And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part III



Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.” But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

Luke 15:25-32

                Enter the stage in my life that I like to call my “Providential Poverty” stage; I was broke, barely scraping by, and developing brilliant ways to spice up the daily meal of Ramen noodles and hot dogs. Due to a concoction of pride and stupidity, I managed to lose a couple of jobs, and finding a new job proved difficult when, for the last couple of years, the only long-term position I held was terminated because of my theft. This was the most shameful and humbling (read: humiliating) time in my life – with one hand I had slapped the world and God in the face and spat out, “I don’t need You!” and then had to extend the other hand and ask for alms.

In the height of my thieving, I was working about five nights a week and taking home around $400 every night, and at that time, I had roughly $300 worth of bills every month (when you split squalor with a few roommates, squalor becomes surprisingly affordable). So, if you do your math, working three nights paid for about four months worth of bills, and working two weeks covered my rent and utilities for a year. The rest was fun money – and I had a lot of “fun” with it. The next year, when the money was gone, as I was developing a taste for dry, crunchy spaghetti as a snack, there was a very sharp familiarity in having no fun money as there was when I walked with a couple dozen Benjamins in my wallet: I was just as lonely, just as dead, just as bitter, and just as broken.

An afternoon in early spring, not many weeks after that February night arguing with God, I was sitting in the cool sunlight outside my little apartment playing my guitar by myself when my neighbor came walking by with her dog. She was an older single woman whose grey hair seemed out of place with the rest of her bright face. She sat on the log bench across from me and asked what I was playing. Confessing that I only knew a handful of songs, each consisting of only four chords, and that they were simple worship songs, I admitted that though I didn’t have much skill, I got great joy from playing them. Pleasantly surprised, she asked to which church I belonged, and though I don’t remember much about that conversation, her last word broadsided me: I had no answer to give her – there was nowhere that I belonged.

Tired of having no place to belong, and even more tired of paying for movie rentals with change from my couch, I received and accepted a job offer to teach 5^th graders for a steady paycheck. Now that I was employed by the State of Texas as an educator, it was “Goodbye, poverty! Hello, slightly-lighter degree of poverty!” Now that I was able to afford the essentials that a young man needs to live, like high-speed internet and Hot Pockets, God began teaching me a lesson that, in retrospect, didn’t take that long for it to “stick”: money, trinkets, toys, and the thrill that they bring are utterly, ultimately void. Whether my pockets were full, empty, or somewhere in between, the person looking back at me in the mirror was exactly the same. When I had money, I threw money around and was entertained and distracted; when I was broke, I was trying to get my hands on more and was busy and distracted. It was always at night by myself, with the sound of the rhythmic ricketing of a ceiling fan filling the room as random headlights flashed on my bedroom wall through the blinds that the emptiness in me was so loud and heavy that I seemed pinned to the bed. It was in the quiet dullness of the mornings that I avoided the mirror every bit that I could. A man deep in debt hates the sight of a checkbook, and when the bill collectors hound him, the sound of the phone ringing brings dread; this is how I felt at the thought of having to look at myself, of having to examine who I had become, because I knew that if I were tried I would be found terribly wanting. This followed me to the small town in which I had accepted a teaching job.

Now, closer to home, my dad began to beckon (though it felt like hounding) me to join my family on Sunday mornings, and I eventually relented. Sitting next to them, I found myself in the place and among the people that I had sworn off two years prior, and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued…again again…

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part II

               

                After giving sight to my eyes and calling me into adoption under His Fatherhood, God soon began reconstructing everything else I clinged to; we will refer to this adjustment of life to the heart ignited by His Spirit as “hand-new eye coordination.” In a gracious and life-altering error, I was robbed of an athletic credit during my senior year of high school, forcing me to take a semester of P.E. I found myself in a gym daily with eleven girls my age, three of whom were pregnant, and each of us were required to do a very small amount of jogging and a great deal of kickball. Wholly uninterested in this, I asked our coach if, after our prerequisite jogging, I could just walk laps rather than play dodge ball and probably damage a teenager’s fetus. He acquiesced, and I spent a semester walking laps and reading a pocket New Testament every day until nothing but a duct tape cover and wadded pages remained of it. Through the opportunities granted by this unfortunate 5^th Period assignment, God ignited in me the greatest delight of my life: Him, as He has revealed Himself in Scripture. This consumed me all semester, and on New Year’s Eve 2002, in the southeast corner of a conference room in a lodge at Plains Baptist Assembly, I submitted to the call to ministry.

                Scrapping plans for a literary degree at an East Coast university, God beautifully confined me to Wayland Baptist University (much to my early disappointment), where I was to study Religion and English. Before graduation from high school, my mantra had been, “Wait ‘til graduation – I’m gonna leave this town in the dust and go on to bigger and better things.” Then, in college, being transformed by the Gospel, my mantra had only slightly changed: “Wait ‘til this graduation – I’m gonna leave this town in the dust and go on to bigger and better things.” During my undergrad, I continued serving at the small, waning church; here, I was progressively instructed in ministry by a very small, very vocal minority in our little church that, while we wanted young people in the youth program, we wanted their families there more (because families write checks), and we certainly didn’t want the kind of youth we had coming every week.

Ninety percent of our youth were from the wrong side of the tracks with parents only slightly interested in them, let alone attending a small, old, blindingly Caucasian church. These kids were supposedly the wrong color, wore the wrong clothes, had the wrong length of hair, used the wrong kind of English, and emanated the wrong aroma (as teenage boys do when they have no one to wash their clothes or enlighten them about the beauty of God’s grace imparted to us through deodorant – antiperspirant is what theologians call a “common grace”). Though I was criticized for partnering with other small youth groups outside of our denomination (when the big church in our denomination ignored our little church), I was okay with all of the griping, scheming, gossiping, and backbiting – it made me a martyr in my own prideful mind, and let’s be frank: I’m always ok with self-aggrandizement .

                Since I didn’t return a great deal of the Pharisaic fervor to that vocal minority, they turned their sights on my pastor, who had a family to think of, and he succumbed to “preaching for the parsonage,” effectively using me as a bullet shield between him and the Inquisition. Frustrated for having to fight the church to “do church,” I left for slightly-less-yellow pastures. Next, I spent months in a nearby community as an interim youth pastor while the church was searching for a new pastor. To summarize, a gentleman vying for this position left me out to dry as well, since an overly-ambitious college student is an easy scapegoat. Very discouraged, I finally got some great news that my spiritual hero, a man who had discipled me early in my faith and was influential in me accepting the call to ministry, was coming back to the area to lead youth at a large church around here. Stoked beyond belief, I jumped at the chance to be his intern, willingly traveling over 200 miles roundtrip every week just to do that. However, as time passed and I conveyed to him that I was struggling with my calling and my walk with Him, he publicly shamed me in front of dozens of other parents and college students helping with the youth. Hurt, enraged, ashamed, and broken, I threw my hands up; rather than recognizing all of these events as evidence that we all need a Savior to impart to us a new nature, I did what a proud, arrogant, self-righteous young man would do: I folded my arms and told Christ, “If this is Your Church, You can keep Her.” As a perfect bridegroom would, He graciously and sternly answered, “She’s my Bride – if you want Me, you must take Her, as well.” In an ill-advised launch into willing rebellion against God, I responded, “So be it,” and dove face-first into the “dark night of the soul,” the bleakest, coldest two years of my life in which I was crushed between the icy hands of Alone and Empty. I used friends, girls, entertainment, money, and anything and everything else I could find to numb the aching void in me; I betrayed good friends, manipulated good girls, and cut every lifeline I could find. After being fired from a local bar and grill for embezzling a few thousand dollars (this is all after I was saved and served in the ministry for 4 years or so), I left town, thinking I could start anew. The problem with running from brokenness is that the source is me – and there’s nowhere to which I can run from myself. After enduring the same dark night of the soul in another city, I eventually found myself in my small apartment, broke and cold one night in February, asking God why He wouldn’t leave me alone: “I blew it! I left You! Why can’t You do the same?! I screwed up my end of the bargain, so we’re done – just leave me be!”

                That night, as He did in a small lodge in the Colorado Rockies, He whispered to me the same thing He had said years ago: “You have nothing to offer Me, nothing by which to earn My attention or affection – but I have everything to offer you. I have come to adopt you, not to hire you. I have come to make you not My employee, but My son.” It is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom 2:4), and this was a most kind invitation to come back home – home, where there awaited the family that I had left behind; and they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued...again...

And They Call It "Ekklesia" Part I

This post is what I hope to be the first of a series, chronicling the calling, doubts, joys, pains, victories, and heartaches of what God is doing in the hearts and lives of my brothers, sisters, and I who hunger for the glory of God in Plainview, Texas. I feel the urge to record these things at the relative outset of this journey (although God has been orchestrating these things from before the foundations of the earth), in order that transparent honesty be fostered, to portray the yearning hearts who hunger for Christ magnified in our small city, and the quest to find Him worshipped in it and through it. I write these things now so that, at the end of it, I could not look back and claim that I had it figured out, that I had planned or foreseen these things, or give any credit to a blasphemous notion that it was anything of my own devising that led to what, I pray, brings God great glory by lives transformed by the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ, and that these lives, set free by His Gospel, turn in overflow of thankfulness and affection for Christ, and raise their hands to Him and shout, “Worthy!”

Similar to our entrance into the MetaNarrative of God’s story, here in between the “Already” and the “Not Yet,” I begin this story in media res, with God having already done so many mighty things before this writing. As a testimony of nothing more than a man born blind who was given sight by this one they call Jesus, I will obviously be limited to my very finite perspective; ergo, if I assume wrongly of anyone in word or deed, I apologize and ask for grace. I can only avow to the things that I have seen, and can only come claiming to know one thing: Christ, and Him crucified. In that heart, I begin this record with the aim of God’s glory, my humbling and sanctification, and as a witness to the grandeur and fame of the living God, who has done and can do mighty things in Plainview.

                Enter a young man, born into a loving, believing family. As a boy, I lived with a heart of inferiority and a lack of a sense of belonging; for instance, I was born into a family of athletes that, from my perspective, seemed to experience so much joy and connection through such games. Born with severe asthma, I simply couldn’t keep up: I was born with weaknesses not found in my siblings or friends. From this, I always felt less-than and perceived myself to be a disappointment to my parents, though I can point to nothing in my life to ever give me that notion. In response to this, my wicked heart sought out my other giftings, which were not as present in my siblings and friends, and I set my hands to construct them into a temple in which I could worship my greatest idol: me. I began to polish and hone my sharp tongue, wit, humor, and insight to become instruments with which to hack and hew at everyone I knew in a destructive effort to reduce everyone else to the feeling of worthlessness that I felt. Over two decades of life, these gifts in me began to become my identity and god, because without them, I was left with only the weight of the boulder of worthlessness that loomed just overhead. I hurt so many people, was so bitter and spiteful, so proud and so full of gall, and to this day, my inner heart still yearns to erect these idols once more.

                Then one day in a small lodge in the Colorado Rockies, the One I had heard stories of all my life, whispered a message that He has had to daily speak again ever since: “You have nothing to offer Me, nothing by which to earn My attention or affection – but I have everything to offer you. I have come to adopt you, not to hire you. I have come to make you not My employee, but My son.” The boulder of worthlessness fell that day, but fell to become a bedrock and a foundation, fell to become the only platform from which I could rightfully receive that adoption into sonship; because, only founded on the realization that I could not merit His approval and estimation were my hands freed to take hold of His, to be lifted up rather than struggling to clamber up His mountain. This was spit and dirt, a hand on my eyes, and my life since has been one of becoming accustomed to sight.

                In June of 2002, I was welcomed into the King’s family, adopted as one of His sons. In December of 2002, I was welcomed to join His sons and daughters as He sent them out in the ministry of reconciliation, to announce that He is redeeming everything back to Himself and His Kingdom. This took the form of a small, languishing group of people, divided and arguing about how to get more people through the front door. And they call it “ekklesia” – the Church.

To be continued…