glenna marshall

Is it Sinful to Live in the Past?

I was juggling housework and a very energetic two-year-old yesterday morning when the phone rang. My friend on the other end, also dealing with a little one, had called with a very specific question about suffering and sin. As I’ve mulled it over, I decided to address her question publicly (with her permission).

She asked me, “Is it sinful to live in the past, even when the past wasn’t a result of poor choices but difficult circumstances not of our choosing?”

It’s a loaded question, really, and I told my friend that. When you dig into the root issues, you’re talking about God’s sovereignty and the problem of evil which are not easily explained in one blog post. And yet, there are some passages of Scripture that came to mind immediately when I considered whether or not it was sinful to dwell on a past marked by suffering. Specifically, I thought of Job and the apostle Paul.

If you’ve read my writing for very long, you know that I frequently address the topic of suffering. In one calendar year, we experienced a nearly failed adoption, the death of my grandmother, my persistent struggle with chronic illnesses, and my mother’s brain tumor and subsequent brain surgery. Because I’m a writer, I wrote about these difficulties as a way to both process and find hope. I shared them with you to help you connect the sufferings of your own life to what is true about God as revealed in Scripture. It’s the primary reason I write: to remind you to let Scripture inform your suffering, not the other way around. So often we work backwards, letting our circumstances dictate what is true about the character of God, which aids only in making God in our own image. What I hope to accomplish with my writing, speaking, and music is to point you to the Word of God first so that you can rightly view your hardships through a biblical lens that explains how God can be good, even in our suffering. Essentially, let’s let God tell us who He is. That said, I believe there are two thoughts to bear in mind when we consider our past sufferings.

The Past Can Serve Us 

My years of living with chronic pain and infertility are the vehicles I use to tell the story about God’s kindness and sovereignty, but they are just that: vehicles. The main story I tell is the one about God that comes from His Word, and the truth of the gospel must pierce every part of my testimony or else I’m just a resounding gong bemoaning the hard things that have happened to me. I’m not that unique; hard things happen to everyone. So, here is where I believe that my past experiences can serve as a place of ministry. When I stand at a podium and talk about how difficult it was to rock a baby to sleep every night for months without knowing if I could keep him, I share the ways my heart felt like broken shards of glass so that I can highlight how the faithfulness of God put all those pieces back together. When I write about the years that I cried out to the Lord for healing because of the disastrous effects of physical pain, I do so to explain how the Lord’s presence and the ministry of His Word persevered me through even the darkest nights of body and soul. The past experiences are merely the touch points for liberally handing out the greatest comfort, which is the truth of God’s unchanging, purposeful nature as seen in Scripture.

“…for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know both how to have a little, and I know how to have a lot. In any and all circumstance I have learned the secret of being content–whether well fed or hungry, whether in abundance or in need. I am able to do all things through Him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:11-13)

I want to be able to say with Paul that I’ve learned contentment in every circumstance. I’m not there yet by a long shot, but with each round of small sufferings I’ve learned that when contentment is found in Christ, then the treasure is not so much the end of specific sufferings but rather His constancy in the midst of them. He is the treasure. In this way, our sufferings serve us as ways to recount God’s past faithfulness to us. You see this pattern in Scripture frequently. The psalmists often structured their songs about suffering by beginning with despair and ending in praise. How did they make this shift? The key is that they nearly always called to mind the past faithfulness of God in order to believe in His future faithfulness. The Psalms are rich with a beautifully relatable pattern of panicking about circumstances, lamenting what has happened, remembering God’s past faithfulness, and resolving to trust Him because of that past faithfulness. I don’t believe the psalmists are “living in the past,” but rather, are allowing the constancy of God’s goodness in the past help them to persevere through present and future sufferings.

The act of remembering God’s past faithfulness is one of the recurring themes of Scripture I’ve noticed in my Bible reading over the past few years, and I believe the practice is meant to remind us who God is as we are bent toward disbelief. Or, in the case of suffering or hardships, we’re bent to let those things tell us what is true about God. Remembering God’s past faithfulness must be done by knowing Him as He’s revealed Himself to us in Scripture and looking for the ways He’s kept His Word in our past difficulties. In this way, I believe we can safely allow our past hurts to highlight God’s goodness to us and give us a place of ministry to those who are currently suffering. It’s incredibly important to keep God as the hero of His story and yours to prevent what I believe can be the sinful aspect of “living in the past.”

The Past Can Enslave Us

There is nothing more annoying than listening to someone recount all the ways they’re victimized by their circumstances. Our culture feeds this self-entitled worldview by liberally spooning out the lies that we are basically good and therefore undeserving of anything bad that happens to us, even the consequences of poor or sinful choices. Here again, we must let Scripture inform the way we think about even the most basic of truths about humanity: the heart is desperately wicked and there is no one who is good or who seeks God (Jeremiah 17:9, Romans 3:10-12).

Sometimes we suffer at the hands of our own sinfulness or at the hands of others. Sometimes we suffer because of our commitment to Christ. And sometimes we suffer and never know why. It is this last one that my friend was addressing in her question. Suffering that seems arbitrary is hard to swallow. I think of Job, who never knew what was behind the catastrophes that shattered his life. And yet, I am thankful for the account of Job’s suffering in Scripture because we are taught how to process suffering that we cannot understand or categorize.

The Job replied to the Lord: “I know that You can do anything and no plan of Yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this who conceals My counsel with ignorance?’ Surely I spoke about things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know…Therefore I take back my words and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:1-3, 6)

What was most comforting to Job in the end was not the cessation of his suffering but the strong, bold statements about the character of God–His wisdom, His authority, His universal sovereignty, even and especially in Job’s suffering. I wouldn’t say that Job “lived in his past,” but he let his experiences serve as a vehicle to grapple with what was true about God.

“Not that I have already reached the goal or am already fully mature, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus. Brothers, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead. I pursue as my goal the prize promised by Go’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus. Therefore, all who are mature should think this way.” (Philippians 3:12-15a)

Paul suffered a lot for his relentless preaching of the gospel, but I don’t see him as a victim of his past. Rather, I see a man who recounts them as a way to talk about the prize of pursuing Christ wholeheartedly. He presses forward for the treasure of Jesus, for maturity in the faith, for a citizenship anchored in heaven. The difference between living as a victim of your circumstances and rejoicing in them is again viewing God as the hero of the story. When we prop up ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, we count our sufferings as undeserved and unjust which puts us at odds with both God’s position of authority and sovereignty. Rather, I believe we should recognize that whatever God allows into our lives has first been filtered through fingers that are threading together a tapestry of redemption that we cannot fathom. Our sufferings may seem arbitrary at times, but what we don’t see is the way God may use them to display the power of the gospel to a watching a world. Avoiding self-victimization begins with trusting a good, sovereign God with our suffering. Maturity grows from the recognition that we’ve been taken hold of by Christ, not our sufferings.

Remembering God’s Faithfulness or Recounting My Miseries?

As people of the cross, the challenge lies in recounting God’s faithfulness in our past, rather than dwelling on how we felt about our suffering. Like most of our struggles as sojourners longing for our better country, we must challenge our feelings with the truth of Scripture. We miss the ways God has worked things for our good when we dwell on our miseries rather than His good purposes.

We miss the ways God has worked things for our good when we dwell on our miseries rather than His good purposes. Share on X

So is it sinful to live in the past? It can be if we allow ourselves to be enslaved to a victim mentality. In so doing, we miss the way our past sufferings can serve as a rich palette for painting a picture of the Scriptural truths about God’s unending, faithful goodness to us. But we must first endeavor to see Him as both the treasure and the hero of our past, present, and future.

 

Photo by Moritz Schumacher on Unsplash

Recommended reading: Future Grace: the Purifying Power of the Promises of God by John Piper

She is Broken, and She is Beautiful.

A week ago, the phone rang before dawn.

There’s never a good reason for calls so early, and my heart immediately began pounding when I answered the phone. A dear church member was on the other end, her voice thick with tears and panic. Her husband had died unexpectedly in the early morning hours. It was difficult to wrap my mind around this sudden news, though surely her disbelief was far greater than mine. Her husband, Ed, had stood in my house just forty-eight hours prior, working to get my furnace going on a bitterly cold day and changing out a light switch in my dining room.

I woke my pastor-husband and thrust the phone into his hands. In that moment, I pictured Ed zooming through the church halls in his wheelchair with my two-year-old in his lap the way he did on the many Sundays that Ed’s physical pain was too much for walking and standing. The first time he scooped my son up into his lap and took off in the chair, Ed’s wife was a nervous wreck. I laughed and told her not to worry. I could tell my toddler was having the time of his life. Every Sunday after church, my son had no qualms about climbing up in his buddy’s lap in the wheel chair and commanding him to go. They rode all around the church building, my son squealing when Ed would lean the chair back on two wheels or let him put on the brakes. No man’s life can be reduced to one endearing memory, but this was the scene on a loop in my head that morning.

“So if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; 

if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)

We are a small church; every absence is felt. In the nearly thirteen years I’ve shared a pew in the brick building set far off the highway, we’ve struggled to keep the ancient boiler working properly and we’ve fought to love one another through disagreements and broken fellowship. We’ve shown up when our hearts were warm and when they were cold as ice. We’ve rallied around the Scriptures, argued over certain passages, agreed on what’s most important, taken turns bearing burdens. We’ve extended forgiveness (sometimes messily) and learned to received it (always messily). We’ve learned that the power of the gospel has rewritten our DNA to bind us together as strongly as any biological family. Sometimes we love it, and sometimes, like a lot of families, we get a bit frustrated with one another. This is my up-close version of the Body of Christ.

We've learned that the power of the gospel has rewritten our DNA to bind us together as strongly as any biological family. Share on X

“Now you are the body of Christ, and individual members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27)

We’re not that unique. There are plenty of churches worldwide full of people who want to throw in the towel and check out of the Bride of Christ at some point in life. Or, maybe during many points in life. But what keeps us coming back to one another over and over and over is the connectedness we have as siblings in Christ. After all, this was God’s plan for the Church: to be a family that works together to know Him and to make Him known, to rejoice and weep when the situation calls for it, to bear one another’s burdens and to function individually in a way the exhorts corporately, to equip one another to speak the gospel often. And last week, when we lost one of our members to death, I watched the Body of Christ function in the way I’m sure Jesus meant for her to.

“But now God has placed each one of the parts in one body just as He wanted.”

 (1 Corinthians 12:18)

When it became known that Ed was in the midst of a bathroom renovation at his home when he died, those church members with gifts for construction and painting took charge the very next day. Before the extended family arrived from out of state for the funeral, the bathroom was painted and put back together with all the necessary fixtures put firmly in place. Some of the women who are gifted with meal organization and serving behind the scenes quickly put together a meal for all the extended family that would be in town. After the funeral, every casserole dish was washed and laid out for church members to take home. Those with gifts for technology put together a slide show or ran the sound board, and those of us with musical gifts took care of the music. We’d had winter weather just two days before the funeral and the church parking lot was still thick with ice. The deacons parked cars for every member and visitor, making sure no one had to walk across the ice unnecessarily. My napless two-year-old was well taken care of in the nursery by a kind volunteer. Not having to worry about car-parking or casserole dishes, my husband was free to preach the gospel to a room full of grieving hearts that needed to be healed by it.

“But now God has placed each one of the parts in one body just as He wanted. And if they were all the same part, where would the body be?  Now there are many parts, yet one body.” (1 Corinthians 12:19-20)

It doesn’t sound like a miraculous event, all of this car parking and nursery keeping, does it? It just sounds like people doing what they’re good at and taking care of business. But, perhaps familial love within the church looks like washing out casserole dishes without complaining, like parking cars on treacherous ice, like going to the funeral home with a newly widowed sister to support her as she makes life’s most difficult decisions. Perhaps the Body of Christ functions at her best when she is so busy using the individual gifts God has given her that it doesn’t look miraculous, it just makes sense.

But underneath the layers of practicality and hard work something beautiful and miraculous is happening. It’s people, broken people who’ve been mended by the gospel, showing love to one another by eagerly accepting the task they’re fitted for so another member can do the task they’re fitted for. I couldn’t play the music for the funeral and organize all the food. And I didn’t have to. There’s no need for me to be an arm when I needed to be a hand that day. And truly, the Body doesn’t need me to be an arm when there are other members who thrive on being the arms but maybe aren’t geared toward being a hand. I am free to be a hand so they don’t have to be a hand.  That’s the beauty of the Body of Christ. Every part is needed, and God has gifted us for every need.

“But desire the greater gifts. And I will show you an even better way.” (1 Corinthians 12:31)

I’ve not always celebrated the way that God has set up the functions of the Church. For many years, I’ve attended church services with gritted teeth and little else. Church ministry is hard stuff, and it is easy to become embittered toward the people God has placed in your spiritual family. But that’s the heart of the issue: these are the people God has placed in your spiritual family. And the call in 1 Corinthians 13, after all the instructions about serving and using our gifts both individually and corporately, is to love the spiritual family serving with you. Love is patient and kind and forgetful when it comes to past wrongs. Love forgives quickly and seeks humility. Love endures. Love is the impetus for grieving with a sister, for washing dishes, for making sure the heat is working.

Beneath the practical outworking of our individual gifts is that enduring affection for the family of God.  And when we get tired of serving or impatient with one another, we dig down a little deeper for the ultimate motivating factor: love for our Father, the One who is knitting us all together with His unfailing, unbreakable love.

The Church is broken because she is made of broken people. But she is also beautiful because she has been healed by a beautiful Savior. I find pieces of my sanctification in serving alongside the members of the broken and beautiful Bride of Christ. He will surely present her pure and spotless before the Father one bright, glorious day.

The Church is broken because she is made of broken people. But she is also beautiful because she has been healed by a beautiful Savior. Share on X

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

The Strongest Thread

It was mid-October a year ago when my mom had brain surgery to remove a tumor from her left frontal lobe. Hovering over the place where her speech and emotions live, the tumor had grown quickly enough to cause a seizure and lost time. I remember how nervous we were when it all happened on a night nobody expected, how my mom and I laid in the hospital bed together and tried to piece together what her recovery would be like. And then there was the surgery, the good report, the way we sat quietly waiting for enough hours to pass to see what the side effects might be.

I remember how my dad and my aunt and I all slept in the CCU waiting room, and how one really doesn’t sleep in a waiting room but waits while pretending to sleep. I remember the woman sitting next to me and the odd way she talked to herself while trying to get comfortable on the teal vinyl chair for the night. Her teenage son had overdosed the night before. There was a family in another corner of the overnight waiting room whose patriarchal member was suddenly diagnosed with late stage esophageal cancer, and I remember my aunt, a former ICU nurse, telling me his prognosis was poor. I remember how we lined up, all of us, at the doors of the ICU and waited for the nurses to buzz us in during visiting hours. What brave smiles we all wore, and how we took any little sign of improvement as proof that all would be well. There was that lady whose husband had had a massive stroke. “They told us he said a few words!” she said with a beaming smile. It was unlikely that he would walk again, but he had said a word or two, and that was enough for hope and resilience to blossom on her face.

The man in the room next to my mom’s never had a visitor.  I thought about sitting in his room and praying for him while he slept. I wish that I had. I don’t know why I didn’t. I will never forget his brown toes peeking out from beneath the sterile hospital blanket. Someone give him some socks, I kept thinking. He needs some socks.

During visiting hours a couple of classical violinists came and played hymns for the ICU patients, and I stood there by the nurse’s desk with tears in my eyes, the non-patient who didn’t know how to reconcile all the hope and grief living in that hospital corridor.

Less than a week later, I sat outside with my mom on the deck behind her house. I made some spiced tea for us, the Tennessee weather cooling off while we sat and watched the squirrels empty the backyard bird-feeder of its contents. I pretended to read but really I just watched my mom. She looked anxious. Do you want a book or a magazine, I asked her. No, she said, adjusting the headscarf I’d bought for her to wear post-surgery. She picked up her phone and then set it down without looking at it. No, I’m just trying to organize my thoughts. They’re always going off in weird directions. I can’t catch them.

We watched TV, she slept a lot, my dad and I cataloged every strange thing she did and googled “brain surgery recovery” when she wasn’t looking. There wasn’t a lot to recovery besides waiting and worrying and praying.

When I traveled home to my husband and kids in Missouri, I tried to process all that had happened that week, that month, that year. I couldn’t remember a harder year. And yet, my mother is fine. Healthy, thriving, nothing to remind us much of a brain surgery or the weeks of wondering what our family would look like when it was over. I sent her a text yesterday: Happy brain tumor removal anniversary!

Last week I dreamed of my grandmother. She died nearly two years ago in January. We buried her right after a snowstorm. In my dream she was exactly the way I remember her best—before Alzheimer’s, before she stopped speaking, before she didn’t know us, before she shrank down to the final version of her earthly self. In the middle of a night last week she was laughing the way she did when she squinted her eyes and showed all her teeth, as if she knew the joke was on her and she was glad to be laughing about it. That’s the way I remember her, the version that shows up in my dreams from time to time and reminds me that maybe she’s laughing that big in heaven with Jesus, but the joke is clearly on us because we’re not there to see her tuck her chin down and laugh with her eyes closed. When I dream of her, I always feel happy but wake up with a knot in my throat.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been remembering and writing. In some ways, I thought writing a book would be easy. It’s just communicating what’s true. How hard can it be? Turns out, it involves a lot of sitting in front of my laptop and watching my tears puddle on the table. I have unspooled the thread of my life to examine all the ways God has been near, and it has left me breathless with thankfulness. There is a good portion of loss, a surprising amount of grief. But there is so much grace that I could never find a vessel large enough to contain it.

I have wondered why at times the Lord allowed certain grief and at other times only brushes with it. Why did my mother leave the ICU with a full recovery ahead of her but the man next door was unlikely to wake up? Why do we have thirteen years of infertility attached to our histories? Why do my husband, sister, and I all have lifelong chronic illnesses? Why did we get to keep our son? Why did my grandmother suffer from Alzheimer’s cruel grip for more than six years? Why didn’t we get fired from church ministry a decade ago? Why am I sitting here free from physical pain when my life used to be characterized by it?

Why are some days suffering and others grace?

Why is it so hard sometimes to tell the difference between the two?

It’s good to lay out the past and remember where you’ve been. In detailing the gifts and griefs and the blurry line between the two, I find one constant. The steadfast love of the Lord is the thread that stitches together my past, present, and future. He’s sewing something beautiful, something that’s connected to a much larger tapestry. It’s hard to trace the pattern. I can’t even see it most days. But I know He’s pulling together the threads of joy and suffering in your life and mine, and He’s continuing the story He planned before anything existed. On the days when the thread looks frayed and faded or maybe pulled so tight it could snap in two, this is when we remember that the One who’s weaving together our future has never lost a thread, never dropped a stitch, never made a mistake. His story will be good no matter what, and He will use the pattern that draws our eyes to the unifying thread the most. He will use what will keep our eyes attentive to His presence and His steadfastness the most.

Maybe it involves long nights in a hospital waiting room, or maybe months making trips to a cancer treatment center. Maybe the pattern includes a pregnancy test that just won’t turn positive. Or a loneliness that presses your chest with grief every day of your life.

Sometimes the pattern feels like the wrong one. Wrong design, Lord. Pick another template. I’ve said as much to Him before. This was not a good plan, Lord. I would have done it differently. But my plans would never have involved me laying face down on the floor in my living room pleading with the Creator of the universe to be near to me. So, I never would have seen Him answer that prayer in a thousand different ways if not for the grief and pain that put me on the floor in the first place. I think it comes down to what dictionary I’m using to define good.

Here’s what I know: the Lord never withholds what is good from His children (Ps. 84:11). He will never keep from us anything that would have been for our good. He even uses what is evil or broken for good because He is the Redeemer (Gen. 50:20, Rom. 8:28). If He has said no to some dreams or ended other ones, it is because He has seen the finished project and knows the way the seams should run. We can trust the One who designed the pattern. When He seems to be withholding good things, He’s giving us everything we need. When He closes a chapter, He’s giving us everything we need.

It’s Him, friends. What we need is always Him, and He always meets that need.

His love is high and deep and wide. It fills in the thin places where our doubts about His goodness thrive. When I look back at the story He’s written thus far, I know I can trust Him with the parts I haven’t read yet. His nearness, the way He has loved us with His nearness—it is the constant. It is the thread that holds it all together.

During the days of my mother’s brain tumor diagnosis and surgery, she and I came to study Psalm 139:5 separately. Neither of us knew that the other one was holding tightly to the same verse.

“You hem me in, behind and before, and You lay Your hand upon me.”

I can’t think of a more assuring promise than to know that the Lord has completely surrounded us with Himself.

There is no stronger, more binding thread.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

There’s Blessing in the Longing

I want to run away from these words.  I hit “publish” so you wouldn’t feel alone when your hopes rise and fall in a tumble of confusing might-have-beens.

It’s embarrassing to admit after thirteen years of one-lined tests that sometimes I still find myself entertaining a glimmer of hope that my situation might change. It’s a small hope, nearly nothing really. But that doesn’t seem to matter. It will still swell and grow and cloud my memory of the way things have always been. I spent a week wondering if maybe everything I’d fought to squelch down over the past decade would find room to breathe in the way of Sarah or Rachel. Hannah. Elizabeth. Every alarm went off in my head—don’t do it. Don’t unlock that door. Hope doesn’t live there.

But I did it anyway. And now I’ve added an extra padlock to the door because the answer was no. The answer is always no. And deep down, I know that the answer will likely always be no because for some reason I cannot fathom, God is more glorified this way, in this continual no. I pressed down the feeling of disappointment as I tucked my kids into bed last night. There’s no reason or room for complaining here in this house where we tuck in our answered prayers with comforting regularity.

I just wanted to see You do it, I told the Lord later when I climbed into bed. I turned this way and that trying to find a position that lessened the familiar grip of physical pain clenching my lower back. It’s not that You can’t. I know You can. Why wouldn’t You do it? It’s not like it’s hard for You. I just wanted to see You do it.

How can a thirteen-year-old wound still reopen with such presence? I thought it was closed up tight. Most of the time it is. So when it opens after such a long time, I’m caught off guard by the way it rubs against my faith. I’m surprised that the remembered pain is just exactly the way it feels now. I turned over on my side and wedged a pillow between my knees to relieve the pressure of a painful back spasm that, to be honest, hurt a lot less than the ache in my heart. I turned out the light and prayed for sleep to come before the sadness swallowed me whole.

Morning dawned gray but not without mercy. I sat on the couch during the early morning hours with my coffee cup and my Bible. I pondered the words of Paul as I read all the way through Ephesians. I pictured him writing from jail. His chains were for our good, he said, and he was right. We needed him to sit in jail and pen the words about who we used to be before Jesus made our hearts new. We needed him to sit in one place and encourage us to be who we are, who we really are in Christ. Like his original readers, we need the reminder that God has given us Himself and that He is always enough.

Maybe the tears on my face haven’t dried up just yet. Maybe the no still stings as much at thirty-six as it did at twenty-four. Maybe the Lord’s path for me will never include the thing I only pray for when I think no one is looking. Maybe a year from now I’ll still feel disappointed in the no. Maybe.

But this I know to be true: God has blessed me with a lot of physical blessings as well as  every spiritual blessing. He has lavished His love upon me. He has breathed life into my dead body and resurrected my dead heart. He has secured my inheritance.

He withholds no good thing from His children, He says (Ps. 84:11). So how does that measure up when the good things I’ve longed for still go missing? If He had satisfied my every physical longing with every physical blessing, I might not feel the hollowness inside, might not learn to name it. Having every desire met might distort my vision of what it is I need. It might keep me from seeing just how much I need Him. Him. The Giver, not the gifts.

There’s blessing in the longing.

I feel like that’s the most upside-down sentence I’ve ever written, so I’ll say it again to make sure I believe it: There’s blessing in the longing.

Longing reminds me that the things I want in this life are unlikely to fill my heart. Good things, even, can turn my heart away from loving Christ the most. If their absence requires me to keep cracking open this heart of mine before the Lord and letting Him tell me what’s most important, then let them be absent. If it keeps sending me back to the Word for what I need the most, let the test always carry a single line.

There is blessing in the longing, it’s true. Oh, it hurts like someone’s bulldozed your imagined future until all that’s left is rubble and chaff. It hurts. But the ache, the longing, the desire for something to be sealed up is an internal reminder that what we long for the most is the One who spoke our very lives into being.

It’s always been Him beneath the ache. It will always be Him.

There is blessing in the longing, it’s true. Oh, it hurts like someone’s bulldozed your imagined future until all that’s left is rubble and chaff. It hurts. But the ache, the longing, the desire for something to be sealed up is an internal reminder that what we long for the most is the One who spoke our very lives into being. It’s always been Him beneath the ache. It will always be Him.

I don’t know what your heart is longing for today. I kind of hate the fact that the things I think I’ve conquered can pull me back to a place of mental reorganization. I slide the file labeled “infertility” back to its corner, hoping I don’t have to pull it out anytime soon. Maybe you feel that way about the thing you’ve just thought of without even trying. Didn’t take long to conjure up that void, did it?

Here’s the good news: it’s not really a void. It’s a reminder.

Paul says in Ephesians 3 that because of Jesus’ work at the cross we “may be filled with all the fullness of God.” So you see, it’s not really a void. Unmet desires make it feel like a void, but you can’t be empty when you’re filled with the fullness of God.

No, you can’t be empty when you’re filled with the fullness of God.

No, you can’t be empty when you’re filled with the fullness of God.  Share on X

 

 

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What Do You Say to the Suffering?

“It was suicide,” she said. Her eyes swam with tears that leaked down her cheeks while she explained what had happened earlier this year.

I whispered, “I’m so, so sorry,” and wrung my hands uselessly the way you do when there is nothing that will make a situation any better and you know it. The word, suicide, still hung thickly in the air between us. I wanted to swipe it away. She smiled tremulously, though, and said, “But I have a strong faith. And I know the Lord is with me.” I asked her name and told her I would pray for her. Even as she walked away, I prayed the God of all comfort would keep her heart soft while she grieves. I prayed that that strong faith of hers would remain tenacious, tough, determined.

Half a minute later, I found myself in another conversation with another suffering woman. Her unidentified physical pain sounded a lot like the pain I had described an hour earlier from the piano bench where I played the songs God had given me when my faith was as weak as my broken-down body. Again, tears that come from silent suffering threatened to spill over when the woman in front of me found a thread of hope in my story. There was relief on her face, too, in finding that she wasn’t the only one.

I love what I do. To sit at a piano and tell the story of God’s faithfulness to me in suffering as I weave together Scripture and stories with songs–it’s like rereading a book someone wrote about your life and recognizing the generous, faithful Benefactor for the first time every time. It’s thrilling to get to the denouement, the climax when the Hero rescues by simply being there. It’s falling in love with Him every time you tell the story.

I could not ask for a more fulfilling job or ministry.

But to be honest, even as one who has suffered a fair amount of physical and emotional pain, I never know quite what to say after the show. When the concert is over and I’m face to face with someone who found their story in mine, I stutter a bit and fight down the insecurity of answering the stark question of grief in front of me. My pain seems small and inconsequential in comparison to the one who has suffered more, or more recently.

I remind myself in those grief-soaked moments, though, that pain is pain and if it weren’t for the sleepless nights and anxiety-laced prayers for relief, I wouldn’t have anything to say to the woman in front of me. She just wants to be heard. To be seen. She knows I can’t alleviate her suffering. She knows I can’t promise it will go away. That’s not why she’s standing here with copies of my album clutched to her chest and tears standing in her eyes.

Clearly, she heard me when I hit that F#minor chord and confessed that I need to know that God was holding on to me in the midst of my pain. She heard the transition to D Major when I said that Jesus’ strength overrode my doubt. The weight of God’s presence in my pain resonated with her more than any chord progression ever could. The Lord was with my in my suffering. She needed to know it was true for her, too.

Whatever you say to the suffering person in your life, make it your priority to communicate that they never suffer alone. Jesus' solitary suffering at the cross means that God will never abandon us in our sorrow and pain. Never.

What do you say to the suffering?

I’m no expert, but here’s what I’ve learned over the past decade as one who has suffered a little and who seeks to minister from pain.

Here’s what’s not helpful:

Don’t promise that suffering will go away, that everything will be okay. Don’t coat grief in spiritual platitudes about the future. Don’t make promises or guarantees you have no business making, no matter how emotionally loaded the moment might be. When the silence between you is thick with awkwardly expressed grief, don’t rush to smother it with bright words. While the absence of suffering in heaven can be a comfort, it isn’t always so comforting a thought at first. Heaven can feel a long way away in the grip of pain and loss.

Here’s what is helpful:

Speak from your pain to her pain. Comfort with the comfort that’s comforted you. Remember that God is the God of all comfort who “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves received from God” (2 Corinthians 1:4).

Simply say, “I’m sorry you’re having to go through this.” And if she needs to be reminded, put a hand on her shoulder and speak the comfort of what was won at the cross: “You’re not alone in this. The Lord never leaves your side.”

Don’t hold back your own tears. Never hold back your own tears for another’s grief. Strive to be Job’s friends on their first (and best) week. Sit with her in tears and ashes. Later you’ll get to speak truth your friend, family member, co-worker who’s struggling to hold on to faith in the midst of pain or tragedy. But first, grieve quietly with them. Lift up a corner of their pain and wear it on your own shoulders. Walk around in it and see how heavy it is. Let him grieve as often as he needs to, let her recount the same story as many times as it takes for her to process it.

When my infant son was nearly lost to me, I sat on a couch across from a kind friend who stopped by to see how I was really doing.  I needed to be gut-level honest with someone that day: “I know God is good;  I know He will still be good on the other side of this. I know I will still believe in His goodness. What I’m afraid of is the process of loss. I don’t know how to come through this and still be me. I’m afraid of who I will be when this is over.”

My friend–she just listened. Nodded. Looked me in the eye through her own tears, and nodded. She knew that I knew what was true. She also knew I needed to be heard and seen that day, that I needed someone else to hear the words that scratched their way out of my broken heart. So she sat still and heard me. Saw me. Reminded me with her presence that the Lord also heard and saw me, that He was with me. A person who simply grips my hands with tears in her eyes says a whole lot more to me about God’s faithfulness than a quippy reminder that “God’s got this!” Mostly, we already know God’s got this. We just need to unload a bit of the burden we’re carrying.

Feel, Christian.

Empathy is everything here. Feel the grief of the person standing in front of you in the church lobby. Own the pain of the person standing next to you in the pew. Be silent but present next to the hospital bed. Weep with the one who is weeping. Hold them up as they falter in their faith. Many times I have prayed over a suffering friend the beautiful words of Psalm 90:15 because I know one day when we see Jesus face to face, it will be true a million times over: “Make us rejoice for as many days as You have humbled us, for as many years as we have seen adversity.”

In pain, sadness, loss, and grief, I want to suffer well. I want the watching world to be confounded by the fierce grip of Christ on my tattered faith. But that doesn’t mean that the act of suffering is easy or enjoyable. It’s so hard. And that’s what I said to the woman who was still reeling from her brother’s suicide. It’s so hard. Simple words, but necessary acknowledgment.

Maybe it’s the most obvious statement in the world that suffering is painful, but we must have patience for those in pain. And we must make suffering a community project.

Sometimes it isn't so much what you say to the suffering that communicates so much about God's faithfulness. It's your proximity.

Never alone.

Whatever you say to the suffering person in your life, make it your priority to communicate that they never suffer alone. Jesus’ solitary suffering at the cross means that God will never abandon us in our sorrow and pain. Never.

Remind your friend of that with your presence, your grief-sharing, your love, your hope.

Sometimes it isn’t so much what you say to the suffering that communicates God’s faithfulness. It’s your proximity.

Sometimes it isn't what you say that communicates God's faithfulness. It's your proximity. Share on X

 

Photo cred: Alex Jones and Ben White at Unsplash

Future Discipleship Part 2: God’s Part in Our Perseverance

When my husband and I first settled into rural church ministry twelve years ago, I was a little unprepared for the pace of life offered by the farming community where we had made our new home. We had left a much larger college town buzzing with traffic and commutes, a life where I’d had a job and goals and lots of church commitments. My first few months as a pastor’s wife in a small town surrounded by farmland was an education in listening and learning the rhythms of life in a small church in a small town.

Those days taste of summer in my memory. We moved into the church parsonage during the sweltering heat of July; a few neighbors and church members introduced themselves with offerings of local produce, sweet corn being the preeminent housewarming gift of choice.

My young pastor-husband chose to take our congregation through the prayers of the apostle Paul during mid-week prayer services that first summer in Southeast Missouri—a gesture of hope from a twenty-seven-year-old seminary graduate to his new flock. What has stayed with me from those warm summer evenings at church are the sincere prayers of the church members whose names we were just learning. Most significant at the time were plaintive petitions for rain, of all things. In the humility that comes from knowing one can do nothing about the weather was a significant sincerity in those requests for rain for the crops. These weren’t merely general blanket prayers for a reprieve from summer’s heat. These were genuine prayers stemming from love and concern for one another: there were farmers in the congregation. While I listened to the prayers of these people I barely knew, I began to understand what they believed about God. Our prayers offer an overview of our theology, and the habit of praying together is a disarming way to get to know someone.

 

He will do the work of perseverance while we do the work of persevering

 

I’ve been studying Ephesians 1 over the last couple of weeks, and surprisingly I got stuck in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian church family in verses 15-19 (that’s not normally where people get stuck in chapter 1, by the way). I felt a pull to stay here for a few days:

This is why, since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I never stop giving thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray the that God our our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, would give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the perception of your mind may be enlightened so you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the glorious riches of His inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power to us who believe, according to the working of His vast strength.

Ephesians 1:15-19 (HCSB)

Paul prayed that God would enlighten the eyes of the believers in Ephesus so they would understand the richness of God and grasp the following:

1) the hope of God’s calling

2) the glorious riches of His inheritance

3) the immeasurable greatness of His power

Paul’s prayer teaches us a lot about God.

What kept me in this short pastoral prayer was the integral involvement of God in each layer of Paul’s petition. These gifts Paul prays for: hope of the calling, riches of inheritance, greatness of power all seem to be mentioned and prayed for in order to encourage the Ephesian believers to continue in the faith by remembering Who is behind it. They could function as Christians because of the hope they have in God’s calling on their lives unto salvation, they could set their eyes on things above when they remembered that they belong to God, and they would be able to persevere because of the immeasurable greatness of God’s power.

God’s calling, God’s inheritance, God’s power. But all bestowed upon His people by Him because He is faithful to persevere His children to completion. The hope of God’s calling them to faith in Christ (discussed earlier in chapter 1), the glorious riches of belonging to God as His inheritance with the guarantee of a future with Him forever (1:13), and God’s immeasurably great power on which the believer can lean according to the working of His vast strength. In his commentary on Ephesians, Peter T. O’Brien says that “the Christian growth of [Paul’s] readers, as well as the furtherance of [Paul’s] own ministry of the gospel, is wholly dependent upon the living God, who gives generously to His children when they call upon Him in prayer.”*

Paul’s prayer also tells us about God’s part in our perseverance.

In my last post I made the point that our daily Bible intake functions as a sort of deposit for our future discipleship. What our hearts are absorbing now from the Scriptures will equip us for the future. I believe that with all of my heart, and I’ve known it to be true in my own life. Equally true is the possibility that we will be ill prepared for suffering when we’ve ignored the call to spend time with the Lord, when we’ve avoided meeting Him in His Word. I believe that to be true because I’ve lived it, unfortunately.

That said, we shouldn’t approach personal Bible study as a formula with which to conquer all the hard knocks life may offer us. Delving into our sacred text is not done for the sake of acquiring knowledge to win an argument or for turning passages into some kind of scriptural talisman with which to shield ourselves from suffering. Our goal in opening our Bibles is always to know God and to make Him known. Perseverance is born from that. Hope is born from that. Security, assurance, help, healing, love, wisdom—these things come in time spent knowing our God, but they come under the umbrella of knowing Him first and foremost. They are fringe benefits, so to speak. Considerable, weighty, lavishly given fringe benefits that are necessary for our growth as believers, but ultimately they stem from first staring intently at the character of God.

He is the one who pulls our hearts to faith, who promises His presence continually (and keeps good on that promise continually). He is the one who holds up our chins and reminds us that He will do this thing. He’s already done it, really. He will do the work of perseverance while we do the work of persevering. It’s Him working in us, according to His vast, vast strength. It’s a kindness that He involves us at all. After all, what is man that He is mindful of him, the son of man that He looks after him? (Ps. 8:4)

He will do the work of perseverance while we do the work of persevering. Share on X

The Author and Sustainer of life has made sure to bend low with reliable regularity to persevere us through suffering, through trials, through temptations. He has guaranteed His work on the cross. Why wouldn’t we endeavor to know Him daily? Why wouldn’t we get up each morning to pile up reminders of His involvement in our sanctification for the days that dawn bleak with doubt? Why wouldn’t we dwell on His faithfulness now when we will always need to be reminded of it?

The pastoral prayers in the New Testament always remind me of those early days in ministry when we listened to Paul’s requests for the first century churches as a primer for praying together as a 21st century church. I thought we had a lot to teach our church, a lot of wisdom to share. I couldn’t imagine all I would have to learn. When I listen to my brothers and sisters pray now, some twelve years later, I’ve learned to listen for what I can learn about God. The pleas from my siblings for grace, for healing, for salvation of friends or family, for provision—these prayers teach me a lot about the character of God. He is as involved in our sanctification as much now as He was in the church at Ephesus in AD 61. Listening to the prayers of other believers encourages me to press on in faith. What they’ve soaked in from their own time with the Lord in Scripture comes pouring out in petitions and pleas that speak of the necessary involvement of God in every corner of our sanctification.

What a relief it is to know that perseverance is a community project.

 

*O’Brien, Peter T. The Letter to the Ephesians. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1999.

Photo Cred: Alexandre Godreau with Unsplash

Future Discipleship: Perseverance Now Means Perseverance Later

A few hot summers ago, the first week of August found me in the early stages of marathon training. For accountability’s sake, I had already signed up for the St. Jude Marathon in Memphis, Tennessee, and paid my registration fee. My financial investment was the impetus for faithful training.

Immersing myself in the Bible now is not only for today's benefit. It is for tomorrow and next week, next month and a year from now.

I’d spent the previous year working up my daily mileage, and I had (like many runners) become a bit obsessive about mile time and long runs. Running a marathon seemed to be the crowning achievement for any committed runner, and I was eager to have that 26.2 mile finisher’s medal hanging alongside my other 5K and 10K medals.

Every evening I scrutinized my training schedule for the next day’s mileage or cross-training activity. Before going to bed, I laid out my running clothes, filled my hand held water bottle and popped it in the freezer, packed my running belt with salted caramel flavored energy gel (the high point of every run), and charged my iPod and Garmin watch.

Running in the intense, humid summer heat began to take its toll on my long runs. Once I hit 7 and 8 mile runs, I routinely suffered blinding headaches for about 48 hours afterward. After doing some research, I discovered that low electrolytes and low sodium were the likely culprits. I began to change my approach to my long runs by preparing the day before. In addition to normal hydration, I added about three bottles of water spiked with electrolyte/sodium tablets on the days before a run longer than 6 miles. I began to notice a difference after my long runs immediately after making this change.  Gone were the headaches! I also noticed overall improvement in endurance and mile time.

It always felt odd to be drinking so much salty electrolyte water on a rest day, but it helped tremendously with my long runs. Each time I did this, I was making an investment in a future event. I was doing something today for my physical benefit tomorrow.

Spiritual disciplines work much like this. 

This hot, first week of August I’m not doing any marathon training, but I’m reminding myself that what I’m investing in my spiritual life now will aid me later when my reserves feel low. Immersing myself in the Bible now is not only for today’s benefit. It is for tomorrow and next week, next month and a year from now.

I’ve lived through seasons of trial where my spiritual tank was so low that the bucket I sent down for endurance kept coming back up empty. I had not prepared for trials–or even just normal life events–because I’d spent almost zero time nurturing my relationship with Christ the weeks, months, and even years prior. When sorrow struck, I scrambled for something solid to hold on to. I grasped for a promise from Scripture that would help me persevere, but the truth was I didn’t know the Scriptures well enough to be certain of any promise.

Now, this is not to say that the Holy Spirit can’t still encourage and prod you forward in perseverance when you’ve not spent time arming yourself with truth. God is greater than our hearts and is full of grace and kindness. He teaches us to trust Him while we waffle and scramble for surety. But if I had spent time loving the Lord by knowing Him in His Word I could have enjoyed His nearness in suffering rather than doing so much exhausting scrambling just for survival.

Paralyzed but Prepared

There are days when climbing out of bed before 6 am feels like war. It is war, in a manner of speaking. Our enemy would love to derail our efforts to commune with Christ, and he does it by whispering lies when the shrill ring of the alarm jolts us from restful sleep. You need your rest. You can skip today. You’re not really getting much from your study right now anyway. It doesn’t hurt to take a break now and then.

I’ve listened to some of those lies this summer. I’ve let the clock dictate my commitment to faithfulness, and I’ve felt it’s numbing effects. Trouble is, those “breaks” turn into seasons really fast. Feeding a dry spell with a break from spiritual disciplines may feel like the right answer, but it will never serve you well when pain and suffering show up on your doorstep unannounced. On a broken, fallen planet, suffering seems sure until Christ returns or takes us home. So, we can be paralyzed when the phone rings with devastating news, or we can paralyzed and prepared for the moment life seems to fall apart. I’ve found that the paralyzing feeling comes no matter what, but I’ve seen unbelievable differences in whether or not my heart has been primed with the truths of God’s good character and sovereign hand.

What helps me fight the allure of the snooze button is knowing that my bleary-eyed Scripture reading in the morning, even when it feels like work, is not just beneficial to me now. The prayerful conversation with the Lord, the outlines of Scripture passages, the asking of hard questions, the work of study is also beneficial for my future. It is a stockpiling of truth and strength for days of grief and loss that are as sure the rising sun on an earth that groans for reconciliation.

Perseverance now means perseverance later.

When you’re feeling like your time in the Word is dusty and dry and not worth the time you could have been getting some extra sleep, remember that now is when God is teaching you to trust Him with your future. Now is the time He’s given you to fill your well with belief that Jesus’ work on the cross was enough to save you, that God’s goodness doesn’t waver, that the one who follows Christ is secure in the palm of His hand. Eventually, dry seasons turn into flourishing spring times of the soul. But it might take a long view of perseverance to get there.

Stay the course, friends. Guard your time in the Word with protectiveness if you must. Every morning that you show up  to meet with the Lord, you can know with confidence that He meets you there. He is faithful and ever-present.

Together, you are investing in your future discipleship.

 

For more on working through a spiritual dry spell, read this.

 (*For those interested: I ended up falling on a run during my training, which resulted in an injury. Thinking it was a strained muscle, I unwisely continued to train and ran 200 painful miles before finding out I had been running on a stress fracture in my femur. [Insert facepalm emoji here.] I was ordered 3 months physical rest by my doctor and had to quit marathon training. I’m sure there is another spiritual analogy in there somewhere, but someday I hope to reclaim my training and add that finisher’s medal to my small collection!) 

Photo Cred: Arek Adeoye for Unsplash

I Prayed for Healing. He Answered with His Presence.

These are slow summer days, stretching long at the ends from first light to last. We drink them in deep swallows, savoring the absence of hurried schedules. We sleep later than normal and wear pajamas longer than we should. The hours unspool without our notice or care. It seems a luxury. I’ve not had such a peaceful summer in years, and I couldn’t put my finger on the reason until I remembered the shroud of pain that used to wrap me up tight with fear and misery. The familiar heaviness of July heat has settled over our low corner of Missouri, a wool blanket dipped in boiling water and hung out to steam and dry above our heads. It’s hard to get a good breath when the air is so hot and wet. In being well these past 12 months, I’ve nearly forgotten the summers past when I struggled to separate the heat of a southern summer with the fire that encased my spine. It was always hot, inside and out.

Two summers past, I was on the brink of a breakdown. My health had deteriorated to the point I was losing my hair, struggling to remember things, sleeping only an hour or two at night, wrestling with pain like it was my full-time job. Physically, I was wrecked. I was also losing my grip on faith. I wasn’t just sick, I was heartsick. My husband and I were walking through a season of doubt about our vocational ministry while also watching our fourth year in the adoption process come to a fruitless close–a lot of loose ends, frayed and pulling at my confidence.

I was sorely tempted to hold hands with bitterness. She’d been a longtime companion, bitterness. But she is a difficult root to kill, the kind of plant nobody wants in their garden, a tangle of vines that spreads with ferocity. Bitterness is the kudzu of discontentment. At its best, kudzu cloaks the world in greenery, turning trees into stooped giants with draping, viney arms. It kills everything underneath, but it’s not until winter when we see the degree of damage. Kudzu inhabits what it covers. And I know from a ten year contention with it that bitterness works the same, inhabiting the heart with tightly wound tendrils that suffocate life and light.

I was afraid of the kudzu effects of bitterness again in my life. Desperate for health, for relief, for purpose, for contentment, I turned with halting steps and faltering prayers to Christ. I hesitated because it seemed too much. My health. My complete inability to have another child, no matter what avenue I tried. My internal wrestling with a decade of failing church ministry. The dizzying effects of everything at once.

The believing part of me knew Jesus was the one to run to, but the doubting part of me couldn’t hold His gaze. I was Peter sinking in the Sea of Galilee, unable to take my eyes off the choppy, churning waves. But Jesus was Jesus, chastising my weak faith while also holding on to me. His grip was stronger than bitterness, His gaze steadier than mine.

His strength overrode my weakness.

He held on to me while the pain engulfed my spine, when every rejection email from the adoption agency landed arrived, when Sunday morning rolled around and I dreaded being the pastor’s wife, when doubt felt bigger than faith.

How did it happen, you ask. How did He hold on to you?

And I would answer that He did it by walking the floors with me in the middle of the night that summer of heat and pain. Pain was the word reverberating through my body, throbbing in time with my pulse. Pain, pain, pain. 

But there was also Christ. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Reminding me of the words He’d said, of the promises He’d made, reminding me until His words were louder than my pain.

I am with you always. (Mt. 28:20)

I will never leave or forsake you. (Dt. 31:6, Heb. 13:5)

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. (Is.43:2)

I will be with you in trouble. (Ps. 91:15)

Nothing can separate you from My love, not things present or things to come. (Rom. 8:35, 38)

While I waited long for healing, for a child, for some kind of purpose, He held fast to me. He did it in every turn of the page in my worn Bible. He did it when I struggled to pin down the words to pray. He was present. Visibly, no. But in every way I needed, He was present because He has promised to be, even (and maybe especially) in pain and doubt. In the white-fisted vise of pain, I learned that Christ could sustain me. He could hold my gaze and teach me to hold His. He could deepen my faith when He reminded me who He was. I could walk on water because He was with me.

  I remember the way I called out to the Lord to heal me and the way He responded by being with me instead.  

 I wasn’t healed that summer. My pain worsened, actually. It would be another year before I would begin to experience pain’s release. It slipped away slowly, hesitant to leave me, I guess. And then one morning at the beginning of last summer, I woke with a jolt and scrambled to name the startling absence I felt. It was nothing. I felt nothing. Instead of a body on fire, there was just a body. I turned to the clock in a room bathed in bright morning light and realized I’d slept all night for the first time in six years.

These past few weeks, I’ve let myself remember those days fogged up with heat and humidity and pain and doubt. I’ve had a bit of a flare-up, and while the ache settles into my joints, there’s a stifling muscle memory there, too. I feel those surges of anxiety that used to steal my breath when I tried to imagine a future shrouded in lifelong pain. I remember the dark, still nights and my splintering sanity. I remember the song I sang to keep me grounded.

I remember the way I called out to the Lord to heal me and the way He responded by being with me instead.  

I remember the words He spoke long ago that throb with truth in time with my pulse, whether there’s pain or just the memory of it. His words of promise and presence. Words I needed then, words I need now. Words that remind me that He is enough on these long, summer days that shimmer with the heat of pain and faithfulness.

My pain and God’s faithfulness. I am not sure I could know one without the other.

 

 Photo cred: Jake Givens with Unsplash

Be Faithful with Small

My husband and I have lived in a rural part of Missouri for just about twelve years now. Since that sweltering summer day in 2005 when we unloaded the moving truck, we’ve been ministering at the same church in the same small town for all this time. We’ve both left our 20’s and nearly our 30’s here. We’ve dealt with financial crises, ministry burn out, church dysfunction, open-ended infertility, chronic health conditions, fractured relationships, and innumerable sleepless nights with the weight of a thousand tears pressing down on us. We’ve wrestled with our failures and wondered if we can ever rise above them.

We’ve felt broken down for a long time here in this little farming community.

But—

We’ve also doubled our family by adopting two boys, replacing sorrow upon sorrow with joy upon joy. We’ve celebrated birthdays and anniversaries, and rejoiced over big and small accomplishments. We’ve learned to lean into marriage when the going gets rough, and we’ve grown up into married adults who spend our rare evenings out talking about all the things we still want to do and be when we grow up. We’ve watched broken hearts heal and we’ve seen lost souls found, and we’ve wept on our knees with troubled parents for wandering children. We’ve learned that what we thought we knew we didn’t really know that well and that what works in one context may not work in another. We’ve learned that passion is a gift to be treasured and not a tool with which to bludgeon. We’ve sighed in gratitude when an anonymous check has graced our mailbox on more than one desperate occasion. We’ve sat in silence while trying to take in the ways the Lord has gone above and beyond in His expression of goodness to us. We’ve remembered with relief that the gospel is the truest thing we know

In the middle of the brokenhearted weight of ministry and its overwhelming portrait of grace is a tension where I often find myself with one resonant question that pounds in my ears: is it enough?

I’ve spent the last year feeling out a new vein of ministry, and with the joy that comes in finding your voice also comes the pressure to be the loudest one. It’s not that different from the last twelve years of local church ministry, really. There is pressure to be the best, most successful church (nope), to have the most rapidly growing congregation (not even close), to have the most sterling reputation in the community (that ship has sailed). Be the most influential, have the loudest voice and the most welcoming arms, never have internal problems, always put your best foot forward, never offend. The demands of church ministry by church ministry can feel a lot like a race you never signed up for but are always perpetually losing.

Who put those demands there? Why do we feel it necessary to compare our ministry with others? Why are we even competitors? Why must we seek to be the biggest, loudest, most loved? Is that what Christ asks of us?

How are we to live as we minister?

I’ve read through the Scriptures many times in the context of life as Christ-followers, and you know what? In all the lists of expectations and exhortations, I’ve never seen a command to be amazing. I’ve never read a verse about having a famous ministry or seen a connection between gospel living and large platforms. It seems to me like what we’re mostly called to is faithfulness and perseverance.

“..all of you should be like-minded and sympathetic, should love believers, and be compassionate and humble, not paying back evil for evil or insult for insult but, on the contrary, giving a blessing, since you were called for this, so that you can inherit a blessing….honor the Messiah as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. However, do this with gentleness and respect, keeping your conscience clear, so that when you are accused, those who denounce your Christian life will be put to shame.” (1 Peter 3:8-9, 15-16)

“But whoever keeps His word truly in him the love of God is perfected. This is how we know we are in Him: the one who says he remains in Him should walk just as He walked.” (1 John 2:5-6)

“Now this is His command: that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another as He commanded us. The one who keeps His commands remains in Him, and He in him. And the way we know that He remains in us is from the Spirit He has given us.” (1 John 3:23-24)

“Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from our worship meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” (Hebrews 10: 23-25)

 

Yes, our calling is nestled in the command to make disciples. I’m not ignoring the fact that growth in the kingdom of God does, by definition, mean growth.

What I’m talking about is seeking the kind of growth that comes from being the best and loudest and most influential. We want to grow our platforms so we can have the largest following; we want our churches to have more members than any other church in town because we measure our success by the number of bodies in the pews. We want to have a large reach because large means success by our culture’s plumb line. We’ve skewed the meaning of success, but it should be largely different than the world’s definition. Gospel living is so upside-down that we try to nudge it into cultural dressings that are easier to measure. If we run our ministries like businesses, then large equals success and faithfulness is a consolation prize. I’ve not seen a shred of Scriptural support for ministering like that. If numbers grew rapidly in the early Church, it was because of the Holy Spirit.

Some people may be catapulted to the space of large and influential reach without really meaning to. Some people pursue it relentlessly, sometimes sacrificing truth to get there. Some never get there though they secretly long for it. But the question shouldn’t be, “How can I make my ministry bigger and more successful?”  The question should be, “Can I be faithful right here, right now with my own particular sphere of influence?”

“Can I be faithful with small?”

And I don’t mean “Can I be faithful with small so that one day God will give me the chance to be faithful with something bigger?”  That may happen, but it’s not a guarantee and certainly not a recommended motive. It’s also not the point. There are so many pastors, missionaries, and people in ministry whose names we’ll never know. They won’t write books or have a large Instagram following, and no one will know to invite them to speak at a conference. They happily serve in anonymity because they were called to be faithful with what the Lord gave them. They are being faithful with small, and in the economy of God a small reach is not nothing. Jesus only invested deeply in 12 guys.

If small is the label on your ministry, be faithful with it.  Perseverance is a beautiful thing to behold. Plodding in anonymity is not unseen by our compassionate and all-seeing God. Your work is absolutely seen by Him. You can be faithful with small because He sees you.

When it comes to ministry, whether it’s local church ministry or another avenue like writing or music or speaking or serving, the pressure to be well known and well respected is present and exhausting. But the manner of faithful ministry laid out for us in Scripture looks a whole lot like perseverance and quiet living. It looks like being loud when it comes to the gospel and quiet when it comes to notoriety. It’s finding security in the fact that God is as strong now as He’s always been, not in whether or not we’re the most riveting preacher, the most eloquent speaker, the most prolific writer with all the bylines, or the servant with all the accolades.

What it means to be a faithful servant in any kind of ministry, that burning question of “is it enough?” could be answered with “can I be faithful with small?”

Maybe it’s motherhood, or a nursing home ministry to folks who don’t recognize you from week to week, or teaching the same Sunday School class for years on end, or making sure the homeless in your town are fed with good food and gospel-saturated love.  Maybe you’re having the same conversations about Jesus with that skeptical co-worker day after day after day and wondering if you’ll ever see anything come of it. Maybe you’re standing in a pulpit every week trying to help your people behold their God or to keeping holding on to their last tattered shred of faith. Maybe you’re scrubbing toilets in complete anonymity

Is it enough?

Well, can you be faithful with small? Can you be faithful with this thing you’re doing right now?

If the answer is yes, then it is enough.

Because God is never wrong in what He’s planned for your life in ministry. Big sphere of influence or small circle of reach, the people He has put in your path of ministry are the ones you are to be faithful with. Someone told me recently, “at the end of it all, the Lord won’t say, ‘well done, My good and famous servant.’ It’s good and faithful servant.”

It’s good when ministries grow and thrive. Seasons like that bring great joy and encouragement, and they should cultivate gratitude.

But if ministry always feels like a fight, that’s good, too. Because the kingdom of God is infinitely worth fighting for, and no matter how different your reach and mine may be, the call is to make Christ known.

If small is the label on your ministry, be faithful with it. 

Perseverance is a beautiful thing to behold. Plodding in anonymity is not unseen by our compassionate and all-seeing God. Your work is absolutely seen by Him. You can be faithful with small because He sees you.

“See we count as blessed those who have endured…the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” (James 5:11)

 

 

 

The Story of the Song: “Hold Me Fast” (on faith and chronic pain)

 

For five years, I lived with an unnamed illness that split my body wide open with pain every single night.

I’d seen doctors and had multiple tests and scans but always walked away with a clean bill of health. Except that I wasn’t healthy. I’d been stooped over with debilitating back pain that never allowed more than 2-3 hours of sleep per night. My hair had begun to fall out, my skin was broken out in strange, silvery patches that alternately itched, hurt, and bled. I was so consistently fatigued that I struggled to focus, especially when driving or reading. My body was so acutely aware of pain that it struggled to do much more than process the sensation.

Pain had become my new normal, the period at the end of every sentence.

And I’d learned to whisper the word chronic when I didn’t think people were paying attention. Traveling brought concerns of where I could refreeze my ice packs or warm up my heating pads. Would there be an upright chair in the room once I could no longer tolerate a bed? Would I be able to feel my right leg after the trip in the car? Would the shower be hot enough to provide some relief?

Home wasn’t much better, but it was at least manageable. Three hours of sleep at night was preferable to none.

I couldn’t fathom living a long, full life in that condition. I tried not to think about the future. There was only today. Now was all I could handle.

There was one particularly bad night in June, 2015.

I could find no position, no combination of medication, no rotation of ice and heat to alleviate my pain. I couldn’t stand, sit, or lie down without excruciating pain. My spine was a constant flame, pulled tightly in a vise of spasming, waves. Two-thirty in the morning  found me shuffling across the floor in the front room of our house, hunched over in agony while my family slept. Moonlight filtered through the windows, casting a cold glow across the wood floor. Tears streaked my cheeks while I tried to find a rhythm of breathing that would still my racing pulse.

I was panicking.

And struggling to keep an even rate of breaths. I gasped for air while pain licked up and down my spine, hips, and legs.

The intensity of the pain clouded my vision, and I wondered if this was what the rest of my life would be. A cloudy, envelope of swelling, reverberating agony.

I prayed like a drowning man, like Hannah in the tabernacle, like a child stuck on the edge of a cliff, like David in the cave of Adullam, like Peter sinking on the sea of Galilee.

Fiercely, I prayed that God would heal me.

Desperately, I prayed that my faith would be strong until He did.

I was so weak. In body, in mind, in spirit, in faith.

Pain had robbed me of loyalty, and I despaired  of ever being anything other than its slave.

But.

In the quiet of that wrenching night, the Lord spoke to me.

Not audibly.

Not in some special form of revelation.

But in words I’d read and held on to from Scripture—

  • He would never leave me or forsake me.
  • Though I walked in the valley of the shadow of death, I knew that He was with me.
  • I could hold on to Him because He has taken hold me.
  • He heard my appeal for mercy.
  • He could give me faith, even when I was afflicted.
  • Nothing could separate me from His faithful love.

I didn’t have to worry so much about holding on to Him.

Because He was holding on to me.

The next morning I sat uncomfortably at my piano and wrote “Hold Me Fast” in one swift outpouring of words and chords. I pictured Peter walking on the water with Jesus while the choppy waves of the Sea of Galilee roiled and churned beneath their feet. The rolling notes of the piano riff in the song are meant to emulate that churning of the waves. When fear pulled at his ankles, Peter began to sink, his eyes off of Jesus and centered on the severity of the storm.

In that troubled place where fear and faith converge, Peter cried out for Jesus to save him.

Jesus didn’t just grab Peter’s arm. He also calmed the sea.

He was showing Peter who He was.

A week after writing “Hold Me Fast,” we began recording the album. And it’s funny that what is now the title track nearly didn’t make it on to the album because it didn’t yet exist. It took a dark night and the paralyzing grip of pain to be born, and I’m so thankful that it did because in the clench of pain, I discovered that Christ is always present in the midst of it. When the dark night of the soul tears at your faith, clawing holes in your sanity and leaving tattered shreds of hope–in that convergence of fear and faith: this is when you see that faith is a gift, and that suffering is what makes it shine.

Hold Me Fast. How could I know that He is my refuge if I didn’t need a place to hide? How could I know that He is my comfort, if not for pain and sorrow? Pain may have held me tightly in its grasp, but Jesus held me tighter.

In the fall of 2015, I was finally diagnosed with a rare, genetic autoimmune disease, and to date,  I have been in remission for one year. I have no guarantee that I will stay well in regard to this particular disease, but one thing I know—the Lord will never leave me alone in my pain. He will demonstrate His faithful love to me by reminding me of His character, by persevering my faith, by deepening my trust in Him.

Knowing Him in the crucible of physical pain prepared me to stand firm when sorrow came knocking on my door mere months after I wrote the song. God has never wasted my suffering. He has only loved me deeply in it.

God has never wasted my suffering. He has only loved me deeply in it. Share on X

I know that sounds illogical in a culture of permissive love. But the paradox of the gospel is that God is greater than our hearts, and if suffering is the means by which He can help me to see His goodness, then I can learn to say with Job, “blessed be the name of the Lord.”

How could I know that He is my refuge if I didn’t need a place to hide?

How could I know that He is my comfort, if not for pain and sorrow?

Pain may have held me tightly in its grasp, but Jesus held me tighter. It was good for me to be afflicted, so that I could learn to trust His Word.

“Hold Me Fast” is the title track from my new album Hold Me Fast.  You can purchase it wherever you buy music online (iTunes, Amazon, Bandcamp).

Scriptures referenced in this post:

  • I Samuel 1-2, 22
  • Deuteronomy 31:6
  • Psalm 23
  • Philippians 3:12
  • Psalm 116: 1, 10
  • Romans 8:38-39
  • Matthew 14:22-33
  • Psalm 119:71

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