I was taking a shower one morning as a grad student in Oregon and I started to relive this whole questionable situation from the recent past that had left me feeling pretty deflated.  I had tried to handle something in the right way, but it was one of those things that wasn’t going to have much of an impressive resolution no matter how it was handled, and I was beating myself up over this thing. It felt like when I went to God that he was staring at a giant letter on my chest. I felt marred. 
I remember crying and having a hard time believing that God really loved me, right there in the shower.  It turns out that showers are pretty good places to get a little privacy for thinking about things like this, what you really believe about things and whether or not you can accept the things that you already know when they’re actually happening.  What I mean is that I know God forgives my sins, but it’s a lot harder to accept when I’ve just sinned.  In the shower you can just stick your face into the water and breathe as hard as you like and work this stuff out. 
I was regularly interviewing nursing home administrators in Oregon at that point in my academic life and on that day I drove to a nursing home in Eugene for one of these conversations.  I’d gotten lost, though, so I called and we pushed back the time and when I found the place I had some time to kill. 
I thought it was strange that the place had a waiting room.  It’s easy to forget that these places are businesses, not just homes.  So I was sitting in this waiting room and there was a man pretty close to me reading the paper and we were the only ones there.  We glanced at each other and smiled, and then it got awkward, the way we studied each other.  Not customary, I don’t think.
Tom was the guy’s name.  I wondered why he was in the waiting room, and he didn’t seem too serious about reading that paper.  We started to chat about the nursing home, how long he had lived there and how he had just had foot surgery.  Tom had worked with some sort of brotherhood of monks or something like that prior to his living at the nursing home.  There was something sort of mystical about the guy, the way he was saying things like the harvest is ripe.  Here I had thought it would be nice of me to talk to him, this gentle, elderly guy, but I found myself drawn in.  I hoped that he would talk to me. 
Tom started ministering to me, and what I mean is that he began saying all these things that were relevant to my crisis just hours earlier in the shower.  I listened like an obedient child because it’s like I knew this guy was some form of a genuine answer, pretty close to the way I would imagine a live conversation with Jesus himself, I think.  And as he spoke I interjected with questions like But what if you screw up?, and Tom just smiled and said things like, Even Christians miss the mark sometimes.
The last part of his message was pretty key for me.  Here I was, trying to wipe away tears so that I could look at my notes and ask important things like, On a scale from very satisfied to very dissatisfied, how satisfied would you say you are you in this position? 
I was scrambling to get my things ready, the tape recorder and pencil and paper and the cup full of candy that served as a small thank you gift, and Tom got a little more animated all of a sudden, like he’d almost forgotten something. 
And just be yourself, he said.  You were made in God’s image.