If the Catholics are right about St. Peter himself being given the keys to the kingdom and headship over the church, it seems to me it wasn’t because of his brilliant confession of Jesus being the Christ or because Jesus spotted some undiscovered potential in him as if he were an unhewn rock (pun intended). It seems to me he was simply the most accessible disciple. The most like us. And whom would you rather have standing at the gates of heaven than someone who knows what it’s like to be someone like you.

Lord, what about him? Peter says. He looks at the disciple whom Jesus loved, the one we figure was the figure behind this gospel, the one who lived the longest legend holds, the one who reclined next to Jesus at the Last Supper looking suspiciously like Mary Magdalene—who knew? Lord, what about him? Is he going to go through all the things you say I am going to have to go through for your sake? Are you going to ask him three times if he loves you? It’s his turn, Lord, what about him? Is he also going to lose his capacity to clean himself up after he goes to the bathroom? Is he going to have someone leading him by the hand, taking his car keys away from him and taking him where he doesn’t want to go? Is he going to have a ministry as hard as mine? Is he going to have to suffer the indignities you say I must? Lord, what about him?

And you know what? You are spot on, dead right. When I do that, I have lost all perspective. And yet, I do that. I think, why the hell should he be so important? What the hell is wrong with this picture? Now, I said I think that, but I don’t say hell out loud, in my sermons at least, or maybe I’d never get what I envy.

There are other ways I do this; and you do it, too, don’t lie. John Fielder preached yesterday and wowed us with his charm and grace. He had about twelve stories and nine quotations and not a single note. Damn, I thought—again, I thought. Or my buddy Allen Walworth who sees things in the text I never see because he gets down closer to it as a biblical exegete, while I am the systematic theologian always soaring above it somehow. He builds a sermon with metaphors piled on top of metaphors, and by the time he’s through all I can say is It’s all Greek to me. Or I listen to my friend Glen Schmucker preach his guts out, because that’s where he always preaches from—his guts. He’s incredibly confessional, and I know I can hardly deign to tell you what’s going on down there with me because I am much more at home up there in my head. And I guess we all wish we had a voice like Joel Gregory.

This comparing thing is deadly to our ministries. You come here to the preaching practicum and maybe you hear someone preach a sermon and you say, Really wish I could do that? And you know you can’t, but in that very instant you must hear Jesus say to you, What is that to you?

What is that to you if someone has a better voice or better health or a better family or a better church or a better sphere of influence? What is that to you if you suffer more for Christ sake than someone else?

Christ doesn’t call all of us to serve him. He calls each of us. And each of us is unique.

In Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day, she tells us about how she is sitting in the grass, watching the world go by, her eyes wandering to this creature and that. And she starts to wonder, generally, grandly at first. Who made the world?she asks in the first line. Then she gets a little closer to things: Who made the swan, and the black bear. Who made the grasshopper? Then she narrows it even more: This grasshopper, I mean—/the one who has flung herself out of the grass,/ the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,/ who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—/who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes./ Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face./ Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

Once she has gotten specific, gotten to the matter of that one particular grasshopper that does not compare to any other grasshopper for the sake what it does in that body and in that grass and in that moment near to her, then she turns to herself. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is./ I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/ into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/ how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll though the fields, which is what I have been doing all day./

But even there I got it wrong, didn’t I? She doesn’t ask US what WE are planning to do with OUR lives? Christ doesn’t call all of us. He only calls each of us. And each of us is incomparable to any other. The onus is on me. The onus is on you. What do you plan to do? How will you account for the life that is only yours and nobody else’s?

And do you understand that it is a wild and precious life, yours? Precisely because you are you and not me, precisely because you are the one with the voice you can’t stand to listen to because it isn’t his voice, precisely because yours is the love life that will always be cloaked for fear of showing the loneliness of longing beneath the surface, precisely because you have life experiences that are as unique as the DNA your cells keep replicating only in you—precisely because you are you and you can only know in your bones that Christ talks to you, you and you alone must answer the call of Christ when he says to you, Follow me?

The marvelous movie, Stranger Than Fiction, flew under the radar and eluded the critics’ deeper take. Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a math wiz trapped in a life of numbers and routine. He counts his strokes every time he brushes his teeth, 72 times, 36 each way. He counts his steps as he crosses streets and depends upon his watch to order his days. He doesn’t know he is the living dead until something happens that leaves him dying to live. A woman novelist is writing a book about Harold. She knows him and doesn’t know she knows him. But as she types each word, he hears it being spoken by her voice in his head as if someone were narrating his every move. This voice disturbs his otherwise perfectly organized yet boring life. Everyone and anyone he tells of it tells him he is crazy, because crazy is what they call anyone and everyone who’s experiences cannot be compared to theirs. Not to spoil the movie for you, which you simply must see—but the glory of the movie reveals itself as Harold begins to accept that his particular story is a tragedy that he cannot escape. And once he accepts it, once he understands that there is a script that is his and only his, once he gets over the injustice of why he should have this fate and not someone else, once he stops asking, What about him? and starts seeing what he will do with his one wild and precious life, everything changes for good and for good.

And so it will for you when you learn to pay attention to the voice that narrates your one wild and precious life. Maybe it will for me too.