composed of sixty-six books, which are almost all longer than Philemon? But, how do I tell this man, who gets a little angry when you say things he doesn’t like to hear, that the institutions that he started back when he was young is probably too boring for someone like me to go to. Instead, I used up all my genius brain power and came up with an answer that I knew he would clearly favor.

“Mr. Ian. How thankful I am for you to have provisioned me with such deep and profound wisdom. O that the depths of your wisdom may reach to the uttermost parts of the World. Nonetheless, as deep as your wisdom may be, I know of an even deeper wisdom…”

I then proceeded to explain to him the Costa Rican culture, and how, because Costa Rica is a third-World nation, we are brought up to be very different than most Americans. You see, all Americans are rich and very few Costa Ricans are. But Costa Ricans want to be rich like Americans, in order to have automatic dishwashers engineered by Mister Coffee, and to drive big Suburbans that consume more gas to get to the closest Walmart to buy prescription glasses, than a Space Shuttle uses to go to the moon.

In essence, I said this to the man:

“So you see Mr. Ian… Society is different here. Most Americans who go to your Bible Schools, can waste a year of their life, just in case they meet a Costa Rican to marry. But in Costa Rica, society expects more from us. What’s the point of marrying an American if her dad isn’t going to give us his riches? Instead, we need to study, and work hard, and give back to society so that we can help this country become rich and big like the US. Therefore, I will have to pass on your very kind offer to help me study the Bible in England, and do that which society expects me to do.”

He was dutifully impressed. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a little tear in his eye. His hands seemed to get ready to give me a standing ovation, and request some kind of encore. And when he spoke, this is what he said.

“That’s great.” Yes… Yes… I know. “If society is your God, you go ahead and keep worshiping at its feet. “ Society, my God? No, I think you misunderstood.” “Or you can worship the one true God, and do what He is asking you to do. Which will it be?”
He wasn’t at all implying that God was telling me to go to Bible school. I don’t think even Mr. Ian would presume to know God’s will in my life. I say “even” because I don’t doubt that Mr. Ian was a lot closer to God than I have ever been. I have a lot of trouble “hearing” God, but there are some men out there who seem to hear Him very clearly. I believe Mr. Ian was one of those men. Yet, in my experience, these men tend to be very careful to inform a person about what they think God is telling them to do.

What in essence I was being told was very true in my life and I believe it to be true in many people’s lives that I know. I was choosing my course of action based on what society (whoever that is) was expecting of me, and not what I was at all believing that God desired for me. I was going to be a doctor or an engineer because in people’s eyes someone with my grades and “abilities” should be a doctor or engineer. Somebody like me shouldn’t waste their life going to learn about God. Somebody like me should be doing something useful with my life.

Many of our actions and life decisions stem from social pressure. Because it’s very difficult to define who “society” actually is (it’s like the communal “they”, in “They say that if you swim right after you eat you’re going to cramp up and die.”). The reality is that some of the pressure is self-inflicted. This isn’t only true about people who choose to be engineers or doctors, but it can be equally true of people who choose to be missionaries and save the World along with Bruce Olson. We often are pressured or guilted into choosing a certain career path, and we don’t take the time to stop and ask God what His desire is for our life. This isn’t only true for young people out of high school, but can be true for older adults with a wife and three children (speaking hypothetically of course.)

Perhaps this is why Jesus said that if we wanted to be His disciples we actually had to hate the people around us (Luke 14:26). It’s a very strong word and all of us who teach from this passage feel the obligation of trying to explain the use of the word away by saying that Jesus is just creating an extreme. In essence, we say that our love and devotion to God should be so much greater than that which we hold toward society, that it would be considered as hatred toward those close to us. Maybe this is right, but he could have chosen a different expression. He chose hate.

God hates other gods. He’s always been a little picky about this. In the Old Testament, He makes quite a statement about this to His people. He also didn’t want images or shapes to be made of Him. His people had a tendency to have other gods, because everybody around them had other gods. In other words, there was a little bit of a social pressure. Since God didn’t want images made of Him, and other people didn’t understand how you could even worship a God without an image, God’s people would worship the images of the other gods. Once, when Moses was on a mountain talking to God, His people even went so far as to make a big huge golden cow to worship. This made God really mad.

Nowadays, in our western society we tend to have less visual images. That doesn’t mean at all that we don’t have other gods. It just means that the gods we have placed first have themselves learned to be little more subtle. Anything that wields more power over us than God’s will and desire is our one and true god.

Society (family, peers, pastors, and even ourselves) wield great power over us. I would even suggest that often they wield even greater power than God. Unless we take up our cross (Jesus’ following comment in the passage) and follow Him, we can’t be one with Him. Crosses were where people died. Society may have a lot of power over the living, but they have no power over the dead. Only God has power over the dead. If we have taken up our cross and died to ourselves, only God will wield power over us. Then, and only then, will we be free to serve Christ.

Mr. Ian was letting me know that I needed to make a choice in my life. Either I was going to seek, serve and obey God, or I was going to be stuck trying to please everybody else for the rest of my life. He wasn’t telling me that I had to go to England. He was telling me that I needed to ask God what I should do.

A few months later, I was on my way to England… and that story changed my life.