Trust Restored

Fiday, September 14, 2012

Reflecting on a conert attended on Thursday, September 13, 2012

Grace Community Church

Roswell, New Mexico

Kutless in concert with Fireflight, The Rhett Walker Band and Hyland

Last night I spent an incredible evening with my teenage son Cameron at a concert headlined by the contemporary Christian rock band Kutless. He probably would have enjoyed if I had spent more time in the auditorium with him, but his mom and I were working at the concert and had gotten him a reduced priced ticket. 

My wife had joined our son off and on during the opening acts and I stayed out and manned the various merchandise tables and occasionally socialized with some of the band members from those opening acts.

At the completion of the opening acts there was a presentation from Compassion International and then an intermission. We were quite busy during the break but afterward I joined Cameron for the headline act. Cameron still enjoys having his dad attend events like this with him because I will sing, shout, scream, jump up and down, punch my fist at the air, clap my hands over my head and everything else that he and his enjoy doing.

But in the middle of all of the hard rockin' fun last night I had a divine appointment.

Jon Micah Sumrall, lead vocalist for Kutless, was introducing the song Even If from there recent release Believer. He introduced it by talking about how in the thirteen plus years that he has traveled all over the world with Kutless the one thing hat has remained constant is that he has always encountered lots of hurting people. While he has seen plenty of miraculous answers to some people's prayers far more never shared this same experience. While it may seem unexplainable in human terms, God most often answers prayers during times of human suffering with a "no." 

Life will be hard and it will contain suffering and while God heals some for reasons known only to Him for most healing may never come. Dreams dies, finances fall into ruin and Christians are persecuted for there beliefs. Jesus even prayed and asked God to provide any other way for mankind to be redeemed other than the gruesome ordeal he was going to pass through in the following days, but God said "no" and Jesus trusted Him that the end of the story was more important than what he was facing right then.

Then he said something that hit me like a cosmic sledgehammer. He said, "I don't know why God doesn't miraculously change everyone's situation that cries out to Him in their hour of desperation, but I do believe God when he said in Jeremiah 29:11 that his plan is to give us a future and a hope. All I know is that even though I can't understand the moment I trust that God is working it all together for His good and the end of the story will make any moment of pain pale by comparison."

Every part of me crumbled into dust in that moment: my mind, my flesh, my spirit, my soul, my will, my heart, my emotions, my everything. I slumped over and collapsed on the chair in front of me.

You see what you may not know about me is that I am a man with an unshakable calling from God on his life. I originally received this call when I was 12 but I resisted because I desired the riches of this world and I knew that ministry was a path in the opposite direction. I ran from God and this calling for nearly five years. Finally, shortly after my seventeenth birthday I surrendered everything to God, embraced that calling and had such a real encounter with the living and resurrected Christ that it would be impossible for me to ever turn away from Him.

From that moment I have set my hand to the plow, never looked back, never even imagined what my life might have been like if I had taken a different path. Everything I have done has been with the purpose of moving me in the direction of pursuing that calling yet it has never been fully realized.

In all of this time God had been faithful to constantly remind me that His calling has never been repealed and no matter how much I have messed things up, He still has great plans for me. But, after nearly thirty years of dedication, no results and empty promises my response to God was "I don't trust you any more. Stop being so cruel to me, promising something you're just going to keep from me!" I was a man trapped in a miserable paradox. I couldn't shake the need to pursue my calling, but I also didn't feel I could trust God to fulfill the promises he was making to me. Most people would be excited just to know that God would speak so freely with them and here I was telling Him to shut up and stop torturing me.

Even though I couldn't shake my calling or my commitment to pursuing it, I truly felt I could no longer trust God to fulfill His promises. I could not trust him with the story of my life. I would teach others, quite convincingly to do what I was incapable of doing myself.

Well, anyway, when Jon said that about Jesus trusting God that the end of the story was more important than what he was facing in that moment and relating Jeremiah 29:11 to trusting that God would make the end of our stories make our moments of suffering pale by comparison every part of my being was crushed and I literally collapsed on the back of the chair in front of me. I began to weep and sob uncontrollably. I began to cry, louder and louder, until eventually I was shouting and sobbing at the top of my voice, "I TRUST YOU! I TRUST YOU GOD! I TRUST YOU GOD WITH THE END OF MY STORY!" I slid out of my chair and onto my knees, arms raised high over my head, and then eventually I lay in the aisle prostrate before God, still screaming, while my body convulsed to my heavy sobs, "I TRUST YOU! I TRUST YOU GOD! I TRUST YOU GOD WITH THE END OF MY STORY!"

I'm sure I made an utter fool of myself, but I didn't care. The heaviest burden I have ever carried was being spiritually sandblasted off of my being. For all I know I was making enough noise and commotion to compete with the band performing on stage.

I got up at the end of the song and stayed for the next song, one of their iconic hits What Faith Can Do then went back out and took up my post back at the merchandise tables. When I arrived I obviously looked like a wreck because my wife immediately asked med what was wrong. I told her I would have to tell her later.

This was a major breakthrough. I went home that night and had the first restful night's sleep that I've had in twenty years. I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and the next thing I knew it was noon the next day. For the first time in over twenty years I awoke and wasn't still as at least exhausted as when I went to bed the night before. I even had people ask me on the phone that day, "Are you feeling better? You sound better than you usually do."