This Old Shirt I Wear

You see this photograph here? this old T-shirt? Notice the cracked lines in the print. The faded hue of what was once a royal blue. This is the kind of shirt that has been lived in, that has lived a life right alongside the one who bought her.

Though this shirt was lost in the basement of a friend of mine’s house for around two years, I’ve pretty much always been wearing it. I’m wearing it now. It’s actually to the point where I know I shouldn’t wear it in public, but if I had a wife she might even politely insist that I not wear it at home either. It is faded and stretched and ridiculous on me. It stretched as I gained weight through all of those years. It retains the shape of a body I left behind, a form that I’m still shedding.

I bought this shirt in a camp shop in January of 2000. It’s difficult to wrap my head around how different the world is from what it was then. I was a senior in high school. I was in love with Young Life, a ministry in the States that strongly resembles what we have created for university students in England and in other places of the world. Actually, I’m still in love with Young Life- or the spirit of it. When I think of it I sometimes get sort of teary eyed. It’s a little bit silly, but so are many things.

When I bought this shirt there were all kinds of lost coastlines in my horizons on those days, scores of sand under my feet that I would have to uncover due to lack of light and sound. Just a way to clamor along and hoping to the good Lord that I’d know who I was one day.

There was a wonderful guy who picked me up in one of those white, 15 passenger vans on the way to the mountains that weekend. His name was Mike Sweeney and he seemed amazing. He would be the boss for our work crew service experience of serving kids food for a weekend while they laughed and sang and heard stories that, for many of them, would change them in the ways that we all hope to be changed at some point in our lives. They would be altered, some of them. They would never be the same. The coastlines would become a little bit clearer, or so we all hope, no matter what we lack or what we don’t know.

Mike would go on to die of skin cancer way too soon. I met a guy named Les that weekend. Facebook tells me that he’s doing well. That weekend was a key moment, as all moments are key, that shaped who I would be, who I am today. It’s the reason why did what I did with university. Young Life, that weekend, that summer in Colorado at Frontier Ranch- all of these things- they were adding lines to the map of my future. Sketches of new coastlines. It’s why I’m in England now. It’s why, when someone I loved was going to camp this past year, that I memorized the names of all these kids that went along and prayed my heart out for their lives, for their days, for their dreams, for their love.

I had no idea, when I bought that shirt, what was about to happen. Here I am now, wearing this old shirt, wondering who I’ll know this year, wondering who I will meet in 2012. I wonder out loud now to myself what will change in me that will take me down new seas, sailing away, floating on and on to the new places of the Kingdom I want to chase with tenacity.

Because I will only live once. So I will have to take stock of my heart and weigh the contents: I will have to move and act on my convictions. I will need to, if I am any kind of man at all, if I follow any kind of Jesus at all, to decide who I am going to be. This is because we are always deciding who we are going to be. Are you going to be your dad? Will I be my mother? Will I be the one true Jason Tatum that was imagined in the heart of God at the dawn of creation? We get to pick this each day. You get to decide now, at the age of 22 or 92. If I know something to be true, can I be complicit in turning away? Can I have a blind eye, with this one life I get to have? And some say that it’s the end of the world. This time next year we might be gone. Is that ridiculous? Maybe it is. Probably it is. But there are many things in this world that don’t make sense.

So let me live. You can bet that I’m going to tell the people that I love how I feel about them. You can bet that I am going to go back through the years since I bought this old shirt and I’m going to take stock. I’m going to write letters far and wide. I once wrote some amazing amount of words that all went in one direction. Now I’ll spread them like ashes at a wake. And I’m going to chart my sails in the direction of stars I haven’t even heard of yet, blinking dreams that I can only feel, if not yet see.

I asked her one time if she thought that her life was a story that she kept writing in her mind. She told me that it was. All the time. I knew that it was. It would only be a handful of hours and I would never see her again. Funny how it goes.

Funny how so much of the past 12 years have been a trail of growing, changing, gaining weight and running until it felt like my heart might explode. Funny how those loves come and go as we spin on our little axis. These stories that we keep writing and rewriting, hoping to know what love is, hoping to know what it means to lay down our lives for someone or something that is way bigger than our own little shell of atoms and water and blood swirling around down this paved earth.

If I love you, I’m going tell you. We only have one life. Until the threads of this old shirt unravel from my old body, I will tell you. We’re far apart you and I. We are long down the coastlines from one another, but we would take care to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re both still staring out at the same salty old sea. We have the same future, in the end. I will find each of you and embrace you while I still can, while my legs will carry us through these rough and constant moon-drawn tides.