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 5th 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...
To be continued...again...
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