By Joe Steinke

From the Series: Stories from The Meekness Training Files

I grew up with the privilege of being aware of the love of God in Jesus Christ that felt natural, familiar and available, being nurtured in the overflowing joy and encouragement of my mother and the gentleness and kindness of my father. I didn’t realize how unique this was until I came of age when I visited other people’s homes and sensed the dissonance in the room due to the awkwardness of my friend’s parents, who were in a struggle to survive the onslaught of life’s responsibilities without a sense of help from God. What was fluent in our family’s daily conversation was like a foreign language to others. Yet, I never mentioned it to anyone, just felt it, and took to heart the rare space we occupied together. If I would’ve known how to name it back then, I would have used words like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and even fun to describe the culture we lived in. 

Now, that is a pretty glowing picture I’ve just held up to you about our family’s way of being with one another in God’s good care. But, it was sustained in the environment of the presence of God, as we often worshiped and prayed together along with a parade of others who wandered into the great room at our Barn Lumber House. We hosted a colorful cast of characters from the Jesus People Movement with their young families as they passed through en route to settling down somewhere on their way to figure out how to live out their new life in Christ after the tumult of the 1960’s and 70’s. We also hosted a Wednesday Night Fellowship that was a safe place for 50-100 people to land weekly. It was in this setting and in this season that I experienced; My Baptism Into Meekness Training.  

I was seventeen years old with two years of noodling around on the guitar in hand and had written, in the secret place of my bedroom, an album’s worth of devotional songs inspired from the Psalms. I was leading the Wednesday Night Fellowship meeting with some friends who had an encounter with Jesus alongside me and we were the ones entrusted with guiding a youth revival that landed in our great room from our high school.  Every week, 70-90 kids piled into our house, body to body, legs hanging over the balcony, camped on the kitchen counters, and scattered around the dining room table to sing, to pray, to listen to my dad give a quick teaching from the Scriptures, and it was amazing. And me and my team, we were so cool. 

My parents were some of the ones who in their I Found Jesus experience, got imprinted by a generous welcome into the family of God, taken in by a loving group of believers who modeled what true Christian hospitality is. So, we grew up with a mantra we heard quite often – Everything belongs to God and we’re just stewards of it along the way. They also had an open door policy that welcomed anyone to come hang out for a day or a year, whatever they needed to get their life back on track or just find a safe place to heal for a time. These wandering souls became our roommates, housemates and what my dad would call – The Daily’s.  

Enter the scene of the Wednesday Night Fellowship, the unforgettable Daily – Jeff. 

Jeff came to us as a thirtysomething misfit from somewhere he never felt like he belonged but now found a home with us weekly on Wednesdays. Back then, they didn’t diagnose like we do now, but he would have landed somewhere on a spectrum of some sort for sure. He came in the same clothes every week – black pants, black dress shoes and socks and a white short sleeve shirt adorned with a pocket protector with pens and a mechanical pencil, smelling and looking like he hadn’t showered in weeks. Jeff was a guitar player whose particular style was to chunk-a-chunk chords on his nylon string classical guitar, which he brought with him faithfully to do a pre-meeting singalong with any of the songs from our groovy songbook which he had memorized. He was like a live Karaoke machine taking requests from anyone who had the kind grace to accommodate him “sharing his gift”. 

I think you can sense where this might stage a Meekness Training baptism opportunity for me as a teenager who had written my own songs that were so cool and original and needed to be shared with our great room audience of teens, if not the world. 

On an off day from Wednesday and the Daily’s, I approached my dad, after his long day of teaching and coaching, knowing I’d have a listening audience with him, with a real concern for the ministry me and my friends were leading. 

Dad, I don’t know what to do about Jeff. He smells, he takes over the room with his chunk-a-chunk-sing-a-long before we start, and seems to need a lot of attention to make him feel good. It’s embarrassing and I think it will keep some kids from coming to Wednesday Night. We can’t afford to have him become a weird thing that makes people feel uncomfortable. 

My dad, perhaps not knowing that he would be a giant of a man, leaving huge footprints in the ground of my being that would shape me for the rest of my life, said something like this; 

Joey, Jeff is coming here because he has nowhere else he is welcomed and loved. He thinks he has a gift to share. Why don’t you, before you lead worship, invite Jeff to lead 2 songs from the songbook. Celebrate him. Honor his gift. Enthusiastically join in and sing. And thank him for sharing his gift with us. 

Of course, this is where my dad…Drops the Mic! 

And this, of course, is where I drop to my knees, and have my first orientation to Meekness Training.  

So, the next Wednesday night Fellowship Meeting, guess what I did? I introduced Jeff, opened up the songbook Karaoke request line, and he chunk-a-chunked out 2 songs that sent my cringe-o-meter into the red, but humbled my heart into a beautiful submission of valuing everyone as God does. I clapped and sang and smiled, and so did everyone else. And I got baptized into the Holy Spirit’s Meekness Training School for life. 

As if this wasn’t enough to check my teenage ego at the door and sit me on a big Time Out, during the same year at high school, my hall locker became the safe place for all of the special needs (or as they are referred to now – additional needs) students that somehow found their way to me in between classes. The 5-minute transition bell would ring, and I’d be standing at my locker with a Down Syndrome mainstreamed someone or some other high maintenance character in the tragic-comedy of life that just needed to be acknowledged as a valuable human person…and somehow, I was awake and available to them. Fortunately, my dad was the history teacher at my high school, so I’d walk down to his room and say; Hey dad, had some visitors at my locker again. Can you write me a hall pass to get me to my next class? He always did. And my teachers never questioned it. I’d like to imagine now that there was some secret understanding among adults that whoever takes time to value and be present to the people who have no place to go other than the locker where they feel seen and loved, they get a free hall pass to wherever they’re going next. 

Celebrating Jeff…being late for class…this is how you get baptized into Meekness Training as a teenager. It does something to you. Soon after, as a sophomore in college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I got a part-time job as an events director at a care home for special needs adults on the weekends in the charming town of Stoughton, WI. Lenny, Will, Gracie, Harm, Jimmy, and Joyce became my weekend buddies. We’d often walk down Main Street after playing a round of Slap Jack to enjoy the thriving metropolis of downtown Stoughton.

One day, we were strolling down the sidewalk like a mother goose with her goslings in tow, and an Orange Dodge Charger rolled up alongside me and my trailing gaggle of God’s special ones. The young driver rolls down his window, flips me off and squeals out a burner shouting F@#$ You- You fairy!  There was a moment when I felt like I was going to shat my pants from the shockwave that went through my body, and I wanted to flip him off and shout that exact same bombastic blast, boomeranging it right back at this ignorant little “BLEEP”,  but my Meekness Training kicked into turbo drive. I took a deep breath, and then strolled into town, offered up a simple prayer of blessing to the juvenile driving that hot car, stopped in at the Coffee Cup for a lil’ bite and cup with the brood, and proceeded to cross the street where Lenny wet his pants in the middle of the road saying: Whoops…Coffee Cup on your head…Coffee Cup on your head. 

And you add another story to The Meekness Training Files. 

In my Junior year of college, I moved into a house on Bedford Street with 4 other friends who were all musicians. We spent evenings jamming and writing songs together. We were all in that Sold Out and Surrendered to Jesus season, where you imagine doing things that are extraordinary for God. After a jam session, we were talking about how we might take our music to the street and see if it invited an opportunity to share Jesus with all those lost people out there. Mike, the older member of the house, who lived like a modern monk, drove an army green VW Bug and played the cello,  humbly asked; 

What if we take our music to the least of these, the ones who nobody cares about? We could go sing to them and their caregivers as a blessing in the name of Jesus. 

For the next year, while we lived together, most every Wednesday night, we packed our instruments into my orange Buick station wagon and Mike’s army green VW Bug, and headed to Central Colony, a coldly named place that the state built to serve highly dysfunctional children, sent there from families who could not provide the kind of care they needed. It was like visiting the Island of Misfit Toys, and little did they know how they were about to save our twentysomething souls. We sang 3 song sets to each of the wings, while hydrocephalic children moaned and careened in their cribs, and deformed dysfunctional bodies found themselves dancing with their caregivers on the institutional blue carpet being held hand in hand or finger to finger. We’d stagger home from our midweek brawl with suffering and existential angst, sensing something holy among us. And if we could have named it,  we might have called it – Meekness Training. 

Q? What are some of your own stories from your Meekness Training Files? 

Perhaps share them with someone who can bear witness to these formative times or experiences in your leadership development journey. These are the kinds of things that a spiritual director would help you reflect on and see how these might have shaped you into the kind of ministry leader you are today. If you’d like to have a conversation with us to explore what this might look like, please contact us and we will follow up with you. Contact us here: Soul of the Shepherd.

To read Chapter 2 in this series, click here.