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| AP Photo/Odessa American/Heather Leiphart |
Three years ago, my world fell apart. And then
GQ showed up. ESPN followed. HBO called. They all wanted me to serve as a
source for a story, one so confounding and intriguing that it garnered
nationwide attention. I was a character
in the story, a bit player that entered in obscurity but ended up right in the
heart of the climax. As my reality morphed into fiction, I was speechless. How could this be my life?
I was
ill-equipped for the tabloid I felt trapped in. I gave a few statements here
and there, most frequently when I was caught by a reporter who got my cell
phone number or when someone showed up unannounced at my office. Anytime that
happened, I regretted it, especially when I saw the end-product. I received a
piece of hate mail after my first appearance in the papers.There was a touch of sensationalism in everything…and I struggled to reconcile what the world was saying with what I had lived. Ripple effects would be felt by many.
I developed coping mechanisms
– don’t speak to the media, distance yourself from those who do, keep your eyes
ahead, don’t listen to what others say, don’t care. But at night, when I was
all alone, I cried. Behind all the labels, there was a person. Behind all the
headlines, there was the truth. I wanted to believe I knew both of those
things.
When I met him, he was introduced to me as Jerry. He was an
incoming sophomore at Permian High School and he met some of my students
through basketball. He was soft-spoken and respectful and showed an interest in
spiritual things. He came regularly on Sunday mornings and occasionally on a
Wednesday night for the better part of a year. I learned bits and pieces of his
story, told to me by students, parents and Jerry himself. There were some
substantial gaps in his life, but it was understandable given all that he told
us he’d been through – orphaned in
Haiti, immigrated to the US, bounced between relatives and older siblings until
somehow, he had ended up in West Texas.
It seemed an unlikely place to start a life, but he had an older brother
who was playing ball at the local university and Jerry had tagged along. He had
lived undetected in the dorms until his brother enrolled him in school and he
had eventually been taken in by Coach Wright, the high school basketball coach.
It wasn’t the first time that the coach had helped out kids who needed a place
to stay and it didn’t seem that unusual to those who knew about it. Odessa is a
community where people care about other people and I know a dozen people who
would have done the same thing if they had crossed paths with Jerry. Soon, the town knew him - he adjusted well at school, made a lot of
friends, started playing on the varsity basketball team. He wasn’t the star,
but he was good and people talked about what potential he had.
Jerry also became a fixture at church. He wanted to be
baptized, to show publicly the commitment he had made to follow Christ. He
became part of our faith family, so much so that an elderly couple “adopted”
him and lovingly called them their grandson. He carried his own Bible and
listened intently during Bible study. It was apparent that he wanted to know more,
grow more and be more.
It was shaping up to be a sweet, feel-good story until the
spring of 2010. That was when Jerry was arrested at Permian High School and we
were told -
He wasn’t an orphan.
He wasn’t a teenager.
He wasn’t Jerry Joseph.
His name was Guerdwich Montimere. He was 22. His mom lived in Florida. He had graduated
from high school years ago. The "brother" he followed to Odessa was actually a former teammate from his high school basketball team. He had lied. But had his lies made our lives one
too?
When something you believe to be true is found to be false,
it shakes your confidence. If you were wrong about
that, then what else have you missed?
There were people who said that Odessa would do whatever it
took to win in sports and we were reminded again of the Friday Night Lights shadow that Permian High School and our
community still lives under. It was a shadow that threatened to engulf Coach
Wright and his basketball program. Even after an investigation cleared Jerry’s
coach and guardian of any wrongdoing and the basketball team forfeited their
entire season, there were still whispered conspiracy theories.
Then there were people who snickered about Jerry’s church
attendance, saying that, of course, a liar could go undetected in the midst of more liars. There was
outrage that he had been among teenagers, a
wolf in sheep’s clothing, the accusation went. Obviously, Christians were
gullible and foolish to fall for the lost teenager act and “hypocrite”
was applied with reckless abandon.
The question, “How
could they not have known?” was most often spoken about, not to the
school, the Wrights and the church. There was an unspoken accusation that we had
all been enablers in this scam. We had allowed Jerry Joseph to live
the charade and even become participants in it…or had we?
Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not
believe, and who it was that would betray Him…So Jesus said to the twelve, “You do not want to go away also, do you?” Simon
Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.
We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.” Jesus
answered them, “Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?” Now He
meant Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to
betray Him. – John
6:64, 67-71
Jesus knew His fair share of impostors, even going so far as
to allow one into His inner circle. He saw the deceit in Judas and knew how that deceit would end and He let him
in anyway. Others’ duplicity did not alter His consistency. He lived, He
taught, He served, He loved…He was constant in the midst of chaos.
I want to believe that I would been just like that if I had
known all along that Jerry Joseph was Guerdwich Montimere, but I know myself. Being
deceived is hurtful, angering, embarrassing. When hurt, I hurt back. When
angered, I lash out. When embarrassed, I recoil. Yet, in the days following the
arrest, the only emotion I felt was sadness, a deep sorrow.
Why, if everything was a farce, had he embedded himself so deeply in the church? Why had he spent so much time with the elderly couple who lavished him, not with material things, but with their attention and love? Why had he come week after week to study a Bible that says sin is wrong and the cost of sin is death and the only hope we have is Jesus?
I had no regrets – and still don't – about how I treated Jerry and how my church had loved and cared for him.
As followers of Christ, this is our command from 1 John 4:
7 Dear
friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone
who loves is a child of God and knows God. 8 But
anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
9 God
showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so
that we might have eternal life through him.10 This is
real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a
sacrifice to take away our sins. 11 Dear friends,
since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. 12 No one
has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is
brought to full expression in us.
We do not love based on what we will get, but on what we’ve been given.
When I understand the love of God that has been poured out in my life, in spite of my brokenness, it changes the way I see myself and others.
Victor Hugo was really just riffing off Paul when he wrote, to love another person is to see the face of God, but could it be that the complement to that truth is this - to be hurt by another person is to feel the pain of God?
If hurt people hurt people then loved people love people.
And that's what my church and I sought to do - before, during and after his arrest.
Sure, it might seem astonishing to some that a Southern
Baptist church in a conservative town in West Texas chose love over
condemnation but that’s the truth. It’s no testament to us, just the God who
saved us. We had been forgiven much, loved much...how could we not do the same? If Jerry was guilty of being a hypocrite when we knew him, how much
more would we be guilty of being hypocrites if we abandoned him in his darkest hour?
Maybe we didn’t know him, but we wanted to make sure that he knew us, knew that
the things we said weren’t just empty rhetoric or religious platitudes.
When we
were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us
sinners. Now,
most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone
might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die
for us while we were still sinners. – Romans 5:6-8
We didn't turn our backs on Guerdwich Montimere, but neither did we excuse what he had done. The charges that he faced were serious, especially the one involving a sexual encounter with a minor. I knew what his interaction had been with the students at church - he had never been alone with any girls, never come to social functions outside of Bible study, never showed special interest in any of them. He had, for the last several months, been in a guys only study group. I would never put the safety or well-being of the students entrusted to me in jeopardy. Then there were the lies. Over and over - in visits to the detention center and in letters, I urged Jerry to tell the truth - whatever it was, however damaging it was. He always responded with a line that went something like, "someday it will all be clear."
I was out of state when, in 2011, that day finally came. The boy I knew as Jerry Joseph admitted in a court of law that he was, in fact, the man named Guerdwich Montimere.
I have learned many things from this experience. First, humanity is messy. Second, God is in the mess. Third, the mess isn't all them; it's me too.
I find the greatest hypocrisy not that Guerdwich Montimere
pretended to be someone he was not but that we pretend we aren’t guilty of the
exact same thing. There’s a deceiver in all of us, an impostor who shows up
just often enough to remind us that we are not all that we appear to be. We
morph into different characters, we edit the story of our lives, we present
ourselves many times as we wish we were and not as we really are. We say things we do not mean; we mean things we do not say. We can act rightly with wrong intentions. All this combines to orchestrate a cacophony of character; we just hope that the dissonance of others' lives drowns out that of ours. I say all of this not to justify Guerdwich’s actions
but to point out the self-righteousness that deludes us into thinking that we
are any different.
Monday, May 13th, 2013, is the day set for Guerdwich to be released from prison.
What's next? I wonder.
Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, 2 but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. 3 As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.
4 “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”
6 They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. 7 They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” 8 Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.
9 When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.10 Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”
11 “No, Lord,” she said.
And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” - John 8
This account is staggering. A woman caught in adultery (but we must wonder where her male counterpart is, for it takes two...), a frenzied cry for justice, Jesus standing in the middle of it all. When the religious cried out for the wages of her sin to be paid, Jesus simply said that the only ones who could exact that payment were those who were sinless. This silenced the crowd. The accusers left the scene, one by one, we are told. Only two remained - the woman whose sin had been exposed and the Man whose sinlessness granted Him the right to condemn her for it. Let's not miss what happened, though - the only One who could condemn her didn't. In a demonstration of grace, He set her free. She was, however, marked. Jesus sent her home with the admonition to leave her old life and embrace a new one, one where there would be no duplicity, no secrets, no shame.
Today, He issues the same call to you...to me...and to Guerdwich Montimere.
You can reach me at: maurie@onesinglevoice.com
