The Disqualified
There is a saying that circulates in certain Christian circles, usually on a motivational graphic with a sunrise behind it, and like most things that get turned into motivational graphics it gets repeated until the edges wear smooth and people stop actually hearing it.
God does not call the qualified. He qualifies the called.
Say that slowly. Because if you mean it — and I mean it — it detonates something in the foundation of the way institutional religion in America decides who belongs and who does not.
The Resume God Keeps
Let us talk about the people God used.
David. King of Israel. The man Scripture itself describes as a man after God’s own heart — Acts 13:22, ESV. He committed adultery with Bathsheba and then arranged her husband Uriah’s death in combat to cover it. Not an accident. Not a moment of weakness followed immediately by repentance. A calculated sequence of sins that a man in power executed because he could. He had multiple wives. He had the blood of his most loyal soldier on his hands.
He also wrote half the Psalms and anchored the lineage of Jesus Christ.
Moses led two million people out of Egypt, received the Law directly from God, and spoke to the Almighty face to face as a man speaks to his friend — Exodus 33:11, ESV. He was also a murderer. Killed an Egyptian with his own hands before any of the burning bush business happened. And decades later, after everything God had done through him, his anger got the better of him at Meribah and it cost him the Promised Land.
Paul — Saul of Tarsus before Damascus — did not just disagree with Christianity. He supervised executions. He stood there approving while they stoned Stephen to death. He dragged believers out of their homes. He was, by his own description in Philippians 3, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless under the law — and he used every bit of that credential and that zeal to hunt down the people of God…
WOE TO YOU, WHITEWASHED PHARISEES
There is a verse in the twentieth chapter of Jeremiah that I want to put in front of you before I say anything else. Not as decoration. Not as a proof text selected to make a point sound more spiritual than it is. As an explanation.
“If I say I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name, there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” — Jeremiah 20:9, ESV
That is why this blog exists. That is why it came back. That is the only explanation you are going to get.
The Silence Is Over
Average Bubba — Unfiltered went quiet in late April. What followed in certain local circles was, by various accounts, a collective exhale. Apparently the plain speech had been making some people uncomfortable enough that its absence registered as relief.
I want to address that relief directly and then move on, because it does not deserve more than a paragraph.
Nobody shut this blog down. Not a congregation. Not a deacon. Not a preacher. Not a family group with decades of practice protecting an arrangement that suited them. A man made a choice, then a man made another choice, and those two things are separated by a meaningful distance that some people appear to be having genuine difficulty navigating. The first choice was mine. The second one is also mine. The distinction matters and I am only going to say it once.
Some People Need To Calm Down
While this blog was quiet, certain local individuals apparently developed the impression that when Average Bubba wrote about institutional church drift, whitewashed religious culture, and the particular machinery that activates when comfortable arrangements get questioned — I was talking about them specifically.
I was not….
The Band Is Back Together
Some of you noticed the silence. A few of you said something about it. One or two of you said something more than once, which I appreciate more than the casual mention.
Average Bubba — Unfiltered went quiet in late April. The stated reason was a transition — moving toward something more personal, more interior, a memoir blog called Tempered Soul where the water that runs deep in a man gets drawn up and put on paper. That work happened and it was necessary and it is not finished. What changed is the address. The memoir content — the Early Years, the Gap Years, the Road Years, all of it — comes home to AB-U where it belongs. Some of you are going to find out things about this writer you did not know before. That is intentional.
Here is what else you need to know. Some people exhaled when this blog went quiet. The particular kind of people who exhale when plain speech stops are the same kind who have been exhaling since the Pharisees figured out that silence was easier to manage than an honest question asked out loud. That exhale is noted. It changes nothing except the temperature of what is coming….