Bill's Pizza

Hello Everyone, sorry it’s been a couple of months since I’ve written, no excuse, just didn’t get to it. Also, please forgive any typos below, kind of in a hurry tonight.

Anyway, when I was 13 my Mom’s friend, Marian Weise got me a job at Bill’s Pizza in Manasquan, NJ, which was right on the beach. When I say ‘on the beach’ I don’t mean across the street from the beach, I mean like right on the sand, where the sand meets the mainland. I loved working there, selling pizza slices to the tourists who were mostly from ‘up north’ or 40 miles away from North Jersey and NYC with their obnoxious accents and sometimes attitudes. It was an open air store front, so to lock it up at night you just had to pull a garage door down, and lock it. Simple.  Fun job, but my favorite days  were the rainy stormy ones, where there was nothing to do but eat the pizza, subs and ice cream, and chew the fat with the co-workers. The storms were violent, but I loved the feeling of being impervious to the weather, so the more violent the better, like a movie with the lightning, wind, and the few humans that were  idiotic enough to tempt Zeus. 

To this day, I still love walking in the rain, as long as I have my awesome raincoat, since that impervious feeling comes back, go ahead and rain, I don’t care, even though I am IN the storm, I am unaffected, even comfortable, my  awesome raincoat  ‘hides’ me from the rain, just like the Bill’s Pizza storefront hid me from the storms.  It reminds me of what it is like to be in Christ, not matter what happens nothing can really hurt me since as it says in Colossians 3 that I am already dead, yet risen with Christ.  Here it is, “for ye died, and your life is HID, with Christ, in God.  So when I became a Christian, Bill died, and now has a new life where Christ lives through him. That is one thing about dead people, you can’t hurt them.  They are also free since they don’t care what people think about them  See, lots of benefits. I even have dead facebook friends, two of them, Gene Camarata and Paul Brown, you can look them up.  (They should have a special section for dead Facebook people) See, Facebook tracks and knows lots of things about people, but they don’t track when they died, so the profile persists after their death. Nobody can really close the fb account since they have to find the password, but can’t since that was taken to the grave along with who knows what else.  When I die I’m going to pre-instruct my daughter to continue posting stuff on my behalf, posts that I will pre-supply  to her now while I’m alive, but they will look like they are coming from a dead and risen man. See, I still want some fun here even after I am there.

Ok, back to the point. Since I have died and should no longer be afraid of anything, I should be outgoing in sharing the gospel . It is my opinion that most Christians never share the gospel out of fear of rejection, and some even fear people even if they don’t share the gospel. They are simply afraid of putting themselves out there due to past rejection or whatever.  God has helped me a great deal here in that He has shown me that it is not my job to convert people to Christianity, or intellectually arm-wrestle them into the church but that it IS my job to share what I know of Christ. And really, that is all Jesus did, except walking on the water and raising the dead helped a bit as well.  The recipients can reject it or accept it, but over time they WILL do one or the other, and the Holy Spirit will influence them to the latter, cutting right through the pretense, pride, past or whatever wall stands in the way. I am incapable of that anyway so that is why I just leave it to the Holy Spirit. SOOOOO much easier, and takes the tension out of the whole situation.  

The other thing I have learned is that many people WANT to know more about Christ, but don’t know whom to approach. I have heard this from a couple people whom I have been introduced to through the Helps ministry, and they approached ME, not because we helped them, but they had heard about us helping others. This made them curious, and brought them out of the woodwork so to speak.  I was speaking with one such individual this morning who had visited our church awhile back, ands he said that while the church people were friendly she expected someone to offer her more, like an ongoing friendship, maybe an invitation to lunch to discuss God, or something. Hmmm, that spoke to me. Wow, people coming to church to develop Christian friendship, imagine that. So the lesson here is that some may come for worship, some may come for the sermon, but SOME may come for the depth of relationship they hope to find with other Christians. Good lessons for me to learn. Don’t be afraid, don’t be shy at church, don’t be withdrawn out of insecurity or really anything, be outward not inward, overcome that lazy pew sitting funk you always seem to get into because you didn’t get enough sleep on Saturday night, look for opportunities to share, put away the fear, and yes they probably want more than a smile and a handshake.  I guess I do too.  Tomorrow I will try to remember the words of whoever wrote this in  Hebrews 13:6,””  So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?””

/Bill