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NOWHERE MAN #2
AN EMOTIONAL CARWASH
We read a cute anecdote the other day about a young
woman who showed up at the DMV to get her license renewed. First off,
her hair was a different style AND color. Before she had glasses, now
contact lenses. She’d lost weight. Her address had changed. To top things
off, she’d recently gotten married, so now her last name was different.
And the clerk who looked at her old ID, and then examined, close-up, the
“new” person standing in front of her couldn’t help but comment. “What’s
the deal with you anyway?” she asked. “Did you just enter the witness
protection program?”
We’ve chosen this as our topic for the week: NOWHERE MAN. What is it like
to be stripped of your identity, to feel insignificant, unloved, unwanted?
I mentioned yesterday that Bible verse from Isaiah: “Can a mother forget
her baby?” And you know, the answer is yes. Mom CAN forget. People CAN
be left by the side of the road, because those who SHOULD care . . . don’t.
Speaking of witness protection programs, it was good timing that we noticed
in the L.A. Times right when we were getting ready to record, a feature
story by Christopher Noxon about a TV special on HBO with that very title:
Witness Protection. The article, and the TV film, describe what it’s like
to be one of the 25,000 or so people who are completely stripped of their
identities — and eventually emerge into a faraway community with new names,
new papers, new jobs, new houses, new backgrounds and histories, new EVERYTHING.
Apparently there’s actually a place, a government complex, called the
Witness Security Safe Site and Protection Center; it’s top-secret, of
course, and this is where federal marshals take a family through this
“stripping” process. Most of them are criminals, actually — close to 98%
of them — and the government gives them this option, generally because
they’ve testified against other criminals or mobsters. In this particular
television film, the story is about a Boston loan shark who has played
the rat, testifying in court against the Mafia bosses he used to work
for. So now he has to go into hiding; either that or end up wearing cement
shoes in the Hudson River. “Sleeping with the fishes,” if you remember
that old line.
The film’s producer, a Howard Meltzer, describes how hard the process
is.
“Most of these guys are being plucked out of an urban
area,” he says, “and spit out somewhere in Montana to work at a Jiffy
Lube for minimum wage. It ain’t easy.”
But there’s something harder than the minimum-wage bit.
Do you know what it is? It’s when they take your NAME away from you.
“The last step, and frequently the hardest for participants,” says Mr.
Noxon, the author of the newspaper article, “is a renaming, officially
severing all connection to their previous life.”
“This place is an emotional carwash,” says actor Tom
Sizemore, who appeared in the film.
Have you ever felt like YOU’VE been through that carwash
. . . with the windows rolled down? Or maybe even without the car? Sometimes
we get our identity, our sense of worth, from our job. “Who are you?”
“Oh, I work at such-and-such factory.” “I’m an executive on the 35th floor.
Corner office.” And then, all at once, after 32 years with “The Firm,”
they dump you. They have a Pink Slip Saturday, and you’re out of there
without much of a golden parachute. And that was who you WERE! You were
a Provider, a Good Family Man, because you brought home that paycheck.
All at once, those huge brushes in the carwash just scrub away that feeling
of self-worth.
Maybe a divorce has happened to you. Or widowhood. You were the wife or
husband of a wonderful person; in fact, maybe you got your NAME from that
person. Your standing in the community came from being married to so-and-so.
And now, either through a death, or because your spouse filed to get rid
of you, you LOSE that identity. A couple of years ago, David tells me,
he was the weekend speaker at a singles retreat. And most of these people
were single because of divorce. A number of them, recently having gone
through this, were still kind of dazed. “Who am I?” they asked their friends.
“Being married and having babies and being a mom and driving kids to soccer
practice and getting supper for my husband . . . this is all I know. This
is all I WAS, all I ever wanted to be. And now it’s all gone.”
Or maybe you’ve been thrust into sudden homelessness. Don’t we define
ourselves by our addresses? “I live on Moocha Moola Street in Prosperity
Palisades”; that’s what you always told people. But now you can’t claim
that address.
Well, you know, the Bible tells us that this struggle of being a Nowhere
Man, a Nowhere Woman, is nothing new. God’s people have always had to
endure that “emotional carwash.”
Consider with me the Children of Israel. God’s CHOSEN people. That was
their name, their identity. They basked in it; they bragged about it.
But . . . for a while they had their own land — and then they didn’t.
They were a free and proud people, and then slaves. In fact, when four
young man named Daniel, Hananiah, Michael, and Azaria were taken from
their homeland and made prisoners in the pagan kingdom of Babylon, the
very first thing the king there did was . . . to strip them of their names.
That’s right. You can read it for yourself in the book of Daniel, and
this happens in the seventh verse of chapter one. Boom! Old names erased;
passports destroyed; social security numbers reassigned. IMMEDIATELY the
king of Babylon assigned them brand new names — remember Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego? — and these were names linked directly to heathen, Babylonian
gods.
Of course, in today’s witness protection programs the trick for the participant
is to LEARN the new name, to immerse yourself with the new data: the fake
birthplace, where you “pretend” went to school, the new driver’s license
with the new name on it. But for Daniel and his three friends, the challenge
was just the opposite: they wanted to recall and hang onto the OLD name
— and even more, their former IDENTITY as sons of the living God.
And friend, this is the challenge for us right now, today. Maybe you’ve
lost just about everything that you thought made you . . . YOU. Your home,
your family, your job, your bank account. Just about all of your definitions
are gone. Or maybe you never even HAD those things. You were born with
just about zero, and have gone steadily downhill from there. But do you
know something? Those THINGS really aren’t your ID at all! This young
hero named Daniel: they took him away from his home. He was separated
from all his loved ones; in fact, he never saw them again . . . ever.
The king even tried to give him a different name: “Belteshazzar,” referring
to the pagan god Bel. And yet, during his long and incredible career of
service, Daniel just kept hanging onto his TRUE identity, which was to
be a servant of the living God in heaven. Nebuchadnezzar could call him
whatever he liked, and Daniel answered respectfully. But he still served
the true God. They could assign him to sleep in any bunk they chose; they
could point out to him that he was an alien in Babylon. That didn’t matter;
his true home, his true citizenship, was heaven. He just kept saying to
himself: “I am God’s man. Nobody can take that away.”
In this newspaper article describing the center where they warehouse and
debrief these would-be “witness protection” participants, Robert Sabbag,
who first reported on this for the New York Times Magazine, marvels at
how thorough this “stripping” process really is. I mean, they really do
a job on a person’s brain, ripping away every shred of the past, all the
former links. When it’s over, you hardly know if you’re coming or going.
“It’s not like a military base, it’s not like a hospital,
it’s not like a jail,” he says. “It’s almost like a space station in a
science-fiction movie — there’s absolutely no frame of reference. They
don’t want you to have ANY sense of where you are or how to get from one
place to another.”
That’s quite a description, isn’t it? And I think this
is exactly what our enemy, the Devil, would like to do with our minds.
If he can get us to pin our identities on things that he can then add
— then subtract — then add — then subtract . . . well, then he’s got us
on HIS spiritual yo-yo machine, doesn’t he? It’s ironic that he can tempt
us into sin. And the minute we DO sin, he whispers in our ear: “Look at
you! Look what you did! And you call yourself a Christian? No way are
YOU a Christian! Not any more.” And if your frame of reference is your
performance, how good you are, how seldom you sin and blow it, then he’s
got you right where he wants you: ready for him to rewrite your passport
his way.
But the secret is one short verse; in fact, HALF a verse. Daniel 1:8:
“But Daniel MADE UP HIS MIND to be IDENTIFIED with the God of Israel.”
Once he did that, all the king’s horses and all the
king’s men — could not make Daniel a Babylon man.
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