I have a lot of flaws.  One of my biggest is envy.  I don’t envy salaries, houses, cars, phones or guitars.  I envy the guy who plays to 5,000 people every night.  It’s not the money those crowds spend at the merchandise table that I wish for – though I could sure put it to use.  It’s not the ego boost and fun of so many singing along that I want – though that’s a pretty intoxicating high. 

I find myself falling into a familiar trap: My inner critic grabs a megaphone some nights after a few kids have been sponsored and says, “Yea, you might have done some good here, but how much MORE could you do?” And suddenly I’m unsatisfied, discontent, pondering a job at Chick-fil-A.

But today I pity the rockstar with his thousands of fans.  There’s one thing I can do that he can’t. (Ok, two. I can’t do jump splits.)

I can stand in the lobby at the end of the night and talk to people.  There’s plenty of room.  No one’s mobbing me.  I’m not stuck behind a table signing autographs while a road manager sees to it that every interaction is as brief as possible.  “Move along.  We’ve got a lot of people in line, folks.  Move along.”

It’s not the rockstar’s fault.  Not entirely. He’s truly too popular to be with people.  There’s no space, no time, no way it can happen if he’s going to get on that bus and make it to the next city for the next packed-out show.

And that’s a shame.

Last night a former sponsored child from Uganda (Olive) and another from the Philippines (Kiwi) came to my show.  Olive opened the night with a too-brief testimony about her life as an invisible child in Northern Uganda hiding in the jungle every night so she wouldn’t be kidnapped and forced to fight for the Lord’s Resistance Army.  She told us how Compassion and her sponsor had changed the course of her life.  “My sponsor didn’t just pick up a packet at a concert,” she said.  “She picked up MY packet.”

I got to hug Olive’s neck and thank her personally.  I got to look into her eyes and listen to the rest of her story – she’s now a social worker in Georgia.  There I was with these two healthy grown-up women smiling and talking and all I could think about was how, once upon a time, they were faces on packets on a table at somebody’s concert. Until someone picked them. I got to be inspired.

Then a woman with a familiar face took my hand and told me through tears about the night she came to hear me in Knoxville in 2004.  She reminded me about her story, about the divorce she was beginning all those years ago, about what I’d said to her back then.  Then she told me about her life over the last five years, about moving to another city and starting over again, about how her divorce deepened her understanding of God’s love for her – how she’s felt that love more through her struggles than she ever did in her years of comfort. 

I told her about a friend of mine who’s filing for divorce soon and asked her to pray for her.  I confessed to her that I just don’t know how to talk to God for my friend but I think she does. She promised she would. I got to be served.

On Saturday night I met a couple – a dentist and a blogger – who read Angie’s blog and followed our recent trip together to India.  I’ve never met fans like Angie’s fans.  This woman, Stephanie, called Angie’s blog “the mother blog” and then told me how Angie inspired her to blog and how she’s now discipling her own readers through conference calls.  I think she said there are 46 of them right now from all over the country going through a bible study over the phone together every week for nine weeks.  Then, at the end of the course, they go out and disciple other women in their own communities face-to-face.  I got to be convicted.

I wouldn’t trade ten minutes with any of these people for thirty seconds with a thousand.  Not today.  Today, I pity the rockstar. But I still envy his tour bus.

Series: Stories From The Road
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