A Man of Faith

Five years ago, I had a dream.

I was standing on Riverside, a large road in Tulsa, OK, waiting at an intersection for the right time to cross. The pedestrian sign was counting down, so I planned to wait for the next cycle. As I stood there, an older Black man with a cane who walked very slowly came up next to me, and despite the time running out, he decided to cross. Surprised, I saw that he wasn’t going to make it in the time allotted, so I decided to cross with him, at his pace, so he wouldn’t have to walk alone. The cars waited, no doubt annoyed at our slow progress, until we reached the other side. When we did, he said, “You don’t have the right shoes for where you are going,” and he handed me a backpack, presumably containing shoes, and also containing an oddly specific and large amount of money. The rest of the dream unfolded as I embarked on an adventure to figure out how much this treasure I had been handed was really worth.

If you’ve ever had a dream, you know they don’t always make sense in the moment. This one baffled me. I was in college at the time and had no intention of returning to my hometown after graduating. So I set it aside and moved on with my waking life.

Two years later, I found myself jobless, directionless, physically broken from multiple back surgeries, and low on hope. I was experiencing every college graduate’s ultimate dream—living at home with my parents—and I didn’t know how to get out of my situation, particularly given the physical limitations of my body. It was a dark time in my life. I felt useless. I didn’t know what I had to offer the world, and even when I didn’t feel useless, I had no idea where to direct my efforts. What good is a gift if there is no one to receive it? What good is there in having talent with no outlet? What good is a dream if there’s no one to walk with you?

It was at this moment that Clifton Taulbert entered my life.

Or, more accurately, I elbowed my way into his.

Now, I knew of Cliff. He went to our church. I had heard him speak on several occasions. If you’ve ever met the man, you know that he carries a sort of careless, ethereal gravitas wherever he goes. He’s the guy to whom you hand a microphone and then wait with bated breath, knowing that what comes next will be a transformational and transportational spiritual experience. However, despite our shared community from my childhood, I had no relationship with the man. He was more of a legend than a person to me.

The first day I sat in his office, we observed each other from a far greater distance than the small desk that sat between us. I didn’t know why I was there. He didn’t know why I was there. A mutual friend had suggested that we connect—so we were making an attempt at connection. He saw a kid who needed a job, and I saw an old guy who needed help with technology. From a practical perspective, from a purely business standpoint, it would seem we had little to offer one another. But thankfully, Cliff is one who sees with more than just his eyes—and so am I.

I remember how disoriented I was when I first started working for him. He wanted me to help him with marketing his coffee (RootsJava.com). I’m no good at marketing. I wanted to help him with his consulting. He didn’t really need help with the consulting. We stumbled through that summer together, trying to figure out why we had been brought together. I made some flyers and posters, sent some emails (which were never returned), and tried to teach him how to use Instagram (with limited success). Cliff no doubt wondered if he had made a mistake in hiring me as his pseudo-intern. I often wondered if I had anything to offer him.

But I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Cliff was the man from my dream, and I knew that for us to cross that road together, I had to walk at his pace. As I slowed down, I began to see why it was that Cliff had been put into my life. I thought that maybe he would teach me some practical skills that would help me to become more successful, or that the coffee business would grow into a passive income stream to free up our time, or that some business connection would help to launch my career as an author. But what I actually learned from Cliff was far deeper and far more important. And even as I got to know the person of Cliff, with all of his quirks and imperfections, because all humans have those, the legend of Cliff only grew within my mind, despite his best efforts to downplay all of his accomplishments. Don’t let his humility fool you.

Clifton Taulbert is the most remarkable person I’ve ever met.

Born on the Mississippi Delta in the midst of the Jim Crow South, Cliff entered a world that was hostile to his very existence. The library was off-limits. He went to school a hundred miles away (literally). His family survived by picking cotton, migrant field workers barely compensated by the white power structure that intentionally kept them in poverty. As a child, he remembers looking past the fields of the Delta, wondering what lay beyond the horizon, and dreaming of the day that he would cross that invisible boundary into a world that would rather he stay right where he was. But he had one distinct advantage, despite every other disadvantage.

He had people who loved him.

He calls them his Porch People, and if you ever get the pleasure of hearing him speak, you’ll definitely hear about them. I did. I know their faces from the dozens of PowerPoint presentations I have edited. I know their stories of sacrifice and stubbornness—of their refusal to let him settle for a life less than what he was worth. They are the reason he made it beyond the horizon. At every stage of his journey, he has carried those stories within his heart, and they have connected him with people from every walk of life, from South African educators to Supreme Court justices. Even after escaping the stifling oppression of his home state, life has tried to take him out. His daughter died when she was just a child, taken from him by a merciless disease. His own body was attacked by cancer, a fight which he ultimately won. At every step along the path, he has overcome prejudice, broken barriers, and shared these stories of connection with people who might never have believed this man had something to teach them.

As a summer internship stretched into a fall internship and 2019 turned to 2020, I began to see why I had been put into Cliff’s life. When a global pandemic shut down the world, we had to transition to Zoom for all his consulting work, and I became invaluable to him. I also taught him how to use LinkedIn, where he has not stopped posting since. I’ve since moved away from home and worked several other jobs, with varying degrees of success and happiness.

Everywhere I have gone, I have carried Cliff’s metaphorical backpack with me—the one he didn’t even realize he was giving me. I learned a lot of things from being around Cliff: how to slow down, how to stay in the present moment, how to take life one day at a time, how to be resilient. If I had to choose one most important thing that I learned from Cliff, though, if I had to distil our many conversations to a single word, it would be this:

Faith.

Beliefs are transient properties. They evolve over time. As we grow, we learn new things about ourselves, about the world, and about others. They are meant to change. There are few things sadder than a person who never learns anything new, who never listens to new stories, who behaves in exactly the same way they did when you knew them ten years ago. There are few things more off-putting than someone with a miniscule, rigid view of the world who refuses to expand, refuses to soften, and refuses to reach beyond themselves toward someone they have prematurely disqualified. You can call yourself a person of faith, say prejudiced, ignorant things about other human beings, and then hide behind your god and your sacred texts like a coward when your beliefs are, rightly, challenged and exposed. Sadly, many people live this way.

Conversely, I’ve encountered many people outside of traditional religious structures, who do not belong to any mainstream system of belief, who possess inspiring amounts of kindness, dignity, and awareness of others. These people are faithful in their work, unwavering in their principles, and unending in their development—looking for the good, living from wonder rather than from fear, and constantly learning from those along their path. They often display far more faith than the people who go out of their way to tell you all about their beliefs and why their cosmological view of the world is superior to yours.

Because faith is a transcendent property. It is not bound by your theological, cosmological, or existential view of the universe. It can be enhanced, or in many cases, hindered by your view of God. The people who have it in greatest proportions don’t feel the need to tell you about it, because the work they do and the way they live makes it obvious that there is something beyond that palpably accompanies their every moment. Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic, says, “It is certain that an atom of goodness on the path of faith is never lost.” Solomon, the ancient Jewish king, writes, “Though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again.” Adyashanti, the modern-day mystic, says, “A single breath has more truth in it than all your thoughts about breathing will ever have.” And my personal favorite quote about faith, Alan Watts quotes “a great master” from Japan:

“The sound of the rain needs no translation.”

When Cliff goes to speak about his life, there is no insecurity in his faith. He doesn’t stand behind a pulpit or hide behind a PowerPoint and outline why his beliefs are better than others’. He doesn’t try to sell them something or manipulate his audience through fear to buy his book or adopt his version of the cosmos. Instead, he very simply, very humbly shares, “Here are some things my Porch People taught me.” These Eight Habits of the Heart (also a bestselling book) have travelled with him around the world. Wherever he goes, at the end of every talk, inevitably some soul will approach him and say, “This talk just changed my life. I’m going to use this with my students…with my company…with my family.” I’ve watched it happen. As he speaks, people’s eyes light up, their minds start to race, and their hearts start to soften. In beautiful, simple words, he shares his life with others, and their lives are enlivened and enriched by his presence. He’s done it for decades.

So when I say that Cliff is a man of faith, I mean that he is a person who stubbornly refuses to quit. I mean that he is a person who continues to believe that good things are in store for him, even after losing his child and battling cancer and overcoming hatred at every turn. I mean that he is a person who extends dignity and humanity to others, even when they refuse to return the favor.

That’s Cliff. I’m sure, deep down, there is anger and pain and rage that I can’t imagine, as pale and as privileged as I am. But when he has the opportunity to lash out in anger or to reach out in love, for some reason I don’t always understand, he chooses love. He doesn’t have to. If he wanted to live angry all the time—at God, at people, at the world—for the way they have collectively treated him, he would be well within his rights. I probably would if I had lived his life. But Cliff has always found the good amidst the pain, the joy amidst the suffering, the love amidst the separation.

On the first day I started working for him, Cliff told me, “Everything you do in your life that is not writing will make you a better writer.” When I think back on my dream now and the time we have spent together since, I can’t isolate one lesson from the others—life doesn’t exist in isolation. I learned more from Cliff through osmosis than I ever did through information acquisition. I wasn’t scribbling notes, trying to capture every morsel of wisdom. We just walked together.

Three years later, I find myself once again in a place of uncertainty: jobless and directionless, but no longer physically broken and filled with hope. Not just because I have more experience now, have developed some new skills, and have adopted some better beliefs. Mostly, this time feels different because my faith has been expanded—and that’s something I learned from Cliff. Good things are on the horizon. Some days, it’s all I can do to get up, make my “other coffee” (which Cliff despises), and keep myself moving forward, eagerly anticipating the interjection of goodness in my life. On those days, it can be easy to wish that I was elsewhere, doing something more exciting besides delivering food or searching for jobs, but I am here. For some reason, I am at this particular location at this particular moment, writing this particular essay. I don’t know why—but I didn’t know why I was sitting in Cliff’s office three years ago, either. Even though this walk across the street is taking far longer than I thought, I’m choosing to enjoy the journey. You can only take one step at a time.

On days like today, I am reminded of my favorite thing Cliff has ever said, and I repeat it to myself, not unlike a prayer. Every time I say it, my faith grows just a little bit more.

“Never underestimate the power of your presence.”