Twenty Years

Last week the church I pastor celebrated the fact I had been their pastor for twenty years. Twenty years – that is a long time by anybody’s measurement. The church threw a great party for me. I was excited and nervous and proud and humbled, all at the same time. They were still glad I was their pastor – and I was glad too. The party was wonderful.

Twenty years. I got married when I was twenty years old. After twenty years of marriage, I sort of knew what I was doing. I’m sure my wife thought I needed at least another twenty, which means I’m not there yet.

When I came to First Baptist of Rolla, I had no idea my wife and I would stay for twenty years. At that time our kids were still in elementary school, and I figured we would be around ten or twelve years. There were opportunities to move to new places of service, but that never happened. I would continue to look at First Baptist and feel that there was so much unfinished business and I didn’t want to leave things half-way done.

There have been times I wondered if God had forgotten me. Tough times when things weren’t going the way I thought they should. Paul encourages young Timothy to preach in season and out of season, and I have to admit there have been lots of out-of-season times. But there have been many good times and some truly wonderful times and I have always felt the tug of the Holy Spirit back to this place. I decided God hadn’t forgotten me after all.

I had a friend tell me that when you have been in a church as long as I have, people begin to treat you like an old piece of furniture. They just take it for granted you are there, and they don’t see the richness of the grain or the comfortable fit or the continued usefulness. I suspect the same can be said for pastors looking at their congregations – it is easy to freeze people to what they once were, to not grant the possibility that God may do a new work in a person’s life. I pray all the time that God would grant me the ability to see others through His eyes, to see what He is up to and how His work of transformation continues. I want to see other’s giftedness, their value to God, their worth to the Kingdom. Dear God, don’t let twenty years blind me to what You are up to in the lives of those I have devoted myself to serve.

I have always feared failure – that is probably something most of us fear to one degree or another. However, I tend to see success and failure in terms of Jesus’ parable of the talents. You remember, a series of talents were given, amounts of money that could be used or saved or squandered, and after a season the master came back to see what had been done. A couple of servants used their talents well, winning them the “well done” of the Master. One had a jaundiced view of the Master, negative and hostile and fearful. “I buried what you gave me,” he said – “here, you can have it back.” The master did not say well done.

I would lie if I claimed I never had those urges to say, “Here Lord, you can have this congregation back, I can't lead them. I don’t have a clue what I am doing or what you are up to – have what is yours.” But those urges are eclipsed by other prayers, “Lord, I don’t have a clue what I am doing or how to be the leader and servant you want me to be – so help me, train me, compel me to grow if you must, use the gifts You have given to me – and in the end, may your work flourish and may I be successful in Your eyes and may I hear your well done.”

I believe God is doing a good work in this church. We are doing things we haven’t done in a long time, if ever. Our focus is more outward, the church is leaving the building (if reluctantly at times), we are paying more attention to the community in which we live. We are looking less and less like a cookie-cutter church and more and more like a dynamic church shaped to meet the needs of those around and to share Christ in that context. It can be messy and confusing at times, and even frustrating, but also exciting and invigorating. Not long ago I had a friend ask if he could submit my name to a prestigious church. I looked at the church’s website and was bored by what I saw. It seemed so neat and tidy and dead. Of course I would go wherever God would want me to go – but all the Holy Spirit did was tug me back here. I was grateful.

At the wonderful party the church had in our honor there were several people who said they hoped I would stay another twenty years. That was nice of them. I smiled and thanked them – but do you realize how old I would be if I stayed another twenty years?

However long the Lord permits me to stay, I am grateful. I serve at the Lord’s pleasure. I hope you do too.

Midnight Closeness

I shared a favorite story with our Sunday night Bible study group this past week. We are in the midst of trying to bring some light into the darkness that surrounds the existence of evil and suffering in this world. I made the point from the book of Job that we are largely unaware of the vastness of God’s care for us – and then I shared the story Keith Miller told in his book Habitation of Dragons.

Miller speaks of a tender scene in his own life. In the middle of a winter’s night his daughter cried out in the darkness, “Daaady!”

You can imagine his surprise, for his children normally called out for their mother. The moment she called he got up, stumbled into her room, and carried her into the bathroom.

The only light was a soft red glow shining on her face from the gas wall heater. He sat her on the little potty chair and bent over to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. Her head lolled gently to one side and then she would catch herself, but never quite awaken. He would steady her, protecting her, holding her.

As Miller gazed at his daughter, he was filled with the most amazing sense of gratitude and love. He tousled her long blond hair, kissed her gently on the nose, and thought, “Some day you and I will remember this as a time of great closeness.” He pictured talking about this night when she was a grown girl, how they both would smile and laugh and remember.

But then he realized -- she would never remember this midnight closeness -- because she had been asleep the entire time he was holding her. She would not remember, for she was not even aware.

And neither are we!

We are not aware of how God cares for us during those long nights of doubt, those times when we are spiritually asleep, suffering loss, immersed in pain or fear, oblivious to His presence. We are not aware of even a fraction of what God does for us, how in His care He sustains us and walks with us and picks us up and loves us.

Job’s last words are those of amazement. Job 42:5, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” What Job sees is the fact that there was never even one moment when God averted His gaze from his life.

Remember that the next time your life is plunged into darkness for whatever reason. When you are tempted to panic, when you feel the wintry blast of fear, remember our Lord’s promise to be with us always. He hasn’t abandoned you or gotten distracted. As Psalm 139 declares, He is intimately acquainted with all our ways.

Even when you forget all that, take courage in the fact that He has not forgotten you. You may sleep through those moments of midnight closeness, but He never does.

Wicked Wednesdays and Sinister Sundays

The first church I pastored was a rural church in west Tennessee. You turned off the main road, traveled about three miles and wound up at Latham's Chapel Baptist Church. It was a great church to begin one’s ministry, and I was blessed with a gracious church family. Every Sunday they would say to me, “Pastor, you just keep preaching better and better.” I thought it was a huge compliment – looking back at the notes from those early sermons, I now know the truth. I couldn’t have gotten any worse.

Being removed from the main road made things difficult in the winter. A little bit of snow stopped all traffic in its tracks in rural Tennessee. Most winters not much snow fell, but one winter was extraordinary, a bit like this winter. For seven or eight weeks (I forget exactly which) we had snow every Wednesday and Saturday. A few of those Wednesdays we just canceled church, but after three or four, we moved into town where the roads got cleared off. The Saturdays were more difficult. The snow would wait to come when it was dark on Saturday night, and we would wake up to a few inches of snow on the road in the morning. We canceled every Sunday night during those weeks and half the Sunday mornings. We started calling the days wicked Wednesdays and sinister Sundays.

What is a pastor to do when he doesn’t preach? There were lots of other things to do – we still had funerals, risking our own lives in the process. There were hospital visits to make and counseling needed. I was attending Union University some twenty miles away, and I made it to most classes. Best of all, I found lots of time to study, reflect, and pray. I finally had time to prepare some of my sermons in advance, seek God’s leadership for the journey ahead, read some books, and truly improve my preaching skills. Honestly, I got to the place where I enjoyed those snow-filled Wednesdays and Sundays.

I looked up snow in the Bible and read this verse from Job 38:22, God’s response to Job’s demand that God give him the meaning of all his suffering: “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?” I thought that was a strange verse and a strange response – what kind of battle does God fight with snow and hail? In the context God is simply saying to Job, “You can’t understand most of what I do, how do you think you could understand why suffering comes?” But the reference to snow and hail – I decided to preach a sermon about it during that snowy winter. I entitled the sermon “Snow and God’s Providence.” I indicated the biggest battle God fought with snow was one against human arrogance. I talked about how God used a little thing like a snowflake to stop cars and trucks in their tracks and bring everything to a halt. However strong and mighty we might think we are, a few tiny snow flakes exposed our weakness.

I thought it was a pretty good sermon. The folks at the church said I was getting better and better. To this day I see snow as God battling our arrogance.

Wicked Wednesdays and sinister Sundays – maybe they will do us some good if we pay a little prayerful attention.

Rare Form

After a long day my wife and I were getting ready to watch a little TV before bed when she said to me, “You’re in rare form tonight!”

I can’t tell you exactly what I did to bring that comment from her. I had just made a very sarcastic joke – was that what she reacted to? It was a Monday and Monday’s are not always a pastor’s best day of the week – was it showing? Recently it seems like I have had more plates spinning in the air than I can keep going (you remember that old trick, don’t you) – was my panic showing? Maybe I was jittery because I had too much coffee – I don’t know.

You are in rare form – I can’t even tell you if that was a compliment or a judgment, but as I played with the phrase, it occurred to me that the world around us ought to be able to say that about Christians. “You are in rare form” – meaning that what others see in us is not what you see in everybody.

When I first became a Christian I had a co-worker named Scott. Scott’s language rose from the gutter and so did his personal ethics. Even so, Scott was a likable guy and after awhile he asked me a question: “Are you religious or something? I notice you aren’t like the rest of us – what gives?” I was most pleased that he could tell the difference, even though I was a irritated that it took his nudging to share my faith. Scott didn’t embrace Christ, preferring to, as he put it, "take his chances." Perhaps later on he did – I am just grateful that I was in rare form before Scott.

I think Anne Graham Lotz describes what rare form ought to be manifested in the life of a Christ follower in her book My Heart’s Cry. I want more of Jesus, she says – but what does that mean? Her chapter headings give us insight: I want more of His voice in my ear, more of His tears on my face, more of His praise on my lips, more of His death in my life, more of His dirt on my hands, more of His fruit in my service – you get the idea. More of Jesus in every area of our lives.

My prayer is that these things would not be occasional or fleeting, rare indeed, but normal, natural, a daily thing. Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Simple translation: more of Christ in every area of my life more of the time.

Definitely not rare form.

We are reminded in 2 Corinthians 4:7 that we have the treasure of Christ in jars of clay. My fear is always that what people see the most is the jar of clay. My heart’s desire is that they see the treasure shining forth. My prayer for myself and those Christ followers I journey with is that such a thing would not be rare form but our typical way of life. We will, of course, need God’s surpassing power to pull that off.

Rare form – I wonder what my wife was referring to?

Random

I gave a book to my daughter Alyssa this past Christmas that I got for myself. I did it on purpose – I was interested in the book and thought my daughter might enjoy it. Beyond that, I thought we could talk about our reactions and reflections on what we read. Last year my son Chad did the same for me – he gave me the space trilogy by C. S. Lewis and for the next four months we talked about it. A highlight of the year for me, and I hope for him as well.

Anyway, I gave this book to Alyssa by Don Miller entitled A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. I had read an earlier book by Miller and thought this one might be interesting though I know Miller is not for everyone. I thought the book might be a good read and good discussion for us.

Alyssa and I do not have much experience reading and talking about books together. A few years ago she urged me to read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book The Brother’s Karamazov. I trudged through the book with great effort and then called her to talk about it (about four months later, as I recall). Looking back, I don’t think she believed I would read the Russian novel in the first place. When I finished it and wanted to talk about it, she confessed that it had been years since she read it, that she had read it in a hurry, and she didn’t remember the parts I was asking her about. We talked about her skimming the book again (Ha!) and then we would talk about it. That was three or four years ago now. No discussion yet.

Back to Miller’s book – he starts out with a series of random reflections on life, a bit like this blog. He talks about a friend who wrote down every experience he could remember and came up with five hundred pages of memories. Miller confesses that the narrative of his life would not be near so long – in fact, he even wonders what to make of all the experiences of life. They seem so random, some highs and lows and all sorts of things in-between. The question is, what story do they tell? Where is life going with all of these disconnected experiences?

That idea speaks to me because each day can be somewhat random for me. The one sure thing I face each week is the relentless return of the Sabbath with its sermon preparation, but other than that, any given day can be a smorgasbord of unexpected experiences. It can be so random, and most days I don’t mind it at all. I have learned that ministry takes place in those random moments as much or more than the planned moments, and that God speaks at unexpected times in unusual ways. At the same time, I have to admit that there are moments I look back and realize that I can’t get all the random events to hang together – I am not always sure what story they tell. Miller feels the same and hopes that some day in eternity he might tell God about all his experiences and God will let him in on what it all meant.

What a random blog – is there a point? Yes, of course!

I often return to the narrative in Genesis 37-50 about Joseph precisely because his life was so random and unexpected. You remember, as a teenager he had some pretty brazen dreams and he dared boast about them to his brothers. They hated him for it and did their best to destroy his dreams, which they did for a number of years. And then more than twenty years later it all makes sense – he tells his brothers that, though what they did was a random act of violence, God was at work using whatever randomly came into his life to bring him to the place where he, Joseph, could be the savior of his family.

I like Joseph’s story because it makes me realize God really is able to pull together all these seemingly random moments of life, the good and the bad and the in-between, and accomplish something far greater than we might realize. In my better moments I tell God that I am okay with that, that I don’t need to know the story line yet, that I will simply trust Him on the journey.

And then there are those times when I stare at some random moment and say, “Father, what is that about? Where does that fit in?”

Are you going to try and tell me you don’t do the same thing?

Prayer As Showing Up

Through the years as a pastor I have had people ask me more questions about prayer than about anything else. My observation is that most of us feel that we pray badly – that we don’t spend enough time or say things the right way or know best how to approach the Father. Our troubles are intensified when we have in mind what we believe God ought to do, and then He doesn’t follow our prayerful advice. It is so maddening, who does He think He is – God?

Even with all the questions, most people would just like to know how to pray better. It is with that in mind that I recommend the advice Philip Yancey gives in his book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? He suggests that the most significant thing we can do in prayer is to just show up. “The writer Nancy Mairs says she attends church in the same spirit in which a writer goes to her desk every morning, so that if an idea comes along she’ll be there to receive it. I approach prayer the same way. Many days I would be hard-pressed to describe a direct benefit. I keep on, though, whether it feels like I am profiting or not. I show up in hopes of getting to know God better, and perhaps hearing from God in ways accessible only through quiet and solitude.”

Showing up – may not sound super spiritual, but it is something I seek to do each day. Whether I am reading Scripture or the words of one of my mentors in writing (like Philip Yancey), I show up most days ready for whatever God may have. Yancey refers to it as the discipline of regularity – those regular, consistent times we enter into God’s presence with our hearts open. I must say, there are times I receive something quite significant – I read a few verses, or a phrase, or a quote, or even a word, and I am plunged into a conversation with God over whatever it is that confronts, challenges, comforts or calls me. Most of the time it is more subtle than that – I spend time quietly in the presence of the Lord, sensing nothing that significant but speaking my heart nonetheless, and then I go on. Showing up.

Of course, that's not the end of it. God is not confined to a single conversation or a structured time of the day. Even when He is the quiet partner in prayer, I discover His amazing ability to bring to my mind some Scripture passage, image, quote, or whatever else is needed for an unforeseen event of the day. He honors my showing up by responding to prayer in His own time and way.

Makes sense. He can do that, you know – He is God!

My advice for the week – why don’t you try showing up for prayer?

Children

We had the joy of having both our children and their spouses home for Christmas a few weeks ago. It was a first for us – our daughter Alyssa and her husband Paul will celebrate their fifth anniversary this year, and our son Chad and his wife Becki their first. This was the first Christmas where we were all family together. I loved it – and the time slipped by so fast. It was as if they got there one day, and were gone the next. The house seemed empty and too quiet.

It is a strange thing – you pray for your children, that God will bless them and keep them close to Him, that they will grow and enjoy God’s good gifts and find a spouse that is as a gift from God. And then as those things take place, you realize that their lives take a different path than yours. You pray they always remember the things you taught them. You ask God to keep them close to Him. As son-in-laws and daughter-in-laws enter the scene, you find yourself praying for them just as you do your own children. You realize, in my case, that where only two people on the face of the earth had the right to call me “father,” now there are four.

You rejoice in their successes, agonize over their hurts, ask the Heavenly Father to direct them, and pray that the choices they make, the paths they travel, will be God-honoring. And you trust them to that Father who is so much greater than any parent can be.

As young newlyweds, Holly and I took off to Tennessee, some twelve hours from my parents. Because of college and work demands, I didn’t get to see my parents but once a year. I tried to call when I could, which wasn’t enough (my kids do much better). One day we were leaving my folks after a visit of about a week. I took one last glance at my parents as we drove off – they were standing outside watching, my Dad holding my Mom in his arms, and I suddenly realized my Mom was crying. I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me before – my leaving caused her pain. She was grateful for all God was doing in our lives, thankful that I had “turned out alright,” but still – things would never be the same.

We have tools my parents never had. We can Skype with our kids, see their faces, hear their voices, enjoy time with them even though they may be hundreds of miles away. But it can never be the same as seeing their faces in the flesh, feeling their hug, enjoying just being with them.

My children are far more attentive to my wife and I than I was to my parents. It saddens me that I didn’t get it – that I didn’t realize that, though the years bring change, they do not minimize the love or lessen the prayers. Twenty years ago I came to First Baptist Church of Rolla, and I remember the conversation I had with my Mom before I decided God was in that move. She wanted to make sure I would be happy, that I would be cared for, that it was the right thing to do. And then she said, “I’ll be praying for you.”

To my knowledge my Mom prayed for me every day from the day I was born – I do my best to follow her example, praying for my children.

See the picture – aren’t they a fine bunch!