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A few words of introduction from me:

So happy to welcome Jonathan Martin here today! If you ever see me out walking at Mill Lake with my headphones on, crying and praising Jesus, it’s a good bet that I’m listening to one of his sermons. One reason why I love Jonathan’s style is that he’s an unapologetic Pentecostal Holy Spirit guy, but brings nuance and wisdom, deep theological insights and education, thoughtfulness and critical thinking to that history. He’s a good rep for us crazy mystics. He sent me an advance copy of his book, Prototype, and I loved it because it gave me language for some of the work God did in me about five or six years ago. I was pretty firmly in a desert season of my life, particularly in my relationship with the Church, and the work of God in me looked a lot like the words in Jonathan’s book. It gave me a bit of a turn to see some of that same language or ideas in his chapters, but there it was, I guess that’s a Holy Spirit thing. Good stuff happens in obscurity. And you’re more like Jesus than you think. And you are beloved. Just knowing – really knowing, resting, abiding in that identity – that will change everything, I promise. This profound and accessible book is a good work, and I recommend it to you whole-heartedly.

And now, here is Jonathan’s post:

I am perhaps irrationally excited about doing a guest post here today, because I am unabashedly a fan of Sarah Bessey. I love her heart, her graceful style, her elegant prose. Because she is not only graceful but gracious, she asked me to write something in conjunction with my first book Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You’re More Like Jesus Than You Think?, which releases today. (If nothing else, perhaps it is a way you might bide the time along with me as we all eagerly await the release of Jesus Feminist, which I sincerely cannot wait to read.)

I wanted to share an exclusive excerpt with you with a brief story behind it. For me, Prototype is a tender, vulnerable book. While it is not a memoir per se, it is deeply personal. I knew that if I wanted it to work at all, it was going to have to be a fragile, delicate thing that was all heart and soul. That is an extraordinarily challenging thing to sustain.

When I was writing the Resurrection chapter, which I suppose is the most meaningful in the book for me, I felt like I had moved just above that fragile honest place where the Spirit is welcome and grace comes easy. I think I was writing with too much confidence and not enough ache. So I went to bed having completed the chapter, only to have a dream about the people and places that were most dear to me. There was a lot of longing caught up in that dream. When I woke up the next morning, I deleted the whole chapter and started over, and wrote from that place. Whether or not any of it works, I do feel like the final resurrection chapter is the most pure, honest expression of my heart in the book.

This is what I wrote that morning, my heart still raw from the dream:

“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” - BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN,“ATLANTIC CITY”

As I often do, I woke up this morning from a dream about the house my grandmother lived in. My grandparents retired in the 1970s and moved to the old Church of God campground in Charlotte, North Carolina, where our denomination’s state office was. It was the site of the tabernacle where we had our sweaty Pentecostal camp meetings every July (these were like weeklong revivals where all our churches got together). As far as I was concerned, it was the center of the entire universe. It was where I went to Bible camp in the summer. It was where I had all my first experiences, from the Holy Ghost to my first kiss (not necessarily in that order).

It was an enormous, sprawling property, with houses all around the perimeter that were built for aging Church of God preachers to retire to. My grandfather was one of those preachers. He was a hard man who grew up in Charlotte and later became a police officer. When he met the beautiful Nellie Edwards, he knew he had to have her as his own. But she would hear nothing of it.

“I don’t date sinner boys,” she told him.

That’s how S. D. Martin ended up in an old-time holiness revival service at the Parkwood Church of God. And sure enough, he got saved, sanctified, and full of the Holy Ghost. A few weeks later, he turned in his badge and gun, telling his captain that God called him to preach—though he hadn’t booked a single revival yet. That’s how S. D. and Nellie became “Brother and Sister Martin” and ended up pastoring in rural North Carolina churches in places like Rutherfordton and Shelby. God was the one who did all the saving, mind you, but it’s no surprise that Nellie was more or less the reason a man like S. D. would be willing to change the course of his entire life; she was just that strong of a woman. Years later when they retired, they settled into a nice little house at the back of the Church of God campground overlooking the big pond.

My earliest memory in life is of my grandfather walking me down to that pond, where he used to fish. I remember my mom being upset because I was wearing new white shoes she had bought me and I got mud on them. A few days later, Grandpa died of a heart attack on that very property, working in his garden behind the house.

With Grandpa gone, I spent most of my summers alone with my grandmother at that house. This predates the boy on the bike. Everything about that place was magical to me. We watched The Price Is Right every day and then played Scrabble. She made Tang and fried cornbread. I can remember everything about her and the house and her little poodle, Fiji.

I have had many wonderful people in my life, but nobody like my grandmother—the way she loved me and the way she talked about Jesus and taught me about life. When my dad was preaching in different churches on the weekends, she would come with us when she could, and they always asked Sister Martin to testify. Whether or not the service was going well before that, it caught fire when she spoke, because there was an electricity and a tremble in her voice that said this was a woman who knew God in ways the rest of us just didn’t. Anybody who ever heard her testify or preach will tell you the same thing—that the hairs on the back of their neck stood up when she talked about Jesus. She was the most tender, genuine person I have ever known. There was no way I could not have believed in God, because I believed in my grandmother. I couldn’t have made sense of her if her God didn’t exist. It’s as simple as that.

Today those old grounds look like the perfect set for a horror movie. Everything is overgrown, and though the big building that housed the tabernacle still stands, much of it collapsed in a fire years ago. Every so often I sneak under the fence, trespass onto the grounds, and walk through the sacred sites now covered with graffiti and littered with drug paraphernalia. The only way I can ever really go back is in my dreams. They are all different and yet they are all the same. This morning, I woke up dreaming I was carrying my goddaughter up the hill to show her the pond, but we couldn’t get through because the road was too overgrown. She was wearing white shoes too. I have had these dreams since my grandmother died, always either going back to the house or trying to get back to it.

And why wouldn’t I want to go back? I don’t write about wounds and limping and heartache as a dispassionate bystander. I’ve lived long enough to have scars of my own, long enough to be disappointed with life, and long enough most of all to be disappointed with myself. Who wouldn’t want to go back? That urban jungle of overgrowth on Wilkinson Boulevard was the Garden of Eden to me. It’s where I walked with God naked and unashamed. I love Jesus on His own terms, I suppose, but in a sense He’s always been my grandmother’s Jesus, and that’s the only one I’d care to know. What would I know about Him without her? She drew me to Him no less than she drew S. D. in the 1920s.

I think most of what you need to know about how life with God works is probably wrapped up in the bittersweet taste of dreams. All that longing and aching for something beautiful that is just out of reach. Sometimes you can touch it and sometimes you can’t. Everything in you that longs for beauty and music comes alive in those dreams, and for a moment you are the you that once was, before wounds and scars and choices and consequences and disappointment took their toll. You can practically taste the innocence and wonder before you knew too much, saw too much, felt too much. By the time you grasp for it, you wake up to the world that has long since moved on. Not that the world as it is doesn’t have beauty of its own, but how could it compare to the life you had before your scars? For a moment, you thought you could go back, but there is no going back. People die, hopes and dreams die, and weeds grow where wonder once lived. These days, bicycles and trampolines aren’t time machines so much.

What is done is done, what is lost is lost.

Unless . . . what if it were still possible to go back?

What if death really wasn’t the final word on the people we love the most? What if cancer and car accidents and closed caskets weren’t the end after all? What if instead of being snatched out of the dream while our hands are still grasping, it were possible to actually reach out and touch those people again? Not to just imagine their touch or remember their voice, but to actually touch them and trace the lines on their face, feel the hair on their arms, feel their hot and living breath on your skin?

If you’re like me, to even think of such a thing stirs an ache and longing deep enough to make you double over if you entertain it for long. But of course such a thing is impossible. Isn’t that what makes death so terrible—the finality of it? Isn’t that what makes it so awful? It’s the thing that can’t ever be undone. There is nothing as terrible as death.

Which is why for death to be undone, it would take something more terrible still.

Jonathan Martin leads the liars, dreamers, and misfits of Renovatus: A Church for People Under Renovation, in Charlotte, NC, where he lives with his wife Amanda. He is the author of the forthcoming Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You’re More Like Jesus Than You Think? from Tyndale House (2013). He’s a product of the “Christ-haunted landscape” of the American South, sweaty revivals, and hip-hop. He holds degrees from Gardner-Webb University, The Pentecostal Theological Seminary, and Duke University Divinity School. His main claim to fame was getting his Aquaman, Robin and Wonder Woman action figures saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost at an early age. He hates the sound of his voice except for the times when he loves it. When he is talking it’s mostly about the beauty of God, what an extraordinary thing it is for you to be called God’s beloved, and finding new ways to be human. He is unafraid to be seen walking his small dog Cybil and evidently of speaking of himself in the third person.