I sat in my freshly wood paneled office in Ft. Stockton, Texas, circa 1980. This was my initial full time ministry. Many a morning as I did my Bible study and prayer I would experience a duel feeling of helplessness and heavy shouldered responsibility. The world is going to hell without Jesus to save them. I am Minister of this gospel. How can I possibly make a holy dent in this mammoth calling from a Podunk West Texas town one hundred miles from water, one mile from hell?

I am perfectly suited to make sure Jesus doesn’t bear the cross alone. I am the eldest and only son of an evangelical Preacher in a Southern family. I was groomed to lift the ministry mantle to greater heights and crowned the family hero. I was reared in a religious culture where Jesus was seen foremost as a Savior figure whose finest hour was at the Altar call with unrelenting verses of “Just As I Am.”

As my ministry and humanity evolved I moved to Houston, left my position in the church and went into a two - year clinical training for hospital chaplaincy. My world salvation passion shifted from altars to bedsides. How do I relieve the spiritual suffering of the sick, dying, and their brood? How can I assist them in engaging these crises with emotional honesty and integrity of faith?

I clearly stated to my intern peer group that my goal was to be the best chaplain of the bunch and to make more visits than them all. Chuck the Savior had kicked into warp saving speed! It didn’t take many “on call” sessions for the Messiah to have a Gethsemane moment. For 16 hours during my rotation all the pain was heroically mine and mine alone. The Savior began feeling quite like the pedestrian human populace.

Some twenty years later I still have a visceral vibration in my body reliving the first time I encountered a weeping woman in the hall and passed by on the other side. I was just like the priestly foils in the Good Samaritan story, and I felt like the cruelest, most calloused man alive. In that moment I resigned as Savior of the world. Hell, I couldn’t even save a medium sized hospital off I-59 and Beechnut in Houston, Texas.

As the experience soaked in and with due reflection I came to a painful truth - I needed to save people more than they neeed savin’. My motivation wasn’t about helping them it was about proving me. In my pastoral ministry I consciously focused on being a channel rather than a hero. After many years I embodied a decent level of mastery in this practice.

These days I fancy myself in the lineage of Liberal Religious Prophets seeking to cure the conditions that cause great suffering. The brand of my salvation is more systemic than individual.

I see a world where power is more important than people; where dominance is more central than decency. Theocrats and Neocons in America are waging war in two countries and on our Constitution. Communist Chinese continue to violently colonize Tibet. Military Despots in Burma are squashing the democratic movement there with deadly brutality and are sacrificing lives by the thousands as they fearfully refuse most international offers of assistance after a devastating cyclone.

These are but a few headliners currently on the media main stage. I feel like I have to do something about it yesterday. The Savoir promised he would return, and he is back in me, like another weary verse of “Just As I Am.”

Like Moses’ burning bush, how does the passion burn through me, without burning me up? I am discovering anew this subtle Sacred Art. St. Paul offers palliative spiritual medicine. We are “stewards of the mystery of God…the requirement of a steward is to be faithful.”1

In another passage he instructs, “I planted, Apollos watered, God made it grow.”2 My calling is not to accomplish but to be faithful. The rest is cosmic organics.

Hi, I’m Chuck. I’m a Savioraholic. Perhaps you are in the circle with me. It’s time for another Savior resignation.

1. I Corinthians 4: 1, 2 / 2. I Corinthians 3:6