I also took the time to get to know this man who with his wife are raising twin daughters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. This isn’t too far from where my parents live. And a slightly longer Metro ride to where Todd was born and raised – the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC.  When you grow up in a city, suburban life takes some getting used to. But Todd seems to be doing pretty well living his wife’s old neighborhood.
 
Todd seems like the kind of guy everyone gets to know. He’s very personable, and really likeable. Which seems odd for someone who spends his days catching financial criminals. “There are a lot of people stealing a lot of money. And I catch them.” He told me all about it, from how he got the job to what he does but suffice it to say all I am at liberty say is he helps regulate the stock market and keep it as honest as he can.   
 
What I can tell you is that his employer used to have a program where on specific work anniversaries, employees were able to choose a gift of their choice from a catalog. Depending how many years you worked there would determine how much you were allowed to spend. Todd got the watch he was wearing. “It’s a Tommy Bahama. It’s 11 years old. Other than changing the battery a few times, it’s still works perfectly.”
 
A big majority of our time was also spent talking about religion, faith, and swapping stories about being Jewish and going to Christian churches. “I had my first crisis of faith when I was five and a friend of mine died” which caused Todd to wonder why God would let that happen. Though he admired the fact I had a calling (and wanted to know all about it), it seems Todd is still wrestling with the idea.  He recalls a time, while visiting a Methodist church in Dupont Circle (in Washington DC), that his thinking began to change. To borrow from the minister of that church, “God is always there when you’re ready.”
 
Todd’s biggest influences came from three men in his life. Two being teachers from his high school days. And the other one his father. “The older I get the more I hear my father.” Now he is one. When it didn’t seem possible to have kids, the miracles of science allowed them. When I told him I thought having twins was a beautiful way to go insane, Todd hasn’t even noticed how crazy it is, “Twins is all I know.” 
 
But that’s not true, because Todd knows how to catch a criminal. He knows how to sail a boat. And even did it on Lake Erie. He also knows what caffeine does to him so he avoids it. Likewise, he has never really liked to drink, so he doesn’t. And although he’s never shot a crossbow, “Sure, I’d be up for shooting one.”  I just want to point out, that each of these weird questions I asked him, his first response was always a big laugh followed by an even bigger smile. That said volumes about this man as it did the idea of asking total strangers random questions.
 
For example, the mascot at Todd’s high school was The Achievers. Yes, you read that correctly. He went to a preparatory school that didn’t have sports, so I guess they had no real need for a mascot.  “But I was more of a semi-achiever.”  He joked about he would walk into the class on the first day and figure out what he needed to do to get a B, and how much more effort would it take to get an A. If it was too much, he would settle for the lesser grade.
 
As an adult, Todd figured out that he would be the mascot for his family. Since everyone used to tell him he reminded them of Winnie the Pooh’s dear friend, Todd went out and bought himself an Eeyore costume to wear at Halloween. “Eeyore’s my Spirit Animal.” There seemed to be a dichotomy between how he saw himself and how I did.
 
If you were to ask me, Todd is more like Rowlf the Dog, his favorite Muppet, the scruffy brown dog who played piano on the show.  Both Todd and Rowlf are calm and yet wisecracking. They have deadpan humor and most of his jokes go unnoticed because they are deep. While it’s said that Rowlf was most like Jim Henson, who created and originally performed the character, Todd is one of a kind.  Which, of course, contradict the way Todd describes himself. “I’m an average, normal, liberal leaning, city boy living in the suburbs.” 
 
More than that, he is gentle, kind, easy to talk to, and filled with interesting stories. He is also the last person I will meet and write about today. I can’t think of a better person to close the show. ​​I know I tell myself this every year, but KNOWvember is bittersweet.  

​It’s a joy. It’s a task. It’s easy. It’s hard. Sometimes I don’t want to do it. And I always hate for it to end. Although the pandemic made it more of a challenge, the concept remained the same and it really wasn’t that different.  Each person who gave of their time, did so by giving their all. Including Todd.

I am grateful to all my old friends who took the time to pair me with someone they also knew and loved. It says a lot about the kind of people I know. Thanks to them, and people like Todd who gave of their time, KNOWvember 2020, The COVID edition, was a success.  

Advent is not the only time God has made us wait. The Bible is filled with stories of God’s people waiting for rescue, deliverance, and salvation. Waiting is a pervasive theme throughout Isaiah which was written sometime after the Babylonian conquest of Israel.
 
Their country was in ruin. The Temple reduced to dust and ash. God’s people where in tears, suffering in exile. They shouted out to God, like their ancestors had but only to find silence. They wondered had God abandoned them to suffer alone.
 
They wonder, like we often do today, where God is or why God let this happen to them. In that time between our suffering and salvation, we wait for God to act. And thus, Isaiah reminds us to remain faithful; to wait patiently and with purpose. God is up to something, but what?
 
Read: Isaiah 64-1:9
 
Is it strange that Advent begins with a prayer of lament and a plea for help? Or that God’s people cry out for a savior and God makes them wait?
 
If anything good has come from 2020, it’s that it has made us better at waiting.  We’ve waited during lockdowns and quarantines. Waited for test results, and toilet paper to be restocked. We’ve waited on our orders from Amazon and Postmates to be delivered.

Sadly, some have had to wait for hospital beds and respirators. Or outside nursing homes to wave to a loved one. We’ve waited for election results, unemployment checks, for school’s to open and work to resume, and of course we’re all waiting for a vaccine. If we’ve mastered anything this year it’s waiting. ​

In this particular passage, Isaiah reminds us that the same God who makes mountains quake and nations tremble is also a God who makes us wait. It hardly seems fair, especially when we feel all alone and scared.
 
What does this say about the character of God who hides from us in our time of need? It doesn’t feel very kind or loving does it? What could be the reason for God to want to leave us to our pain and suffering? I doubt it’s too be cruel.
 
Writing on this passage, Scott Bader-Saye argues two points on this strange characteristic of our Divine Creator. And I think they are worth pondering. First, he believes God hides from Israel to remind them that God is not exclusively theirs. Think about that for a moment because this problem still persists today.  
 
Not just within Judaism, but within the different sides of Christianity and Islam and other religions. Each is guilty of claiming ownership of God. But here’s the thing, there’s no box big enough to contain, muchless control, God. The pot does not create the potter.  It merely showcases her talent and creativity. No one owns God.  Instead, God owns us. All of us.
 
Black, brown, or white; straight, gay, or indifferent, we are God’s beloved children. Or as the psalmist wrote, we are the sheep of his pasture. we can’t ever lose sight of that. Until we stop dividing ourselves over politics, gender, nationality, or religious doctrine the fullness of God’s power and glory will remain hidden from us. 
 
The second point Bader-Saye explores is this idea that sometimes God hides on purpose. And that purpose is to awaken us of our wrongdoing. For example, God might hide to help us deconstruct a distorted set of beliefs and practices that cause us to make God in our image. I think there’s some truth to this.  
 
In seminary, the professors were tasked with deconstructing any preconceived notions of God that we might have brought with us. This was a long process that truly tested the strength of one’s faith. Between shedding the old and the building up the new, there is a long period of waiting in the emptiness of one’s self. 
 
It was an active waiting, where I was preparing my heart to receive God and to see my calling through God’s eyes and not my own. In his time of waiting for God, Isaiah is able to see and understand the difference between the God of Israel and the other gods in the cultures of his time.
  
He remembers God greatness recalling, “When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” He is stunned and shocked to discover that this God works for the people, and the people for whom God works are the people who wait for God. Advent is a time of waiting for God who is working for us in ways that are yet to be revealed.
 
John Pavlovitz reminds us, “If we cultivate a bit of faith, that in-between time can be a hopeful space for us, a place where we can welcome transformation. Rather than wanting the time to pass quickly, we can actually enjoy it because we know we are being renovated.”
 
At the end of our reading today, Isaiah gives us two more insights into God’s character. One as a parent. And the other as a potter. Both of these images reveal an intimate connection that God has with us. To paraphrase Richard Rohr, God is always being drawn to the image of God in us. 
 
Ours is a God who has not abandoned us in our wait, but one whose hand is upon us; shaping us over time like a parent shapes the character of a child, as a potter lovingly molds her clay. “Just as it is with the child in Mary’s womb, there is always change taking place, always new life about to spring forth.” 
 
And so we wait for God to do what God does. To mold our hearts to love as God loves us and to shape our hands to give as God has given to all.
 
As you busy yourself preparing for Christmas, I hope you will remember this: You are God’s malleable work of art, being carefully shaped into the vessel of God’s incarnation to bring forth the presence of Christ to the world. You are a masterwork whether you know it or not. And a masterwork takes time. 
 
As we enter a time of waiting for the incarnation, we do so knowing God is shaping us to be like him.
 
Thus in his first letter, John writes, “All of us who look forward to his Coming stay ready – with the glistening purity of Jesus' life as a model for our own” (1 John 3:2-3).  By this we will not only be prepared to live in the promised realm of God when it comes, but we also get to experience what life in that realm is like today.
 
And so, we wait. And as we do we pray, and stick together, and love one another, and see to it that people are cared for and life is shared and peace prevails as we wait upon the Lord who is revealed to us in the incarnation of all that we do.
 

 
 
Works Cited
Bartlett, David L and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Feasting On The Word, Year B Vol 1. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008.
Pavlovitz, John. Low: An Honest Advent Devotional. Chalice Press, 2019.
Rice, Whitney. "Waiting Upon the Lord." 23 12 2020. episcopalchurch.org (accessed on 28 12 2020).
 

​I also knew from a conversation I had with his wife a few years ago that Sam went to seminary around the same time I didl, where he earned a Masters of Art and Religion. ​That makes sense. 
 
I could expect that my friend would marry someone who was cool and confident like Sam. She was that way herself as a teenager. Ironically, that’s not who Sam was when he was in high school. “I wasn’t popular. I was short and skinny, and not very athletic.” 
 
For most kids that age this would have been what caused them to go inward or become an introvert. Sam, however, was an extrovert and would use his stature to his advantage.

At sixteen he met a girl who was a parade dancer at Disney World. She told him they were looking for people like him – energetic, outgoing, and confident. He would get the job, playing Mowgli from the Jungle Book. “I wasn’t popular at school, but there I clicked and was welcomed by everyone.”
 
This gig would push Sam to try new things and grow more confidently. At 19, he met another girl who convinced take his first dance lesson. “They didn’t have a beginner’s class for adults. So it was just me and a bunch of little girls.” His life just went up from there, turning his part-time job at Disney into a full-time career in theater and teaching.
 
I didn’t ask him about his time in seminary, but I did learn that Sam has never shot a crossbow and Sam has no interest in doing so. “I do have a shotgun story if you want to know it.” Let’s just say it involved a shotgun, some retired Vets, and trap shooting on a boat. It seems like after some disagreement on ship protocol, “Someone finally said, ‘Why don’t you shoot one?’”

Whether or not they knew that Sam had never shot a gun before wasn't the issue really. The way Sam saw it there were two rounds in the gun, “I had a fifty-fifty chance at hitting the target.”  The first shot missed. The second hit. Calm, cool, and collected he persisted - traits that help Sam raise a daughter with his wife. "We are different but we compliment each other." 
 
It does make me wonder if his wife would describe Sam the same way.  “Outgoing, energetic, sociable, and confident and insecure that the same time.” As a kid he was a button pusher, today he is a “perfectionist with the confidence to fail.”
 
Not bad for a guy who moved to a new town without knowing a single person. Or for someone who married the “cool chick” from my youth. “I married my Muppet self.” 

Which takes us back to Janice, the easy going, free spirited bass player in the Electric Mayhem Band. Believe it or not, Sam played her in the show “Here Comes the Muppets”  a live musical that ran at the Disney MGM Studios. I can't think of a better person or a better Muppet to blur the line and get a great story out of it than those two. 

So here are a few things that Gay has done since we last met in Indian Rocks Beach, back when I was a surfer and she the cheerleader. After high school, she started going by her birth name, and not her middle name. After a very brief, and regrettable marriage, Gay met a man who sang Elvis to her and married him a few years later. “I don’t even like Elvis, but it worked.” Like me, she grew up sailing. 
She and her husband once owned a 35’ Hunter sailboat. She is also a water person. “I love to scallop and scuba dive.” She has shot a crossbow.  “I only did it once, but I have pretty good aim.” She learned how to use a gun when a child her dad would take her hunting and let her shoot oranges off the trees.
 
Her favorite Muppet is Kermit. “He’s sweet and goofy. And he loves everybody.” I like to think that is why our friend wanted us to meet again. Like Kermit, there is an authentic, gentle spirit that radiates from Gay and a confident wisdom gained from years of living that spirit in the world. She too is loving and gives of her time to care for others. She likes to smile and laugh. Even in difficult situations, Gay is able to find hope and strength to persevere.
 
When asked to describe herself in ten words or less Gay admits, “I am complex, persistent, light-hearted, overly caring and a little chaotic.”  These are traits we learn at a very early age. But aren’t fully realized until we’ve lived and wrestled with them for a while. Our time together wasn’t so that we could remember our past , “I thought you were really cute” (included for posterity reasons only) but so we could be fully present, in this moment where life is a little chaotic to say the least.
 
“Everything I’ve been through has got me to where I am today. I wouldn’t change anything.”  I can’t go back in time, to that day she walked into my bedroom. Nor can she go back and tell her younger, teenage self not to “drink a bottle of wine all by myself after ballet practice.” 
 
It may have taken four decades to understand that “things happen for a reason. We are given some hard things to help us later on in life.” Although Gay missed our original interview earlier this month, I am thankfully I had one day left on my calendar for her to get a second chance to make a first impression. 

Again, I am only getting one side of this tale. And all I really know is it involved a school dance, some crabapples, a broken windshield, and a tree branch. Also, both boys lived to tell the story. Or so I was told. After a few repeated tries, Phil still remained missing. I must admit, it has my wondering. Who is this mysterious man?
 
As the only eye-witness to their juvenile crime, I wanted to get Phil’s perspective. I was hoping he would fill in some missing parts, like where he went off to after his friend hit the tree branch. What became of the two men who were out to kill them for throwing a crabapple at their moving car? And what about the girls they left at the school dance? 

I could tell you the tale, but it wouldn't be the same. I am almost positive I would embellish it further. It's better if I leave it up to my dear friend to tell and retell the tale for me. That way I can count all the different ways he stretches the facts for his own benefit. Without getting to meet Phil, we will never really know the whole truth.

​Suffice it to say, the moral of that dark and frightening night is this: Don't throw crabapples at speeding cars. They will stop, they will chase after you, and if they don’t catch you and beat you up…you might run into a tree and do yourself in.
 
Of course, the moral of this particular KNOWvember tale is: Don’t let other people write your story.

Get out there, meet strangers, let them know who you are and get to know them. Ask them to tell you something crazy they have done. Better yet, share something crazy with them. If anything, you'll share a good laugh or two. Who knows, maybe they will take your story and make it their own. It's been known to happen.

Years down the road, you'll be sitting somewhere listening to someone tell a story about that very thing you did. And before you know it, you've become an urban legend. Told by strangers who never had the chance to hear it from you directly. 

One reason I wanted to me his son Ian is because when I lived in Greenville, Michigan and told people my name, many asked if I knew this particular Ian. I'm not sure why, but it seems like some believe that people who share names all somehow know one another. Well, I can now say, I KNOW this Ian, the ex-Marine, father of four and lover of coffee. 
 
That's the real reason I wanted to meet Ian. You see, about three months ago his dad sent me a bag of freshly roasted coffee beans. Turns out the two of them not only love coffee as much as I do, but together they started a small business venture called Flat River Roasters.

“Ever since I was young I’ve loved coffee.” Lucky for him “my parents are coffee snobs” and Ian learned the art of coffee starting on the right foot.  Ian and his dad have always been close. “We hang out a lot. Roasting coffee is just another thing to do with him.”
 
The idea came when Ian read an article about using a cast iron pan to roast coffee beans. A few experiments later, they found that an air popcorn machine would do the trick. His love for coffee and his inquisitive mind would push the two of them to producing some of the best roasts I’ve ever tasted. But there’s more to the story.
 
When Ian was a teenager, his little Braeden brother passed away. Working alongside his father, the two roast beans to help raise money for a charity that they created – SuperBub's SuperHeroes – a Childhood Cancer Foundation started in memory of Braeden. I might be addicted to their coffee beans, but as a cancer survivor myself I have no problem donating to this cause (especially when I know I get a bag of beans as a thank you).
 
Ian shared a story when his platoon spent three cold and rainy days out in the field. “I refused to bring instant coffee with me like the other guys.” The man had his priorities, bringing with him a small fire pot that had a French press attachment. He made a cup and shared it with the others who were frozen and drenched. The mood shifted, and “we had reason to smile when there was nothing to smile about.” It was then Ian realized, “When you’re in a low place, coffee can go a long way.”
 
Ian is studying to be a mechanical engineer, working a side job, and raising children with his wife. If ever there is a need for caffeine it would be now. He drinks his with cream and sugar, knowing that he will get some coffee snubs for doing so. “I think you start tasting different notes in the beans with it.” Suffice it to say, we stopped that conversation right there. For the record, this Ian (me) drinks his coffee black. 
 
Now, here are a few non-coffee related things you might like to know about the guy who shares my name. He has shot a crossbow, “But it wasn’t a good one.” He has never sailed a boat, “But I’d be up for it because I love water.” And he has no favorite Muppet, “I never watched it as a kid, and my kids haven’t seen it because they aren’t on the streaming services.” Suffice it to say, yet again, we stopped the conversation there. 
 
Another fun story Ian shared with me was about the scar on his elbow that he recently got trying to help assist in a motorcycle accident. (Since serving in the Marines, he keeps an emergency medical bag in his car) It was raining, and the tread on the shoes Ian had on was all but gone. A bad combination. He slipped and skidded on his elbow. Ironic how someone who wanted to help someone else would quickly be the one who needed help. When a fireman saw blood pouring down his arm, and tried to tend to his wounds, Ian told him “The only thing that hurts is my pride.” 
 
It was nice to get to know Ian. Like so many of us, COVID has been hard for him. As a student, his classes are mostly online. As a vet, the Veteran’s Lounge at the school is almost always empty. As a dad, he’s pretty much homebound when he’s not working. “It’s nice to do this with you because I haven’t met a lot of people lately.” 
 
I felt his pain. As I took the last sip of what was now cold coffee, I truly understood what he meant when he said, “When you’re in a low place, coffee can go a long way.” It really can. I have a feeling our friendship will too – even if he stops roasting beans…suffice it say, I’m going to stop right there.