Life in the Desert

This past Sunday I preached a sermon at Set Free about "Life in the Desert," essentially explaining how to cope with times of difficulty and spiritual frustration and the feeling that God is very distant. If you've read my past few blogs, I'm sure you can see how appropriate that is for my season of life.

So for those of you who feel like you're wandering around in circles, getting nowhere, and "chasing the wind," I'll give you the abbreviated version of my sermon (which clocked in at a cool 25 minutes!)

First, times in the desert are a necessity. Every person has gone, or will go, through these times. All the big shots in the Bible went through it: Moses, Elijah, Jesus, Paul, and even some littler shots like Philip the evangelist. There are many different reasons people have to go through the desert: tempting, testing, punishment, a personal God-encounter, escape, training, and to minister to other desert dwellers. The key is to endure the time, while not doing anything to keep you there longer.

Second, in the desert, regardless of why you are there, you will face temptation. Either the temptation to "go back to Egypt," or the temptation to stay and do things like God's not watching. Our reactions to these can either be like the Israelites in the desert, who grumbled, complained, and rebelled. Or you can react like Jesus, who stood up and faced his temptation by quoting some basic commands of scripture to his adversary.

Third, it is important to keep the focus on God's provision during desert times, because this is where the biggest miracles happen. Yet these big miracles are often not a daily occurrance; it is, rather, the one-day-at-a-time provision direct from the hand of God. When you start to focus on what you don't have, you are on your way to failure. The keys are to keep praying for everything you need, regardless of what it is, and to be thankful for what you get.

Finally, the result of the successful navigation of the desert times is abundant blessing--the promised land! Unfortunately, these blessings can take many forms, which may make them hard to recognize. Ultimately, our entire life on earth could probably be classified as a desert existence, meeting with various oases between the drier times. So any blessings we get down here are only a transitory foreshadowing of the glorious riches that God has in store for us through the provision of Jesus Christ.

So there you have it. And if you're currently in the desert, I find that ice cream really helps take the edge off!

Experience?

I wrote this awhile ago, but got too mad in the middle and had to delete it. I'll try this again, now, with a little self-restraint.

Every now and then I search through the pastor search websites, just because I still need a job with a livable wage, and over and over I see that churches almost unanimously require five years of senior pastor experience.

This is a problem for several reasons:
1) most importantly, it excludes talented people (i.e., me) from the job pool just because I chose secular employment to put me through school.
2) it FORCES mobility on a profession that needs more steadiness. It breeds church-hopping pastors, always looking for the greener grass, never staying long enough to work through problems. A pastor cannot truly become a part of a community after just five years. And I would almost bet that high mobility has created a lot of the problems in pastor's lives, like divorce, burn out, and family resentment (or at least added to it).
3) it's not based on anything! Call me crazy, but I've seen that phrase so many times that I'm completely sure it is just mindless parroting of something, just because it sounds good. Show me the Barna report that says pastors with five-years experience always succeed when they transplant churches. Oh right, it doesn't exist.
4) to me, that requirement just says, "our church is too good to allow a pastor to make some mistakes." You know, in my church, I'll be happy to let everyone make as many mistakes as I make, if not more. We're none of us perfect, except big churches.

OK, well, I'm getting all riled up again, so I'd better quit.

Here's the moral: Churches, don't limit your pool of candidates by placing meaningless regulations on potential pastors. How about more meaningful ones, like "must like urban/suburban/rural environments," or "must love hard-headed people."

I'm just glad my wife didn't require five years of dating experience before we went out! Sometimes, God can make up for a lot!
--Abraham didn't need five years of parenting experience
--David didn't need five years of king experience
--Jeremiah didn't need five years of prophet experience
--Paul didn't need five years of Scripture-writing experience
--Jesus didn't need five years of messiah experience

Many times, life experiences can prepare us for the bigger roles God has for us.

Value

I was just reading "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller (again!) and there was something in there about letting things or people "name" you. That is, making your entire worth come from one person or something.

It became clear to me that I have let my vision of the future "name" me. I had decided that I would have no value to anyone unless I planted a successful church in Northern Virginia. That's really what these last few weeks have been about: my feelings of complete worthlessness because this did not happen. Somehow, in the midst of all this I forgot that God values me more than I can value anything: more than my wife, family, job, hobbies, or even my guitars!

The thing that has been the most meaningful about these past few days/weeks is so many friends just coming out of the woodwork and bending over backwards to make time for me, to listen to my frustrations, and show me that they are for me even when circumstances are not.

I've regained some optimism about the future. I'm looking for houses out here, and the prospect of having a real house for the first time with my wife is exciting. We'll see. If you read this, keep praying for me. And read "Blue Like Jazz"!

A Confession

It's amazing to me that much of my haranguing of the "traditional church" stems from petty jealousy. Why don't I have a big church (or A church) like those other idiots?

Which idiots, you ask?
--Joel Osteen has the largest church in America and you're lucky to hear a reference to the Bible (much less Jesus) in one of his sermons.
--Then there was that guy in Colorado who had a mega church, was president of the Evangelicals, but got caught doing meth with a gay prostitute.
--Also my wife had a friend whose husband had several church jobs and a touring band, but he decided to turn his back on his career, his wife, and his five kids for some floozy he met at seminary of all places.

So why do these guys get the good gigs, while people like me, who have no idea where to even buy crystal methamphetamine, or who talk a lot about Jesus in sermons, struggle to find a gig with more than twenty people? Do you see what I am doing here? I'm masking my sins behind their "bigger" sins and claiming something to the effect that God doesn't need to use as much grace with me as He does with others. So, basically, I'm making it easier on God; He gets the better end of the deal, right? Right? Yeah, I guess not.

What I really hate is hearing people with big (150+) churches talking about how miserable they are sometimes! If you hate it so much, then why don't you step down and let some of the rest of us have a turn?!? I really used to think that pastors weren't in it for themselves, but lately I've seen so many who are absolutely intent on plastering their own pretty face and their brilliance all over the place. When I was in high school, we called these kind of people "attention whores." I wonder what John the Baptist meant when he said "he must increase and I must decrease." I like the kind of pastors who hate the spotlight and hate the sound of their own voice, but these guys don't have mega churches, they instead force their way into email inboxes through their own soapbox blogs, like me!

It's so easy to have that cheese ball humility amid success; I should know, I've been successful at various times. The difficult thing is to live with humility that comes from trial and failure. When life humiliates you, that is a whole different ball of cheese; plus it isn't so offensive to others I've found.

People like to say that when God closes a door, He opens a window. What they fail to reveal is that the window is usually on the second or third floor with really pointy bushes below you, and the window is really small and uncomfortable to squeeze through, and once you're outside, you really wonder whether or not you should have stayed inside and waited just a little while longer for another door to open, but in reality we all want what we can't have, and just when we get it we start wanting something else that we can't have and just start blaming God for the fact that life isn't perfect, but if life were perfect how would we know we needed God??

Or maybe that's just me....

Change of Plans

There was a commercial a while ago about some company (maybe Nextel??) that allowed people to be flexible when the situation changed. And even though I don't remember exactly what the commercial was advertising, I remember that everybody in these commercials said "Change of plans" about 100 times. It got pretty irritating.

Anyway, as I follow Jesus, that seems to be the theme of my life:

Career in music? Change of plans --> enlist in Air Force
Career in Air Force? Change of plans --> go to school for ministry
Useful college degree? Change of plans --> quick degree in "General Studies"
Get paid experience in ministry? Change of plans --> stay in UPS
Career as a regular pastor? Change of plans --> pursue church planting
Plant a church in Virginia? Change of plans --> get financially settled first
Move to Virginia? Change of plans --> stay in Kansas City
Do more with UPS???
Find a house to rent in KC???
Get a second job???
Start a church???
Go to another church???

Well, because of all these changes, I have almost been a nomad. My only dream in life is to go somewhere and STAY THERE! But God keeps churning my life around, with experience after experience that leaves me dissatisfied.

And the worst thing about it is that I don't really have anything solid to complain about. I can't relate to any of the psalms or Job because my only real enemies are my attitude and God's roadblocks and detours (probably related?). I definitely identify more with Ecclesiastes in being stuck in the futility of life in the cycles of the generations.

In the midst of all this I am faced with the exasperating exhortations in Scripture that just tell me to be faithful and shun evil and so on. I want to find some real practical help in making my daily decisions and know that I am on the right track, but I keep coming back to just being a good student/follower of Jesus.

There is one metaphor in Psalms that really applies to me here: "stuck in the miry clay." The hardest part about all of this is resisting the temptation to entice God: "God I'll fast/give/study/share/love/sell whatever if You'll just..." Sometimes I really wish God worked that way; that would make this Christianity stuff a whole heck of a lot easier than what it really is: waiting patiently for the Lord to lift us up out of the mire in due time.