In the first church, I found a real genuineness in the people, their worship and their whole approach to teaching and presenting God's word. It was very restorative to my soul in so many ways and refreshing to find not only a body of believers that were in sync with what I believed and wanted, but was also part of a larger movement of churches all committed to the same principles. That said, as comfortable and as healing an experience it was for me, I never got to the place where I was ready to risk it all and reveal my whole story to the pastor. I was so afraid that what had brought me so much comfort and joy and healing was as unstable as a house of cards and had I risked anything so great I might just risk losing what I had gained. Oh how foolish I was and what an opportunity I may have robbed that pastor of to have had the chance to pour of himself into my life the way I had only dreamed of having someone in that type of authority role do for me. But, I allowed fear to cripple me and most likely cheated us both out of a richly rewarding relationship.
The second church body that we moved to was just because my father was really anxious for all of us to go to the same church together. My dad was a purchasing agent for the fire department and was accepted as an honorary fire captain and included in the Christian fraternity Firefighters for Christ. One of the captains he served invited him to come check out the church they were attending. It was in a town just a few miles away, but still close enough to be within consideration. My dad asked us to come check it out with them.
Well, we all went together for a few months and my parents eventually decided it was too contemporary for their tastes, but we had felt like we were at home from the very first Sunday we had visited and we weren't looking for a new church to attend.
Here at this church I found something that I had not experienced before. I found a pastor with a high degree of empathy and and even higher degree of steadfast tenacity. He saw that there was a great big hole in me and he was determined to get to the bottom of it, even he ran the risk of getting lost trying. I didn't risk putting my trust in him. He put himself out there and took all the risk in trying to earn my trust. He and I made a lot of breakthroughs.
Unfortunately, stubbornness and pride can make a train wreck of even the best of good efforts and even still, after all he attempted I wasn't willing to dive in deep with trust and for the first time in my life I came face-to-face with the core of the matter, my faith was at stake. I finally owned up to God that I was willing to follow his voice, I felt I had no other choice, but where I had the trouble was in believing that God would follow through once I got to where he told me to go. I had been in the wasteland for so long and still hearing God call to my heart that the purpose, the plan, and the dream are still very real, but my heart would cry back, "so, it's not like you're going to do anything about it if I keep running after them."
I was destitute. I felt as if every dream I had ever had or God had ever given me had evaporated before my very eyes while God just stood there and watched and still he would torture me by continuing to remind me that he still wanted me for that big purpose of his for my life. It made me as angry to continue to hear it as it gave me relief to know that I hadn't already blown it so bad that he still wanted to yes me. I felt like a cosmic joke, but I was beginning to feel less and less so. It was starting to turn around. My thinking and my faith were beginning to change.
During the time that we were at this church I really began to pray for a miraculous change in the relationship between my parents and myself. My parents and I had always had a strained relationship at best. We went through what I call a dance. The music and the steps never change only the venue and occasionally you just get tired of dancing and pretend you are not dancers at all. Well, this is how my parents and I related to each other. We had major issues between us that prevented us from having a healthy and close relationship with one another. Periodically, these issues would become to big to ignore and there would big a blow-up. We would have it out verbally, but we would never seriously deal with the issues raised. We would just wait until things cooled down again and just repress them once again.
After September 11th, 2001, I had a serious talk with my parents about ending this cycle for good. I asked them to commit it to prayer and be willing to work through things no matter how hard they may be to deal with or ugly to look at. They agreed, but I took it one step further. I took the issue to our church family and asked them to commit this matter to prayer with us.
This became a collective journey that we shared, as a church body, as God began to work miracles in the relationship between my parents and I. And, it culminated, in a very visible way, on a men's retreat that I got my father to attend one spring. It was such a moving experience for the men who had been praying for me on this journey that many were moved to go to great lengths to restore strained relationships with their own parents.
It was also during this time that God blessed my wife and I with our first successful pregnancy giving us a precious little girl. This too was a journey of prayer and faith that our church family walked closely with us on. A year and a half before we had experienced a very short pregnancy that ended abruptly in a miscarriage. So, for over forty weeks they very closely followed the progress of our baby and prayed for her and my wife's health and protection daily.
This was such a wonderful time of change in my life, and in my family. I had completely transitioned in my relationship with my parents from "There's no way we're moving with you when you both finally retire and leave the state. The best we ever got along was when we had two thousand miles between us." to "There's no way I want to allow that great a distance to exist between us because I am not finished seeing where God is going with this miracle.". Even though I was fresh out of another bad experience serving under this second pastor, the rest of the experience was very positive and affirming. God had finally given me at least one more child in my family. Things were good and I was in a place were I was finally ready to trust God with everything again. And we were moving to New Mexico.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:N Main St,Roswell,United States
No comments:
Post a Comment