I have been telling people lately the importance of journaling, of keeping a record of all the miracles that God brings into our life so that we can remember them in times of doubt. Then I look at this page and see that it is often a monmument to my lack of discipline in writing.
I will make a more concerted effort to keep track of the amazing things God is doing in my life and post them here.
Being in public ministry
is changes you. My son once asked me if I was a public figure, and I said it
was a matter of degree. I'm famous at our Wal-Mart, but not necessarily in the
Wal-Mart one town over. But because I have some degree of fame, I have also a
degree of critics. Not the good kind, the ones who are in your life helping you
navigate through your own hubris, but the kind who sit on the sideline and cast
stones. The guys like Shimei in the Bible who cast stones at David while David
was at his lowest. I understand now the look my last senior pastor gave me
when I came to work at his church. It’s a look that says, “You seem like a nice
guy, I wonder when you’ll betray me.” It’s common enough in ministry that I bet
every senior pastor who read that just nodded.
So I have take to reading
up and studying conflict resolution. My wife and I have very different strategies,
based on our upbringing and life experiences. She was raised in a house where
almost all conflict was destructive. This causes her to value quiet and prioritize
minimizing conflict. She would say of me that I often seek conflict out. From
my view I feel like unless it’s addressed it can’t be healed. But I’m also
prone to try and fix things that aren’t broke, breaking them in the process.
She and I often balance, but occasionally cancel each other out. The truth, as
with most things, lies somewhere in between the two of us.
My wife tells me that these battles have made me harder, sterner. I find myself sometimes not wanting to concede a point because I'm just so tired of taking criticism. Sometimes I find myself confronting early, trying to short-circuit destructive conflict. After all, this is what the books say do. But sometimes you end up fighting a battle that would have gone away without your intervention,
Or I avoid the conflict, because I care for the person and don’t want to risk them leaving the church. Do this too often and you risk losing you place to speak into this life, and others will assume you condone their bad behavior.
But the worst thing you can do is have a problem with someone and tell others. I don’t always know what works, but I know this one for sure doesn’t. You words will reach them, but instead of a place where you can respond, they will respond in kind, to people other than you.
So this is going to begin
something for me. In the next few weeks I plan on writing out the events and
details of conflicts I have had in my church, and to be as honest as possible,
not covering up my own mistakes, seen through the eyes of a pastor who tries,
fails and tries again. Some I handled well, some I fumbled, but I’m hoping writing
it out will help me to make sense of how God has called me to lead people to
Him. I hope you will join me on this journey. Stay tuned next Thursday, where I
start with my first Jezebel.
It actually started the day before, when I picked up the phone (my secretary usually screens for me, don’t judge) and a company I had never talked to needed to donate cookies, probably because a retail store had refused delivery. Someone told them we might be the right people to ask. I asked how many they had, they said around 16 pallets. I figured with our Thanksgiving pantry the next day, we could move four. But then the still small voice said get more. I said, “Sure, if I call back and the number they give me is 10, then that’s my sign”. They said they could give me 6 more. That was our first little miracle, everyone at our pantry was going to get an extra treat for Thanksgiving.
When I went to the office at 6:30am that morning, there was
already a car claiming the first spot. It was going to be a big day.
The day itself didn’t start out well – we were expecting 3
trucks by 10am so that we could start by 11. The first one arrived at 9, it was
just the 500 turkey boxes we had ordered. We found out the cookies wouldn’t
arrive until 12 or 1, but that was ok, because we could start without them. But
the truck carrying the bulk of our food, 1152 food boxes, got two flat tires.
It couldn’t be helped, and he wouldn’t end up arriving until almost 1pm, and we
wouldn’t be able to start until 2, almost 3 hours behind schedule, with
hundreds of people already in line, and dozens of volunteers with nothing to
do. And not only that, I had gotten distracted and not kept up with traffic,
which was now a dozen blocks long and snaking in all the wrong directions
through the neighborhood. People didn’t like being told to move around, as they
were all jostling for the same spot, and they all asked the same question.
“Will I get a turkey?”
I love directing traffic and walking down the line of cars.
People want you to stop and pray for them. They want to tell you thank you.
They want to update you on how God answered the prayer you prayed for them the
week before. But today, they really just wanted to know about the bird. “Will I
get a turkey?” “Do you have enough?” The further back in line I walked, the
more tepid my response became. It went from “Of course”, to “I’m pretty sure”
to “I think so” and then finally to “We’ll see”. It wasn’t fun knowing that
people who waited 3 to 4 hours might just go home with the basic food box, but
we could only buy so many turkeys. That’s just how it was.
But once it started, it started. The line became a fury of
popping trunks, loading boxes and reloading tables. Diapers were flying out to
the loaders. The registration person was taking names as fast as her hands
could write. There were so many children whose faces lit up when they heard
there were cookies. And a few older people too, everyone loves cookies. The
kids are always the ones that get you. One week earlier I found one of our
workers crying after a five-year-old boy told them, “Thank you, we didn’t have
any food.” You would have 49 grateful people and 1 difficult one, and we’d try
to love them as much as the other 49. But you get so busy that you don’t hear
every “thank you”, or every story that each guest wants to tell you. You’re
just trying to get everyone fed and hoping the food doesn’t run out.
"Loaves and Fishes"
We always say that around the pantry. We
know that many pantries ran out of food before the need was met. Others
required a sign up because they knew they didn’t have the resources. I always
tell my wife, “There’s only so much we can do”, and she ignores me. We knew
with COVID and all the job losses in our area it was going to be a big day. We
had topped 400 and 500 guests the weeks leading up to this. And we had ordered
500 turkeys. It cost us more than we had. We raised funds from every source we
could find and it still didn’t cover the costs. And with only 500 turkeys, some
people were going to have to go without. Except that it’s always loaves and
fishes around here. And it seemed that for every turkey we gave out another
would appear. I kept thinking we’d run out, and there was just more and more
and even too much. It was late in the night that we realized that either
through an error on our part or on the part of our distributor, every box that
we thought had one 13lb turkey had two. And instead of giving out 500, we were
well on our way to giving out almost 1000. God answered the prayer of every
guest in line who asked me, “Will I get a turkey”, and to each I had said with
more hope than reality, “I think so”. I felt awful knowing that we didn’t hold
back any turkeys for our own people, not even our own volunteers. Yet by the
end of the night, we were still taking a dozen turkeys back to our freezer, our
“twelve baskets” at the end of the feast. Every one of the almost 1000 people
that came got a turkey, and we were still putting some away for our next
pantry.
There was a lady whose name I don’t remember, and if she was
standing in front of me today I might not recognize, but I remember the anxiety
in her voice. I was walking the line, directing traffic, checking on our
guests. Our wait was agonizingly long, but there was little we could do. I
remember her talking about how she was going to have to go to work, that she
couldn’t wait. But I hear that a lot. I’m sure every charity does. Everyone has
a mother’s sister who’s brother’s cousins friend has a special reason why they
should be at the front of the line. Honestly, you learn to tune it out. But her
voice had something different, it had anxiety. But the rules of our pantry
require us to treat everyone equally. We didn’t hold turkey’s aside for our own
volunteers, and my hands were pretty much tied, she would have to wait or do
without. But I couldn’t shake the sound of the anxiety in her voice.
Because of our 3-hour late start, it was well past dark, and
we were still giving out food. We kept
saying we’d shut it down after this car. Then this car. Then this car. Then her
car pulled up. She told my wife she couldn’t believe we were still open; she
was sure the parking lot would be empty. She had to leave earlier because she
had to go to work. She had nothing for her family for Thanksgiving and she was
desperate. And a “little voice” told her to try anyway, to stop in and see if
we were still open. And there we were, probably rather ragged looking, but
still there, waiting for her. Even if we didn’t know she was the one we had
been waiting for.
As a pastor I’m always telling the church “My sheep know my
voice”, and if you belong to God, you know when He speaks to your heart. This
lady did not appear to be “church people”. Something tells me she had no idea
it was the Holy Spirit speaking to her. But I recognize it, that moment when
God begins to change your life. Change your heart. Change your destiny. It
always starts with that “little voice”. That the almighty God of the universe
chooses to reveal Himself this way is one of the great mysteries of the divine
humility. And whether or not she fully knows it, she is one of His children,
and now, because of our ragged little church, she has heard His voice.
I ended the night more tired than I’d ever felt working at
the church. My blisters had blisters and those blisters were still serving
people food. My wife and I stared at a remote we were both to tired to reach
for to see if we made the news. But everyone that worked that day knew the same
thing: Today was a special day. A blessed day. A good day.
If the cookies didn’t come, it would have been different. If
the delivery hadn’t set us back three hours, it would have been different. If
the lines had been shorter, it would have been different. If the weather hadn’t
been unseasonably warm, it would have been different. But it was what it was,
and it was good.
It was a night of a hundred little miracles.
