Saturday, August 2, 2014

CONFESSIONS OF A BROKEN VESSEL

So, you may be wondering why I'm spending so much time on the subject of choices.  Well, the honest answer is, I'm just learning about this myself.

Over two decades in ministry and I did not have a full grasp of the power of free will.

24 years of marriage and I did not understand how powerful my choices were and how far reaching the consequences of my choices would be.

But I do now.

In January of 2009, at the ripe-old age of 39, I preached my final sermon as a full-time pastor of one of God's churches. I had been involved in ministry at some level since I was 14 years old. I made it through my teenage years and my (very) early 20's with only one goal in mind - fulfill my personal calling to be a pastor. At 21, I realized that goal when I took the senior pastor position at a small country church in Silsbee, Texas. Yeah, you read that correctly. I was 21 years old and pastoring a church.

That's not all. Not only was I a pastor, I was a husband too. My wife and I had married in December of 1989 when we were both 20 years old. You don't have to be a genius to figure out I was completely immersed in a level of responsibility that very few people are even aware exists when they are 20 or 21 years of age.

But, I had achieved my goals.  I had married the woman of my dreams and I was a pastor all before most people my age were even out of college.

What I thought was the beginning of a blessed lifetime of service and fulfillment quickly became a reality I was not even remotely prepared for.  All of my development and training had been focused on Bible doctrine, church administration, and sermon preparation. While I had witnessed some hardships suffered by my pastoral mentors, I somehow got it in my head that I would make it through the pastoral ministry unscathed by anything truly bad.

After all, wasn't I one of God's chosen vessels?  Hadn't God called me into His ministry at the tender age of 13? Hadn't God qualified and filled me with everything I would ever need to succeed in that calling?

Those were the assumptions and thought processes I took with me into ministry service. I fully expected that whatever challenges or hardships my wife and I would face in ministry would be met by our Rock, our Shield, our Mighty Fortress, and Strong Tower. I was fully convinced of my invulnerability based on my understanding of God's mercy, grace and love. After all, I reasoned, if God be for us....

In 1994, my wife and I moved from the small town confines of Silsbee, Texas and took a much larger church in a suburb of Houston, Texas. This was the "big time". I could not have been more excited to face the opportunities to minister to a larger audience and a much more fertile "field of harvest".

What was lost on me in my rush to get out of the small town and into the big city was a tiny fact about the church I was about to pastor. When they "hired" me in 1994, I represented the fourth pastor in four years for this church.  From 1990 to 1994, four experienced, veteran pastors had taken and left the position of senior pastor after serving for one year or less.

No matter what the details of each pastoral vacancy was, the obvious conclusion that anyone with a thimble-full of common sense would make was there was something very wrong with this church.

There was, of course.  It was a deacon-led congregation populated by older families; families that had been at the church for decades. These people had long-ago taken ownership of the church and saw the pastoral position as a necessary part of the church process. Unfortunately for me and my family, what I failed to notice in my youthful exuberance and inexperience was this church did not want a PASTOR, they wanted a preacher. Those are two entirely different roles that neither I nor the members of this church fully understood.

A pastor is much more than a preacher. The truest definition of the word is a "shepherd". If you know anything about shepherds it is that they are the defacto leaders of the flock. The shepherd is supposed to know where the best grasslands are for feeding, the best watering holes are for watering, and where the dangerous places are. He is supposed to use that knowledge to feed and protect the flock he has been charged with shepherding. That's just a nutshell version of the job. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that.

A preacher's job is much easier. All a preacher needs to do is just get up every Sunday and preach a sermon or two. Pretty much anybody can do this job and it is what most people assume a pastor's job actually is; just prepare sermons and preach them once or twice a week.  When you look up "gravy jobs" in the dictionary, "Preacher" is easily on the top five list. After all, a preacher only has to work one day a week, right?

When I took the position of "Pastor" in 1994, at the tender age of 24, I took it with the understanding that I was being brought in to pastor the church. The deacon-led congregation had no intention of letting anyone pastor that church but them; especially not some green, wet-behind-the-ears, 24 year old man-child.

I'll let you fill in the blanks as to how this adventure ended up.

When I resigned the church in 1998, I was a piping hot mess.  My faith in God was shattered into irreparable pieces. For four hard-fought years I had placed my full trust and faith that God would protect me and my family from my hard-headed, hard-hearted flock and we would emerge from the church battles victorious because GOD was our defender.

What happened in reality was the exact opposite of that. What happened to us was so far removed from what I was expecting from God that I allowed it to destroy my relationship with God, my wife, my family, and pretty much anyone on the planet that called themselves "Christian". I became a bitterly angry human being and when we left that church in 1998, I was emotionally and spiritually done with ministry work.

In 2009, I was physically done as well.

Yeah, it took me 10 years of stumbling and fumbling through ministry experiences before I finally made the decision to quit once and for all. I stayed in ministry more from a mercenary standpoint than a God-called shepherd. I needed money to pay the bills and ministry was all I knew; all I had trained for. So, despite the fact that my faith in God was all but gone, I kept trying to "do the work of the ministry".

Because I did not face my anger or take any steps to deal with and heal my hurts, I simply cultivated and nurtured that bitter root for a decade. Every run-in with a hard-headed Christian just added to my anger. Every church fight or crisis with a disgruntled church member was just more bricks in the wall I was building between me and God, my wife, and my family.

I became depressed to the point of suicidal thoughts. I was completely shut down and simply lost any desire to do anything more than just live and survive as best we could.

I took my anger out on my family most of all. Nothing was good enough for me; especially at home. No matter what my wife and kids did to please and appease me, it was never enough. My poor wife took the brunt of my rage on more occasions than I can possibly recount and while it didn't get to physical abuse levels, the emotional and spiritual damage I caused her was as potent and destructive as anything I could have done to her physically

Because of the choices I made to embrace my anger and bitterness, I was transformed into the very people I had been fighting in these churches. Instead of choosing to deal with my anger in healthy and healing ways, I chose to take each church fight and disgruntled church member episode as further evidence of God's impotence, apathy, or mythological status. By the time I finally resigned from my pastoral position, I was convinced God was either a fabrication of man's fevered dreams or a sadistic deity that was not worth my time much less my worship.

So in 2009, after over 20 years of preparing, training, and serving God in ministry, I told Him what I thought about Him and His kingdom and where He could stick it and I walked away from it all vowing to never return to another church for the rest of my natural born life.

That was my choice and I exercised the power of that choice in as loud a manner as possible. God help the poor soul who crossed my path and tried to "preach" or instruct me in the ways of God. If you were a Christian at that time and made the mistake of letting me know about your affiliation with Christ, I was rarely gentle in sharing my opinions on the matter.

For two years I lived in a self-centered world of personal abuse. I abused my body with alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. I embraced every aspect of life that I had abstained from in my 20s and chased after the pleasures of the flesh as if the cure for every problem I had could be found in them. I made very selfish choices and powerfully destructive decisions that are still resonating in my life today; much to my shame and regret.

For two years, I did everything in my power to destroy everything God had ever given to me and in 2011, I very nearly succeeded.

God got my attention when my abuse and horrible decision making finally led my wife to conclude she and our children would be better off without me than with me. Faced with the prospect of losing my family, I was forced to do the one thing I was vehemently against doing...go to God.

My return to God started where all journeys with God start, with His Word.  I had not cracked open a Bible since my final sermon. I could not have even told you where my Bible was during all those years of my running. But, when I finally was brought to the point of decision to start the process of restoration or fully and completely sever all ties with God, my Bible appeared on the floor of my bedroom.

I remember the morning God spoke to my broken and battered heart. It was very early on a Sunday morning. As usual, I was unable to sleep and after a few hours of futile tossing and turning, I reluctantly picked up my Bible from the floor and made my way to the kitchen. I angrily tossed the book onto the table and flopped it open. In my heart, I scoffed and laughed at the entire exercise. In my mind, opening this book was a waste of time. God had not spoken to me in years and apparently could not give less of a crap about where I was or what I was suffering.

I remember the battle in my heart and mind was so strong I could literally feel my chest weighing down with the pressure of the moment. I wanted nothing more to do with God but somewhere deep within me I knew that my family's future was hinged on the decision I was about to make with Him. If there was any hope for me and my family to survive my bitterness, I would have to swallow my rage and my pride and simply look at the open Bible laying in front of me.

I looked. The Bible had opened to Lamentations. I remember laughing at the title of the book. "Good", I thought. "I'm not an ancient Jewish city besieged by Babylon so there won't be any meaningful message for me here. I'm safe."

I started reading chapter one of Lamentations and with each verse I read, I felt a sick form of vindication. I believed God, if He existed at all, did not care about me or have any desire to speak to me. I felt if He wanted to talk to me through His Word, He could easily manipulate the book to open where I needed to read it. After all, in much more peaceful times, He had done it before. But, after I read fifteen verses of the first chapter in Lamentations and saw nothing of any relevance to me in any of those verses, the shattered remains of my faith in God were ready to be permanently swept from my heart.

Then I read verse 16 and time stopped.

My wife has always had a collection of spectacular spiritual gifts. One of them is her ability to hear from God in real time. I've always been jealous of her gifts as I also wanted to hear from God in real time. She would remind me often that my communication gifts have been more dependent on the Word of God. She would tell me on many occasions that God can speak to me through the Bible more than any one else she's ever known.  I've used that gift on several occasions throughout my life and she's been more right than she could have known.

God does speak to me through His Word and He was doing it again in Lamentations 1:16.

"For these things I weep; my eye, my eye overflows with water because the comforter who should restore my life is far from me. My children are desolate because the enemy prevailed."

It was a 2x4 to my hard head. It was a sniper shot right into my hard heart. God did not pour flowery words of comfort and peace onto me. He hit me with a singular truth that I did not want to hear.

I was where I was because of me. It wasn't those hard headed church members. It wasn't the years of abuse from hard hearted Christians. I was where I was because of my decision to run from my Comforter. I was facing the desolation of my family because of my choices.  I was not in any position to be restored because I had decided to give myself to bitterness and anger instead of giving myself to Him. The enemy of my soul was winning because I had used my gift of choice very, very poorly.

I have not cried that hard in a very long time. Remorse and regret slowly turned to repentance. Like King David in front of Nathan, the full scope and magnitude of my sins had been shown to me and I was faced with what would be the ultimate decision; stay angry and die or repent and live.  Restoration or die in a wilderness of my own making.

The choice I made that morning saved my life and the life of my family.  The decision I made started me on the road to recovery and full restoration.

I say "started me on the road" because one decision in a moment of revelation does not instantly fix or transform. There is a process for restoration and healing that I am still in. Hence the title of this blog "Musings From The Kiln".

I am writing to you, not from a position of full healing and complete restoration but from a position of being restored.

I am writing to you from the Potter's Kiln and what He is teaching me about Himself and His methods of transformation are life changing...

It is about those methods that I wish to speak to you.

Our journey with God starts with the decision that Joshua placed before us. If you have chosen God as your master, there is a lot about the journey with Him that you need to know. Information I wish I had been in possession of before I ever left Silsbee, Texas. Information that would have radically changed my life and saved me and my family from a lifetime of heartache and pain.

It is my desire and prayer to pass this information on to you...

..Stay Tuned...