A Story about a boy who Reminds me of Jesus

It was during my junior high years that I noticed my living conditions were different from most of my friends. Most of my friends lived in these big sprawling houses that had more rooms than I could count. Some of them even had those refrigerators with water and ice that came out of the front door. Their yards had fresh green grass, pretty flowers, and easily detected boundary lines.

We lived in a white trailer, a doublewide, with a rickety porch. The railings squeaked in frustration if you leaned on them with your full weight. We had a few dogs who slept in the laundry room. The border collie always seemed to be pregnant, and liked to give birth to her pups in my parents’ closet. There was a lot that was fun about where I grew up, and also some things that made me feel ashamed.

We almost always had at least one broken down car outside the trailer, a hitching post in the driveway, and way too much grass to mow. The grass was tall and unkept, giving off a shabby appearance. We drove a station wagon that broke down all the time, and we never had enough money. Ever.

My dad was drugging during those years, and my mom was sad. Sad in ways I didn’t understand and couldn’t fix, but that embarrassed me. Our car embarrassed me, my white dilapidated trailer embarrassed me, the broken down cars in the gravel driveway embarrassed me, and our poverty embarrassed me. I didn’t understand the drugs, and I couldn’t comprehend the insufferable silence that seemed to permeate the entire house whenever my parents were in the same room together. Shame hung in the air like a permanent light fixture, except it was invisible and I didn’t know how to name it, but I felt it, like the feeling of old musty cobwebs.

During those years, I became friends with a boy named Adam. Adam had really bad acne, and wanted to be a professional cyclist so he shaved his legs and didn’t always know the right thing to say. We started sitting together on the bus, then he asked for my phone number and we’d talk on the phone. We even hung out a little at school. He wasn’t one of the cool kids, and I was still at that place in my life when I was trying to belong to the upper echelon of society, and therefore was doing my best to find an inroad to the cool clique. As if that group somehow had the deciding vote on my self-worth.

Adam wasn’t one of those kids, but he was nice and we liked sitting together on the bus. He told me he liked me. He told me he liked me so much he thought he loved me. He invited me to his house and to his family dinners. His family sat at the dining room table and said prayers. His house was strong and sure. Adam’s front porch was made of brick, not rickety metal that squeaked.

He wrote me poems and tucked them into my binder. Love poems that were kind and thoughtful, poems he sometimes turned into songs for me. Songs I had no idea what to do with.

One afternoon, he rode his bicycle to my house and showed up outside my trailer in red spandex and a bicycling shirt. He knocked on my bedroom window and waved at me like it was perfectly normal to come to my house even though I hadn’t invited him.

I gulped down my shame. How do you explain the hardest thing in your life to explain? How do you say what you don’t have words for? “I don’t belong here, but I guess I do belong here, because this is my home.”

I felt every second of those first few minutes when he stepped into my house and looked at the shabby brown carpet, the thin wood paneling. The thing was, Adam didn’t seem to notice my trailer, or the carpet, the walls, or even the long grass outside where the broken down cars sat. Adam only noticed me.

Adam liked me and nothing else seemed to matter to him.

All the feelings of not being good enough, of not having the right house, or the right life to give off the impression of my coolness didn’t matter to him. The only thing that mattered was that we were friends. Real friends. Not the kind you have to do something to deserve, or the kind where they’re offering you their pity and you’re lucky they notice you, but the kind of friendship that makes you feel like they’re really happy to be with you, just the way you are, rickety trailer and all.

There’s a lot about Adam that reminds me of Jesus. I get that Jesus is Lord, first and last, beginning and end, the One and Only. But there are these verses in scripture that talk about how Jesus was humble, and didn’t have much in the way of good looks to recommend him. In a culture that values beauty and put-together-ness it’s good to remember that 2,000 years ago, Jesus showed up on the scene, and saw people no one else seemed to give a damn about, and Jesus liked them.

Somehow, in this super mysterious way, two millennia later, at the times when I have felt most alone, most ashamed, this humble Jesus, the one who gets overlooked and passed up because we love our warrior types, the put-together types, the strong and gallant cool guys, shows up at my window with kind eyes and a gentle presence and asks if he can see my room.

Jesus doesn’t just pull me out of my window and whisk me to a castle far away, he comes into my room and sits in the middle of all the things that make me feel bad and icky, and talks with me until I don’t feel so damn awful.

His faithful, kind companionship has meant more to me than anything wealth or status or approval from the cool kids could have ever given me. He is the One, the Friend who makes me feel okay with my own grown-up version of the white trailer with broke cars sitting outside my bedroom window. He is the friend who sits with me in whatever I’m sitting in, and reminds me that he’s in it with me, not just to get me out, but to be with me because he likes me. Because we’re friends. The real kind.