The Hot Tub Pontificator

After a long day of work, my colleague and I were relaxing in the hot tub at our Chicago hotel.  We were talking about our progress in meetings that day, catching up on our family news, since we hadn’t seen one another in a few months, when Pete plopped himself in our midst and interrupted quite rudely.

Pete had been drinking, eyes glazed over.  He also had had some relationship troubles with his girl friend back in the room.  Pete just started talking, and talking, and talking, really being annoying.  It was getting unpleasant, and my friend and I were about to leave.  Then, Pete told us that he had just found out the day before that his mother had died.  Actually, she had died a number of months ago, but his family kept the news from him until yesterday (this was a long story).  He was in town to find resolution.

Well now we couldn’t just leave this twenty-something messed up kid alone in the hot tub.  His troubles went from pathetic to really pathetic, and amazingly complicated and dysfunctional to the point that he couldn’t be making this stuff up.  My friend and I were pastors, after all, and being such we have heard it all.  We let him dump, we felt sorry for the guy, even if he did ruin our night.

We were praying for Pete’s openness to the Gospel when all of sudden Pete started talking about his religious background.  It was a combination of traditional Roman Catholicism mixed with his own self-righteous rationalism.  My friend and I kept our identities hidden, because announcing that one is a pastor usually changes relational dynamics too quickly.  We just probed his thinking with questions, and he kept on talking and revealing things.

He was happy to find some fellow Christians he could instruct. We talked about the Gospel and the inability of man to be good enough before God, and then took it personal by telling our own stories and asking about his life. Things got heated pretty quickly as we had touched a nerve about his view of himself.  He started lecturing us on philosophy, religion, the Bible, politics and whatever else came to mind, even physically getting in our faces (probably due to the alcohol).  He dogmatically camped out on the Golden Rule as many people do, while refusing to see the irony of how he had just treated his girlfriend back in the room.

Okay, we had to reveal who we really were at this point.  He was stunned, of course, since we held this back for so long.  It turned out to be a good tactical move on our part though, the timing.  He asked us to explain the Gospel and answer various questions he has had for a while.  We cleared up some of his thinking, but his veneer of respect for us quickly wore off, and he was back to being pompous and antagonistic.  He even started lecturing us about Greek, Hebrew and Latin and all sorts of wild smokescreens to prove himself and hide from what we were telling him about Jesus Christ.

After about an hour of this, it was clearly time to close the conversation.  He was exhausted.  And we encouraged him on how to practically repair his relationship with his girlfriend.  He said he wanted answers, so we left him with a challenge to read the book of Romans.  He said he had read it before.  We challenged him to read it differently this time.  We told him to look for the answers to the questions we had been talking about regarding how a person gets right with God, and to pray and ask God to answer his questions, if he was serious.  We challenged him on his true resolution, as well.  And we told him that we would pray for him in this and all his troubles that night.

My friend and I were so glad that we stayed and listened to the pontifications of a drunken fool.  We enjoyed ministering the Gospel together.  And we talked about how often we each end up in such strange confrontational conversations with people.  We don’t like these types of Gospel talks, nor are we particularly gifted and handling them, but we sensed that night that God was truly using and guiding us throughout the event.

The next morning we saw Pete at the front desk as we were all checking out.  He apologized and was very thankful for our advice on so many subjects the previous night.  He promised to work on Romans and we told him that we prayed for him as we said we would, and so we expected him to keep his word and read Romans the way we suggested.

I have prayed for Pete this year on occasion, and his messed up family, messed up life and messed up theology.  May God be gracious and open his eyes to the glory of Jesus Christ and the salvation and life transformation there is in Him.