Everybody, Always

but he got away. He ran outside and melted down on TMZ in front of
millions of people. Mercifully, no one knew I was the guy holding his
boxers, trying to get him back into them.
My friend had made a mistake prompted by something far beyond his
control. Here’s the important thing I learned from him: he doesn’t think
he’s still naked on the corner. Many of us think of our big mistakes as
disqualifying us; God sees them as preparing us. Jason is still as creative
as he is courageous, and with guts and grit he sees the bright hope his
future offers the world. He is dreaming, inventing, and exploring again.
He’s learning and giving away hope and joy again. In a word, he sees
what most of us don’t. He sees who he’s becoming, and this is it: he’s
becoming love. Sometimes God uses the most difficult things in our lives
to show us the most accurate things about our lives—if we have the guts
to receive a little grace.
They say if you’re an adjunct professor at Pepperdine, you need to
have office hours, but they don’t say where. I have mine on Tom Sawyer
Island at Disneyland every Wednesday from ten in the morning to two in
the afternoon. I tell the students at Pepperdine if they have a question and
ninety-five bucks, they should come and see me. I’m willing to bet I’m
the only guy at the Magic Kingdom with a laptop and a stack of papers to
grade. What’s kind of funny is there have only been a handful of times
when I’ve gone to my office on Tom Sawyer Island and had fewer than
ten people waiting for me.
There are plenty of places I could go to meet people, I suppose.
Pepperdine’s law school has a bunch of conference rooms. I’ve even
heard there’s an office I can use, but I’ve never gone. I meet people at
Disneyland because where we meet shapes the discussions we’ll have.
We’ve all experienced this, but few of us put this idea into practice when
we’re setting our meetings. It’s not silly to meet on a set of swings or a
movie set, at a park or an airplane museum or at Build-A-Bear. I’ve used
all of them. Each is engaging and creative and fun in its own way.
Location drives content. It’s why we should be as picky about where we