Not so remarkable.

I have met some remarkable people in my life. Mel Gibson, Rick Warren, the guy that played Rocky's Brother-In-Law, Rod Stewart, Keith Thibodeaux (Little Ricky from I Love Lucy), Miss India. Those are just some remarkable people I have met that you may have heard of.
Here are a couple of my favorite people that have also been among my favorite teachers: Dr. Jeffrey Sief, David Gibbons (Not the Watchmen Comic guy, the Pastor guy).
This blog post is about none of those people.

Just wanted to share a couple of things about someone I met in school named "J". He was not remarkable and I won't share his full name because some people may know exactly who he is.
The last I saw him, he was driving away from school in a taxi cab that he was piloting.

I used to do a work study at the V.A. hospital. For one semester, I worked in the personnel and director's office doing office stuff. I am pretty sure the director was a veteran because, when I shook his hand, I noticed he was missing a finger. It was probably chewed off by the viet cong in a fierce fire fight or was lost to a "hand" mine in Grenada.

The second semester, I asked to be assigned to the recreational therapy unit and spent my time learning to play dominoes with veterans of world war two and attending treatment meetings pretending I knew what sort of recreation would be best for veterans dying of cancer.

"J" was able, somehow, to wrangle a work study position at the same hospital changing dirty sheets and bed pans. Since we both ended school at the same time, had the same work hours and he saw me going to the same hospital as him, I ended up offering him a ride from campus and back, where we also both lived.

There was never a dull moment taking him there, and plenty of highlights. Like when we told him we were returning to Arizona and he guffawed loudly and wondered "who would want to go to that God-forsaken place?" Not God, I guess. Or how he insisted we listen to some radio station about some radical anti-abortion activists and would scream with glee when he heard of them chaining themselves to trash cans and the like.

On a particularly crazy day, we saw a man in some sort of uniform with a bucket and some little flowers. When "J" asked what that guy was doing (because I obviously knew, since I was driving), I told him they were probably trying to raise money for some cult. "J" then pointed at the man and shouted, "I CURSE YOU IN THE NAME OF JESUS!".

I appreciated his passion for the Lord, but I am not really sure he wants us to go around cursing people. Fig trees, maybe. I could be wrong. I am the same person that thought "J" should at least tell us thank you when we drove him all the way across Dallas in rush hour traffic to meet his friends at a concert. Apparently he and I didn't really agree about everything.