Buck’s Tux

I was living on Balboa Island in Southern California.

Yes, that Balboa Island. If you’ve seen Arrested Development, you know what I’m talking about. Boats. Beautiful houses. Strange wealth. Frozen bananas. And more than a few people who seemed capable of accidentally committing light fraud before lunch.

It was a ridiculous and beautiful place to be newly converted.

I had become a Christian not long before, and one of the people God used to help me find my way was a man named Buck Murphy.

Which, incidentally, is one of the greatest names ever given to a human being.

Buck Murphy.

That is not the name of a man who sells insurance.

That is the name of a man who owns a horse, knows how to fix a tractor, and has probably punched a mountain lion.

Buck and his wife, Nancy, had taken me in during that season. I lived in their garage apartment, which sounds humble because it was, although in Southern California even garage apartments somehow feel as though they should have their own Zillow listing.

Buck and Nancy fed me, prayed for me, encouraged me, and watched me stumble toward Jesus.

And I did stumble.

I was not exactly a polished young Christian. I was learning the Bible. Learning to pray. Learning what Christians did with their hands during worship. I had recently discovered that the Bible contained a talking donkey, so there were still some fairly significant gaps in my theological education.

But something was happening in me.

Eventually, I decided to go to seminary in St. Louis, and while that sounds very calm now, at the time, it felt enormous.

I was leaving California. Leaving the ocean. Leaving Balboa Island. Leaving whatever life I had previously imagined for myself. And I was heading halfway across the country in a little two-door Honda packed with nearly everything I owned.

Which was not much.

Young men tend to overestimate how much stuff they have and underestimate how much life is ahead of them.

I spent the entire day packing. Boxes. Books. Clothes. Whatever miscellaneous junk a young single man somehow believes is essential to establishing a new life. I played several hours of automotive Tetris trying to get everything into the Honda. And by the end of the day, I was exhausted.

Sweaty. Dirty. Disheveled.

Moving has a particular kind of filth associated with it. Not ordinary filth. Moving filth. The kind where somehow your elbows are dirty. Your hair hurts. You smell faintly of cardboard.

Before I left, Buck and Nancy invited me over for one final dinner. So after I had loaded the last box into the car, I walked over to their house. No shower. No change of clothes. I was probably wearing shorts and a T-shirt and looked exactly like a guy who had spent the day cramming his entire life into a Honda Civic.

I walked up to the door. And knocked.

Buck opened it.

Wearing a tuxedo.

A full tuxedo.

Black jacket.

White shirt.

Bow tie.

The whole thing.

I just stood there in shock. I don't remember what I said.

Probably something deeply theological like:

“Dude.”

Because Buck wasn't going anywhere. There was no wedding later. No banquet. No awards ceremony. He wasn't squeezing me in before some black-tie event.

Buck Murphy had put on a tuxedo...

for me.

And it was funny. Absurd, really.

I was standing there looking like I had just lost a wrestling match with a moving van, and Buck looked ready to present an Oscar.

But underneath the absurdity was something that nearly undid me.

Buck was honoring me. Not because I had accomplished anything. I hadn't. There was no ministry yet. No degree. No church. No sermons. No book. No accomplishments to point toward and say, “Look what he became.” There was just a nervous young man standing on a porch. And a badly packed Honda waiting at the curb.

But Buck saw something I couldn't see. He saw what God might be doing.

Without giving a speech, he was saying:

This matters. Where you're going matters. What God is doing in your life matters. And you are worth celebrating.

I don't remember what we ate that night. I don't remember much of the conversation. But more than thirty years later, I can still see Buck standing in that doorway wearing a tuxedo. Because there are moments when someone sees us differently than we see ourselves.

And sometimes that changes us.

Most of us learn fairly early how to rank people. We walk into a room and immediately begin taking inventory.

Who is important? Who is confident? Who is attractive? Who is educated? Who has money? Who seems to belong here?

And then, almost without realizing it, we ask the more dangerous question:

Where do I rank?

Some people walk into rooms assuming they belong. Others enter like ninjas, hoping nobody notices they slipped past security.

I was much closer to the ninja.

I was excited about seminary, but I was also afraid. Everybody there would know more than I did. They would know Greek. They would probably own sweaters. They might have read Calvin. But I had barely figured out Habakkuk was a book of the Bible and not an exotic Middle Eastern appetizer.

I felt underprepared. Inexperienced. Unpolished. And if I'm truthful, I suspected that eventually somebody would discover I didn't belong.

But Buck did something very simple. He refused to see me that way. He did not dress according to how I looked standing on the porch. He dressed according to what he saw. There are people all around us standing on porches like that.

Kids beginning careers. Friends rebuilding their lives. People coming out of addiction. People grieving. People starting over after divorce. People who have failed. People trying something new far later in life than they imagined. People who are scared to death and pretending they're not.

They may not look impressive.

Most beginnings don't.

Usually God's work in a human life does not arrive wearing a tuxedo. It arrives sweaty. Confused. Late. Driving a beat-up Honda. And sometimes what a person needs most is someone who can see beyond the appearance.

Not flatter them. Not pretend they're something they're not. But recognize the tiny green shoot of grace coming up through the dirt and say:

I see that. It matters. Keep going.

There is a beautiful dignity in being seen that way, and perhaps one of the great privileges we have in this life is learning to see other people that way too. To notice what God might be doing before it becomes obvious. To honor beginnings. To celebrate courage. To recognize that somebody standing awkwardly on a threshold may be stepping into something holy.

Sometimes encouragement is a conversation. Sometimes it's a hand on the shoulder. Sometimes it's simply showing up. And every once in a while...

it's opening the door in a tuxedo.

Buck’s Tux is adapted from my book, Eyes to See: Seeing the Kingdom in Ordinary Life—a collection of stories about the ordinary moments where grace, beauty, humor, and the Kingdom of God sometimes become visible if we have eyes to see.

If this story stirred something in you, you can find the book at windowsontheway.com and on Amazon.