Frustrated Incorporated

Ladies and Gentlemen. I come to you this morning very tired and in need of sleep, but I have awoken this morning before 8 am in the morning on Sunday which is extremely unhealthy, just to call a black friend of mine and ask him when his church meets, hoping it was at 9 or 10 in the morning, so I could visit it.

Unfortunately, my friend explained the the church he preaches at only has worship meetings one Sunday morning every other month. Apparently he is trying to phase a church into regular every week meetings. Since I am very tired I could be getting the dates wrong and maybe they meet more than once every month, but that was the gist of it. He is hopelessly charismatic and incorporates the mannerisms and ideals into his everyday life where I have never really seen him without a suit and top hat or being at anything but a super enthusiastic level of excitement about virtually everything. He probably feels that the Lord would never have him express a negative emotion.

I felt I had to call him in order to get a monkey off my back because I just met him for lunch the previous Friday, after he had been pestering me for weeks to meet without saying what he wanted to meet for, and we don't have enough of a relationship that I can assume we're just meeting to be friends and hang out or "catch up".

I had gone to a Tex-Mex restaurant with him for lunch with him after some persuasion (he just wanted to meet at a coffee place it sounded like) and I made him laugh for most of our time there. Eventually he busted out the big guns like he knew he would and asked me for volunteer help at his church. I had been trying to avoid him for some weeks because I knew that the reason he was asking me to meet was that he wanted help in some fashion with his church and I didn't like the way that he was making a pretense of wanting to be friends only for the purpose of church business.

That kind of business model always leaves an icky taste in my mouth but church planter seemed so enthusiastic, and sincere that I didn't want to hurt his feelings so it was tricky. He would call repeatedly on one days notice to meet at the Empire State building and fortunately for me work or an engagement with a much better friend would come up and I would have to cancel or not return a call and I would get repeated messages on my phone from him about this about how I had forgotten to return his call and I might be avoided in the future but that I was forgiven.

I was bewildered that this guy didn't realize that we didn't have the relationship necessary to talk like that to each other. It was highly inappropriate but I'm not the best person at explaining that to other people since I am usually the inappropriate one.

After our lunch meeting he called repeatedly and left several messages on my phone the next morning. When I finally returned his call he said he had forgotten to mention something at our meeting and wondered if we could meet again to talk about it. I was exasperated, thinking I had gotten my lunch engagement out of the way with this guy and was now free of him again for a little while so I told him that we just met and anything he had to talk about he could break over the phone.

So with a heavy heart he explained that he wanted me to sign for the opening of a new bank account for his church, and that this was a position of trust and responsibility. I was blown out of orbit by this request and didn't know how to respond to it over the phone and I may have to meet him in person to explain how inappropriate it is and how I can't possibly be tied up with any financial or otherwise responsibility to a church that I have never attended based on the description of it by someone that I have not known for that long.

So tomorrow we're meeting at the Empire State building where he always wants to meet for some reason. I suspect its because he doesn't get out much and doesn't know too many places in the city. Then he suggested we could walk to Starbucks at 1:00. I explained to him that man cannot live on coffee alone and he just laughed.

So we shall see how reacts when I break the sad news to him that I am just not on board with his crazy scheme.