If, upon entering this restaurant, you asked someone to pick out the preacher from among the patrons sitting in Guero's expansive lobby, they would be hard-pressed to pick him out. The man known as Real Live Preacher is--and if you've even glanced at his website, you would suspect this--not the archetypal image of a Texas minister. He's a guy in his early forties wearing a navy-blue tee shirt and rimless glasses. He looks like a college professor. The only hint of his true vocation is the deep compassion you find in his eyes and his welcoming smile. This is a person who is awake to the world in all its joys and pains, its simple truths and complex ironies. 

We order beers and talk about daughters. Men with daughters have a nearly infinite store of things to say about it. There is something almost elegiacal in this kind of talk, as though my three-year-old and her infant sister have already grown up and moved to the dark side of the moon and I'm left with nothing but a handful of photographs and scattered memories. Men can really open up about daughters; they are the causes of our sharpest joys and pains, our deepest concern next to God. 

Real Live Preacher is as candid, as open in person as he is on the page. He claims that "Real Live Preacher" is a character that is somehow separate from him. "It just sort of got away from me," he says, shrugging. Whatever the differences are, however, they are minimal. He doesn't say "fuck" as much in person as he does on the web (I do, if not moreso), but that's about the only difference I could glean. Here is a person with whom you feel like you could discuss anything at all and not be judged; this is a rare commodity. We manage to discuss everything from bathing a little girl's private parts to the awkwardness of male friendship over a ten minute span.

When we order, I choose the mole enchiladas. Mole is a rich brown mexican sauce made with chocolate--it has a fairly unique flavor. RLP has never tried it. "Hey," he says, "would you mind if I tried a little bite of it?" And when the food comes, he does, finding a clean spoon and digging in. There is something utterly winning about this, both in the way it is asked and the way it is done. How many of us would ask someone whom they've never actually met in person to try a bite of their entree? I don't mind, of course, and he is probably aware of this before he asks. This is the best example I can give of the combination of direct straightforwardness and canny subtlety that is Real Live Preacher.

He says something that gives me pause. Because I am on this path that could well land me in a life as a minister myself, I'm concerned about how I'll be perceived by the outside, secular world. "When I tell people that I'm a preacher," he says, "the reaction can be pretty funny sometimes. People always react to it. The thing I've learned is that it's a waste of time to try and change their minds about who you are. You can say, 'Oh, but I'm not one of those Christians. I'm smart; I have a brain.' There's no point. Let them think I'm crazy, or stupid. Let them think what they want. You have to get over this need to convince people of who you are." This, to someone who has spent his entire life trying to convince people that he is one thing or another is both a grave condemnation and the key to a prison. It occurs to me, maybe for the first time, that you can simply be who you are and people will love you anyway.

Listening to Real Live Preacher talk about the impact of his website and his impending book release, he appears to be genuinely baffled by the attention. He claims never to have thought of himself as a writer, and refers to himself as the "Mister Rogers" of Salon.com. I think it's a pretty apt comparison, actually. In the world of children's television programming, Mister Rogers was someone you felt like you could trust. He was the one guy who would tell it to kids just like it was without any sugar coating. Life can be a real bitch, Fred Rogers told us, but it's okay because love is bigger than that. I think Real Live Preacher has the same effect on his readers: he tells it like it is. It's not always pretty, not always funny or cute, and there's not always a moral, but whatever else it is, you feel like you can trust it. And that's worth something. Quite a lot, actually.

When it comes to talk of me and of my vocation, I struggle and stumble for words. I try to explain the weird place that I'm in, trying to figure out what I want to do, what God wants me to do, what path is right for me. I blurt out all the difficulties that I'm having with my new job and with the denomination (you'd think that I detest the United Methodist Church if you'd been a fly on the wall--I don't, not really). Instead of just nodding serenely or telling me to grow up and get a life, he does something that I don't expect: he has the audacity to tell me that the struggle is the best possible thing I could be going through right now. One of the things I've learned about the Truths of life with a capital "T" is that when someone imparts one to you when you need to hear it, you are torn between the desire to give them a hug and the desire to throttle them with your bare hands. This is one of those moments.

I don't know too much about anything; I really don't. I'm a rank amateur when it comes to just about every aspect of life, and I say this not out of false modesty but as a result of much soul-searching and contemplation. But what I do know is this: some of the most valuable things that you will ever experience will happen when you're sitting at a table in a Mexican restaurant, noshing on leftover tortilla chips and draining the last ounce of beer from the bottle. These moments, when two or more people are gathered in the name of What Matters, are when we as people find ourselves at our most open and at our best. Meeting someone that you can really, really talk to, who's just as interested in the history of the early church and New Testament exegesis as you are, who loves his kids with the exact same passion that you do, who is afraid of things and confused by things and amazed by things just as you are, this is one of the great blessings in life. My marriage, thank God, has been just such a conversation, though spread out over the years. Friendship, like marriage, like parenthood does more than simply give us a moment's pleasure; it helps remind us who we are.

Emerson said, "Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed." What a pauper who believes in neither--how rich the one who believes in both!