Words from WW Blog

“Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations; I am exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46:10)

It has been two months since my friend and coaching buddy, Joe Miller, collapsed and died in the midst of our high school gym. I keep seeing that scene, going through the seconds of performing CPR on him, sprinting to get the AED device, the call to the paramedics, the stunned faces of our players. It is a moment I seem to replay on a loop. I am glad I was there, and yet, I am haunted by the fact that I was there.

As I sit on my usual stool at Starbucks, I’m tearing up as I write this. Joe and I worked well together. He didn’t expect me to be all about winning. He expected me to develop the younger players in our high school program, chiseling away the roughness to find their potential and assuring them they could someday be varsity players. He had to contend with a couple of varsity players who thought they were all that. I just had to teach some players how to do left-handed layups. Joe was patient. His lighthearted, sarcastic humor came out as the two of us sat together on the bench or waited for practice to start. We had planned on being a coaching team together for a few more years.

And then he was gone.

The past two months have been an emotional roller coaster. I’ve been cranky, huggy, dull, excited, uninterested, easily perturbed, lonely, wanting to be alone, wanting to be with the grandkids, not wanting to be with the grandkids, wanting to fall asleep, not being able to sleep, laughing, crying, questioning, majorly disappointed, and, in some ways, rescued and restored. Honestly, it is only the second time in my adult life that I’ve considered seeing a counselor. It’s a journey dressed in grief and sorrow, a variation of what we call “the dark night of the soul.”

In our culture, there is a tendency to “hurry through it”, to get to the next thing, to get over it. With grief a person needs to live with it, walk with it, ponder it, and…be still.

I remember a dear elderly gentleman I was privileged to pastor, who had lost his wife of 68 years. It was a deep and echoing grief that numbed him from the rest of his life’s details. We talked about the pain, the all-encompassing sense of emptiness. We talked about the house that they had lived in for over fifty years. He wanted to sell it, but also didn’t want to. It was a time when he needed to be still, to not be moving.

We have times in our lives when we need to be in neutral, to let God control our comings and goings, pauses and ponderings. If we speed ahead, like the world expects us to, the danger of going off the road greatly increases. Being still is a hard place to be, and yet the necessary place to be.

So, I’m being still as I grieve the unexpected death of my friend. Being there when he fell to the floor and seeing him staring up at me are moments that I must live in. And I trust that God is close beside me as I ache with them.

“For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding…” (Colossians 1:9)

It’s not that I think “I’m all that!”, but recently I had a situation in which I thought I knew what the will of God was. It seemed so clear to me. I even thought that He had put me in a position a couple of years earlier to be His instrument now.

But I was wrong! That’s not how things played out. I wrestle with the confusion and the questions that came flooding into a sleepless night. As a friend of mine told me, there is difficulty moving from the “why” to the “what”, the transition from “why not me” to “what would you have me do now, Lord?” It requires, so to speak, some rearranging of the furniture…moving the couch from what I thought was the best spot to somewhere over to the side.

When disappointment invades the perfect picture that has been painted in your mind, it causes a person to rethink the journey. It seems that the steps have brought the individual to this point and then, suddenly, there is a detour that veers away. It’s like thinking you’re going to Las Vegas and then realizing it’s Las Vegas, New Mexico. The glitz of the city that never sleeps is transformed into the town where you may need to get a fuel fill-up…and go on.

When the answer is “Not me”, it is the natural reaction to question why you thought what didn’t happen was God’s will? Was it my ego that reshaped the scene? Did I think I was hearing what God wanted me to be about, but really, it was what I wanted His will to be? Did I rush ahead and not hear His no?

Most of us have experienced disappointments that are similar in nature. We’ve had the indigestion in the midst of the waiting and the numbness after becoming aware of the unexpected decision. It becomes a point of growth. Our spiritual maturity is often fertilized by the pain of disappointment. We draw close to the Lord as we endure some pruning of our excesses, our unnecessaries, and the subtle hints of entitlement. Like peeling an onion, we shed a few layers of our outer skin in order to get back to what is at our core.

Thirty years in the rearview mirror, I remember a search committee from another church contacting me about their open pastorate. They showed up on a Sunday at the worship service of the congregation I was pastoring. It looked like a good situation. Carol and I drove down to their community and met on a Friday night with the Search Committee. After the interview, one of the committee members made the verbal statement, “Why do we need to look any further? Here is our next pastor right here.” We drove back home thinking that God was going to be moving us.

But the committee had one more person to interview, and they went with him. I remember the disappointment in that situation, but then our congregation had its own period of maturity that developed new life and new intentionality in the ministries with our community. The other church experienced some serious struggles that I would not have been ready to help lead them through. In the midst of the situation, I was dealing with my lack of worth and confusion. It was only after getting some distance from the disappointment that I could focus more on the “What now, Lord?”

I’ll still be wrestling with this situation for a while. There are other factors involved with it that accentuate the pain. But I know, maybe even more, that the One Who created me will guide me and care for me.

“And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone…” (Matthew 14:23)

Each Sunday in our worship service, Pastor Dan (a great preacher and person, by the way) always prays right after he reads the scripture for the morning’s message. It’s a nice prayer, focused and spiritual. I close my eyes and think about Jesus…and then I drift into a twenty-second nap. There are needs and there are wants, and what I need in that short moment is some slumber.

I wish I could apologize to Pastor Dan, but if I did, he would know that I had swayed off of the prayer trail and into the soft pillow my mind has set before me. Seriously, I think sitting quietly for a few moments with no one pulling on me, and with one of the youth speaking with the volume control turned up full blast, brings on the calming of my spirit. It is definitely what I want, but it is also what I need at that moment.

About the time Dan is landing with an amen, I hope he will receive an extended inspiration and delay the conclusion for two or three more seconds. Kind of like a revivalist preacher who would come to our church for a series of weeknight meetings. He drew out the prayer-ending amen so long, my Wrigley’s Chewing Gum had lost its spring. If Pastor Dan can spread it out, my mind is able to come back into the present, and I’m ready to hear the word of God spoken by him for the next twenty minutes or so.

I’m comforted by the biblical revelations of Jesus “needing a moment.” He often pulled to the side and spent time alone in prayer. It is never revealed what he prayed for in those solitary times, except when the tempter meets him in the wilderness. Perhaps Jesus prays for his disciples, or talks with His Father, or is simply quiet and still for the moment. Depending on the Sunday, my Baptist guilt complex either pounds on me or God’s grace is triumphant. One of the two wins. More and more, it’s the grace of God that sweeps into the moment and reminds me of the Sunday mornings in my growing-up days that I leaned against my dad in the midst of worship and slumbered for more than twenty seconds. Of course, the weight of my head pressed against him may have kept him from his own nodding off as Pastor Zachary went on and on about the things of God and the needs of his people.

On a more personal note, my twenty-second naps may be an indication of the tiredness of my soul. Sometimes we pastor-types drive ourselves relentlessly. We are ever mindful of the problems of others and frequently negligent about our own self-care. It is probably why, in my 36 years as a pastor and speaking almost every Sunday, I valued the Sunday afternoon nap. It was a gift from God that lasted much more than twenty seconds.

The difference now is that God does His renewing a lot faster. Thank you, Lord…and forgive me, Pastor Dan!

^” Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16)

In the midst of the valley of loss, I’ve been walking through, I came face-to-face with a road sign that said “Grace Ahead. Approach with Confidence.” The small print beneath the bright gold sign bore the words of Hebrews 4:16 in spectacular cursive curls and swirls.

The news of what lay ahead and, actually, had already been traveling in, slowed my pace and lifted my chin from its stare at my feet. Jesus had been waiting. Like a Kansas Interstate roadside rest stop, he had been awaiting my realization of the need to pull to the side, to stop for mercy, to find the welcome of grace.

Receiving mercy is not an easy thing for me. It’s a humbling indication of my stumbling humanness, a reminder that the “S” on my T-shirt doesn’t stand for Superman, but rather one of many other “S” words like stupid…and stupid…and simply stupid. In fact, I have a T-shirt that says pretty much the same thing. “S” doesn’t stand for Superman.

Receiving mercy is the promise of our Father, and yet, I too often speed by the offer, thinking that getting on with the journey is more important than a quiet encounter with my Creator.

Today, the gift of discoverable grace has so overwhelmed me that I’ve given up the fight of holding back the tears. It is my time of need, my time of stillness. The road sign from Hebrews reminds me that I don’t need to cringe in doubt and fear, that, like the story of Jesus welcoming the children, there are open arms extended for me.

I am not suddenly exiting the valley of loss, but I am assured of a traveling partner Who is incredibly comforting and understanding.