How to be (Un)Successful

Foreward by Tyler Staton, author of Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools and Searching For Enough

The Christian mystic Thomas Merton once said,

“If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men – you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while.”

I agree, and I think he missed something. Who am I to add to Merton? But here it goes anyway: if you write for God you will disrupt many men and women, but it’ll be the best kind of disruption, like being awakened by the bumps of a flight landing on the runway – it’s jarring for a moment, followed by the delightful surprise that you’ve reached your destination. That’s how I’d characterize Pete Portal’s writing – delightfully disrupting, jarring in a way that awakens me to my true destination.

Every summer, I make a pilgrimage back to the rural American South of my childhood, travelling highways to hug family members and reminisce about another year passed in a blur. Along those highway miles, I occasionally pass billboards or church signs reading, ‘Where Will You Spend Eternity?’ or the more aggressive, ‘Turn or Burn!’ These messages, a relic of a church era gone by everywhere in the modern West except the rural American South, hold within them a great irony. They do not make me think of Jesus but of the human authors behind the billboard message.

I count Pete Portal a friend. I’ve laughed with him over dinner, prayed with him through tears, listened to his most honest and unfiltered rants, and heard his vulnerable confessions, and he mine. I can tell you what he’d readily admit: he is not a perfect man with perfect motives. He is writing for God in spite of himself, fighting the urge with each strike of the key to write for humankind, making nothing more than noise, for a little while.

And because Pete is writing for God, I have only to issue a warning and an invitation as you embark on the journey through these pages.

I’m a ‘bad news first’ kind of guy, so we might as well start with the warning: the book you’re about to read – equal parts Hudson Taylor-esque missionary tales, Mary Karr confessional memoir and John the Baptist prophetic echo from the wilderness – is, like all words written for God, disruptive. But disruptive in a way that awakens you to the delight that you’ve been sleepily carried hundreds of miles nearer your soul’s true destination.

And, while framing it as bad news, I honestly believe that to be the highest compliment I could offer this (or any other) book. It reads not unlike the red-letter words of Jesus in the Gospels – ever-inspiring, deeply comforting and occasionally quite disrupting. But if you want to help anyone else in any real way, if you write to enliven the soul rather than massage the ego, you’re going to have to be all right with disruption, and Pete, whether vulnerably trembling or self-assured I don’t know, has made his peace with disruption and served it up to you and me right alongside the inspiration and comfort. And for that, I’m grateful as a reader, proud as his friend, and spurred on as his brother in the faith.

Do not read this book if you seek only to stay asleep, only to keep marching drowsily forward apart from any startling disruption. Because to crack this binding and peruse these pages is an exercise in disruption of the most delightful variety.

At this point, I’m guessing the bad news makes the good news evident: the disruption is the best part. Like an acquired taste you mature into as you inch towards adulthood, what is first bitter grows into delicacy for anyone serious about following Jesus over the long haul. Our souls acquire a taste for conviction and self-reflection, and a resilience to return to the narrow way we never tire of wandering from.

It seems to me that the very words of Jesus that disrupted most profoundly at first, for those who stay by him, revealed the most profound truths in the end.

Take, for instance, his words in John 6, after feeding the five thousand. ‘Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’ (John 6:53). With those few words, Jesus’ most popular moment became his undoing, by modern measures of success at least. Most of his followers left him, and even the Twelve, who stayed, did so in spite of the bitter aftertaste his disturbing words left in their mouths after such a satisfying lunch.

It was Peter who said it, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (John 6:68). Peter, and the eleven others, sure he and he alone could guide their souls, even if there were stretches of the journey that felt turbulent, welcomed the disruption. And so it was Peter and the others who sat with Jesus at the table we’ve never stopped gathering around, to receive the broken bread we continue to receive in remembrance of him, and listen to that same disruptive voice say, ‘Take and eat; this is my body’ (Matthew 26:26). The disruption satisfied their souls in a way that even the miraculous meal among the masses on the hillside couldn’t. And in the hours that followed, they watched Jesus lead the most (un)successful victory in human history.

So I guess you could browse the shelves at your local Christian bookstore. They’ll be full of words that are attempting to import the way of Jesus into the pursuits of success we’ve swallowed whole and think we can carry with us all the way to abundant life. Those books would certainly comfort and inspire you. They’ll probably make more noise than this one, to be honest… for a little while.

But this is not that.

This book will woo you, startle you and arrest you. It’ll provoke you, wrestle you to the ground, keep you up at night, widen your sleepy eyes and, at the end of it all, you’ll thank it for that. I did.