During my recent mission trip to the Czech Republic, I kept a journal. The format I will use for these posts is to share (and edited version of) my journal entry, then provide commentary on it. Here is entry #2.
Sunday 8/11/13 – 8:45 AM – Last night we saw many of my old Czech friends. This place feels like home. It’s so different this time from the first time I came here two years ago. I spoke with someone from Strakonice (the next town over from Pisek, about 30 minutes away by car, about 25,000 people, and that does not have a church), and he told me how meaningful it is for the Czechs when people they know come back after their first trip because it validates that the experiences we’ve had are real. It shows we are really invested and it shows Christ’s love. This place does feel like home, but I’m not fully sure what to do with that.
Last night at the leadership meeting, we had worship and we sang Always. It was so powerful. I felt that we were proclaiming this ground for God (right in the shadow of the building that was used as the Communist headquarters). I strongly felt that Gary Gowler (a servant of Christ who came many, many times on mission to the Czech and passed away in April) was with us during worship. I saw this shaft of light coming down into the center of the worship circle, and that this light was powerfully being projected out through the windows and walls and into Pisek. We were proclaiming that God is here in this land, and that this is God’s land.
My thoughts on this entry – God really put Strakonice on my heart on this trip. For my friends in the US, imagine living in a town with 25,000 people, and having no active church in the town. It’s so easy for these folks to go through a week without seeing another Christian (unless they are intentional about seeing and knowing them), and how discouraging it would be to know so few Christians and to be living in what is essentially a completely secular society. Might the great commission (what believers call the command of Jesus that you need to talk about him to those you come into contact with) seem like a chore with no end in sight? How can you be expected to be stopping every person you meet to tell them about Jesus, because when so few people know him, you can’t even step out of your house without needing to tell everyone about him? Wouldn’t it be easy to start to wonder if you matter to God? How can you matter to God you feel like society and the culture beats you down because of your faith? Now imagine that God sends a team of 20+ people from another continent over to you, with the primary job of the mission to encourage you in your faith. Almost half of these folks have come here before and have answered God’s call to come here two, three, or even twelve times. God wanted to use us so that these believers would know that God loves them and has not forgotten them. So often, the Old Testament talks about “God remembering” his people, and I believe that us coming to the Czech is a tangible manifestation of God remembering his people in the Czech.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Czech journal entry #1
During my recent mission trip to the Czech Republic, I kept a journal. The format I will use for these posts is to share (and edited version of) my journal entry, then provide commentary on it. Here is entry #1
Thursday 8/8/13 – 7PM (Chicago time)
I am on the plane and we are ready to leave. I am quite excited. In the airport, I met Kayla. She is on our flight, and is going on mission by herself to Central Asia for 5 months. At the airport, she ran into someone she went to high school with from Kentucky. They are both on our flight to London. God is already making divine connections on this trip. Kayla is also nervous about flying by herself, and she now knows many more people on the plane. It looks like I am getting two seats to myself, so hopefully I will be able to get some sleep on the plane. I am really excited to see what God will do on this trip!
My thoughts on this entry – God was making divine connections already on this trip What a great way to start. I was very moved that Kayla, who had to be no more than 22, and just up and went to serve in central Asia by herself (the country she was serving in was classified for the safety of everyone) for 5 months in a culture that doesn’t treat women the way we do in the US. God made sure that I met her to fully prepare my heart for those in the Czech who so willingly serve for the sake of the gospel.
Prayer was a central focus of this trip. We prayed as a team before leaving the Christ Community Church, we did a prayer walk on our layover at Heathrow, we did a prayer walk in Pisek with selected scripture readings (putting on the armor of God at the Pisek castle/old fort wall, reading about our fullness in Christ in front of Jesus on the oldest bridge in Central Europe, and praying for Elim Church, our local ministry partner), we prayed for people after service at Elim Church the first Sunday we were there, and we did a prayer walk when we arrived at camp. Prayer was a central focus in our preparation for the trip and this modeled how prayer just kept springing up at camp.
Thursday 8/8/13 – 7PM (Chicago time)
I am on the plane and we are ready to leave. I am quite excited. In the airport, I met Kayla. She is on our flight, and is going on mission by herself to Central Asia for 5 months. At the airport, she ran into someone she went to high school with from Kentucky. They are both on our flight to London. God is already making divine connections on this trip. Kayla is also nervous about flying by herself, and she now knows many more people on the plane. It looks like I am getting two seats to myself, so hopefully I will be able to get some sleep on the plane. I am really excited to see what God will do on this trip!
My thoughts on this entry – God was making divine connections already on this trip What a great way to start. I was very moved that Kayla, who had to be no more than 22, and just up and went to serve in central Asia by herself (the country she was serving in was classified for the safety of everyone) for 5 months in a culture that doesn’t treat women the way we do in the US. God made sure that I met her to fully prepare my heart for those in the Czech who so willingly serve for the sake of the gospel.
Prayer was a central focus of this trip. We prayed as a team before leaving the Christ Community Church, we did a prayer walk on our layover at Heathrow, we did a prayer walk in Pisek with selected scripture readings (putting on the armor of God at the Pisek castle/old fort wall, reading about our fullness in Christ in front of Jesus on the oldest bridge in Central Europe, and praying for Elim Church, our local ministry partner), we prayed for people after service at Elim Church the first Sunday we were there, and we did a prayer walk when we arrived at camp. Prayer was a central focus in our preparation for the trip and this modeled how prayer just kept springing up at camp.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Does prayer improve your health?
There is mounting evidence that leading an active prayer life improves your health. Below are some links to articles that scientists are discovering.
From the Telegraph, one of the largest papers in the UK.
From the Washington Times
From the Huffington Post
From US News & World Report
There does seem to be a clear link between an active religious life and better health.
From the Telegraph, one of the largest papers in the UK.
From the Washington Times
From the Huffington Post
From US News & World Report
There does seem to be a clear link between an active religious life and better health.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
How does someone follow God - The long delayed “Part II”
Apologies for the long delay since my last post. I knew what this subject matter would entail, and as such, it took a long time to write it and get it right.
Feel free to read part 1 first (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-does-someone-follow-god-part-1.html)
So, in 2011 I went on a mission trip to the Czech Republic. I felt God inside of me during this time more intensely that at other times in my life. It was clear that he was working inside of me and directing my path while I was there.
One of the things that some of us had the opportunity to do was to submit stories relating to our walk in Christianity, and how we’ve seen God show up in life. Each night at camp, two stories were able to be told during “talk show”, a nightly event where we had entertainment mixed with some of the bigger issues of life. This is a critical venue in Czech, the second most atheistic country in the world so that they can hear dialog like this with God being a part of the narrative. The story I submitted was similar to the blog post I made here a couple of years ago (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-journey.html).
So, during the first night of the talk show, Gary and Lorna Gowler were speaking about the incredible circumstances around their son’s medical history. That’s when I started to get a really strong feeling within me that was telling me that the story I submitted wasn’t the story I was supposed to be sharing – that I needed to share the story that Ginny and I had traveled. Now, if I shared this story, I’d really be giving a portion of myself. This would not be easy to retell, as it involved easily the most difficult portion of my life. And yet, I almost instantly knew that I had to tell this, as God was prodding me to do it.
Being at the camp, and with a non-satellite cell phone, I could not call my wife to make sure it was OK that I shared this journey of ours. The camp didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t easily get a message to her either. And yet, I knew that I needed to stop asking why I shouldn’t tell this story, rather that I needed to trust God and go in the direction he was leading me. So, after talk show on that Tuesday night, I went back to my room and started writing out this new testimony. I think I got it to a place where I was happy with it by about 1:30 in the morning that night.
Now, people generally didn’t know if they were being selected to have their testimony selected until the day of the talk show, so I had no idea if this new testimony would be shared. The following morning, I found Joel, the pastor who ran the talk show, and let him know that the testimony I had written ahead of time I had just replaced as I felt God was leading me to want to tell something different, and I gave him a 30 second view of what it was about.
I was selected to give my testimony on Thursday night. The theme of the night was personal struggle. Linda from our team went first, and it was very apparent that God was with those in attendance and with her that night. Joel asked a general introductory question, and Linda went straight through telling her testimony, uninterrupted, for thirty minutes. It was a riveting and very inspiring talk. My testimony would be the last activity of the night. I had been hoping to have a video of this so that a link could be provided, but it appears that this isn’t in the cards. So, below I’m going to share (to the best of my memory) what I shared that night.
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It’s Sunday, February 7, 2010 and my wife and I sit down to do what we do every year on that day, watch the Super Bowl as a family. That game featured one of the most memorable plays in Super Bowl history, where the Saints opened the second half by recovering an onside kick. Unfortunately, my wife has no memory of that play or anything that happened at any point that day. The following day, I asked her the most important question I’ve ever asked her in my life.
The second most important question I’ve asked her in my life was “will you marry me” on February 10, 1998. We had been dating on again and off again for years, and had finally got our relationship to where it was time to take the next step. We had a church wedding in February 1999. The church portion didn’t matter to me at the time, as I was not a Christian. It was important to Ginny, so we were married in the church she grew up in. I had nothing against being married in a church, so long as we were able to have a party afterwards. That’s where I was at spiritually at the time.
This set a tone in our marriage for the first eight years. My wife, being a Christian, wanted to find a church home that she could worship at and be connected to God. Certainly, it would help our marriage if we did this together. And yet, I had absolutely no desire to do any of this. My “church” was the National Football League and I saw no need to attend a religious service. I could believe in an afterlife without needing to attend a religious service, so this is something that my wife would need to do on her own.
And that was the story of our marriage for the first eight years. There was one period where we attended Willow Creek for about a month together, but other than that, I never attended a church regularly in my life, and this was something that Ginny would need to do without the support of her husband. And yet, Ginny was always encouraging me to attend church with her. What kind of a husband has their wife asking them for 2 hours a week and isn’t willing to give that to her? The answer to that question is not an answer I am proud of.
After eight years of marriage, we moved back to Elgin, the city where my wife grew up, and were ready to start a family. In the fall of 2006, for the first time in my life, I started to attend a church regularly. We were expecting our first child in the winter, and I knew that I missed out on something by not being involved in church when I grew up. Again, what did it say about who I was that I was willing to do something for a daughter that I hadn’t met yet, that I was unwilling to do for my wife? Interestingly, in the back of my mind, I think that I thought that if I attended church and appeared to go through the motions, and with my wife doing more than going through the motions, that somehow my daughter would magically not go through the motions, she would believe because it would be what she knew.
Ginny and I started getting involved in the church. I find it humorous looking back that one thing that I did was act in church skits. They had a propensity to cast me in the role of Jesus for these skits (finding a willing male in his ‘30’s with long hair I think was qualifier enough). Ironically, I’d be doing the skits for a church who knew these stories, and it was my first exposure to them. Nothing was ever explained in the skit, certainly not to me, about what the true meaning of them was, as “everyone” knew the stories and significance.
Within only a month or two, Ginny and I were selected to be in charge of the outreach committee, which is an important post in a church that had mainly been doing “church for the churched”. This still makes me chuckle, and I now know that God put me through this for a reason (training a non-Christian on how to talk to non-Christians and lead a campaign for Christ is really funny when you stop to think about it). We built up over a two year period to a big launch date in the fall of 2008, where we were hoping to be able to have new folks begin to attend regularly. Even though I was co-chair of this committee, I was approaching it like I would a business marketing campaign. As such, I wasn’t regularly asking for God’s assistance to bless the campaign, reach his desired outcome, etc. because this would be a “waste” of my time.
Ginny and I knew something was wrong as we were nearing the culmination of the campaign. Our goal was to call 20,000 households in the Elgin area. We did not achieve that goal, but we did call 12,800 households, which is still a heck of an amount to call in a 4 week period. I personally did the most calling, with 865 calls. In addition to that, I was tabulating the results at the end of the night of who was called, etc. There were racist events that happened with individual members of the congregation during this campaign. Let me be clear, the church was not a racist organization, and the leadership of the church did not have any tolerance for racism, but there were multiple events during this campaign that showed racism at its worst.
The first event I noticed when I was checking in the call sheets at the end of the night, I noticed that the words “no English” were written at the top of the page with a line down the page. This should mean that all twenty of the households on the page were called and that none of them spoke in English (pages were alphabetically by last name, so let’s say that the last name on all 20 entries on the page were Rodriguez). Certainly, when I called households and the initial greeting was in Spanish, there would be cause to write “no English” next to an individual name. But to write it on an entire page as a blanket statement? Someone is stating that a household with Melissa Rodriguez as the contact point doesn’t speak any English? I found that very hard to believe. Sure enough, I called Melissa and heard the phone was answered in English, not Spanish. Could this campaign be something that God wanted if racism was so clearly playing a role? I didn’t think so. Of course, it all makes sense in retrospect. If a non-Christian is leading the campaign to bring God’s message to people without a church home, it didn’t have God’s power on it and as such, one should expect it not to reach the desired outcome.
There was another incident of racism that happened at the party that was to thank all the volunteers about a week before the launch date. People were sharing stories of the campaign and specifically of the people who made phone calls. One woman stated “I got so tired of calling houses and having them pick up the phone and say hola”. Now, I made 865 calls and not once did I call anyone in the Elgin area and have them pick up the phone and say hola. I called more than my share of Spanish speaking households as I would go out of my way to take the Rodriguez pages after seeing that someone else may say they were called without calling them. When I called a household where the greeting was in Spanish, they said bueno. This means that the person who complained about “hola” either lied about making any calls to a Spanish household or didn’t listen even once to the person on the other end of the phone. It was damning. Certainly, both Ginny and I felt that this is not where we were supposed to be (for my Christian friends, keep in mind that God lead me away from this church while I was a non-believer – never underestimate how God can be leading someone who has yet to recognize God for who he is). Obviously, this was much tougher for Ginny than me, as it’s the church she grew up in.
There were some positives that I noticed from my two years of attending church. One was that weekly rhythm that you get from attending each week. It sets your week up in a way that can’t be described to someone who hasn’t regularly attended a church before. It gave me exposure to bible stories. I had started to read the bible. And certainly, except for the culmination of the campaign, I recognized the value of going to church as a whole family. During the campaign, we would know that the call was not going to end with the chance that they would be coming to our church when they started being overtly positive upon hearing why we were calling. The reason is obvious. These people already had a church home and were ecstatic that someone was calling them to tell them of the good news. By far, the church that had the most attendees respond in this way was Christ Community Church. So, in January of 2009, Ginny and I started attending Christ Community Church.
For Ginny, having grown up in Methodist churches her whole life, CCC was just different. But she was very willing to go with me to CCC because I still wanted to go to church. She knew that I was still in the investigation stage of figuring out what God, Jesus, and Christianity were all about after attending the other church for two years.
So, after only two months of attendance and after our first meeting at a couple’s group, I gave my life to Christ in March 2009. This was a path that my wife gently led me on for 12+ years. Never being overt, but with a gradual softening. She was the key figure in securing that my eternal destiny has been assured, and I can’t put into words how grateful I am for this. I believe that I owe her everything.
Things were different after I gave my life to Christ. One example is that I used to do numerology and put a lot of stock in what these results would say. There certainly seemed to be a correlation between what a numerology reading would say and the results to people. When I did a reading I’d hit on some big truths for people about 80% of the time. But now that I was a Christian, I felt almost no desire to consult the numbers for anything. The reason was simple – let’s suppose that God put numerology here and that numerology readings are an echo of what has, is, and will be happening. Why would I consult an echo of God, when I now have the Holy Spirit alive in me and can consult directly with God himself. It just seems like a waste of time now.
Additionally, I believe that Ginny was able to lead me to Christ only because Ginny completely accepted me for who I was first. She did not come into the marriage with an agenda to get me to become a different person in marriage. Such hidden motives do not build an environment of trust that is essential for a marriage to work. While she obviously would have liked me to become a Christian, she had to completely accept who I was as a non-Christian. Thus, the paradox that only with her total acceptance of me as a non-Christian was the groundwork set for me to become a Christian
So, as Ginny and I were attending Christ Community Church (CCC), we were expecting our second child. The ultrasound revealed a problem with the pregnancy. The umbilical cord was connected at an unusual spot on the placenta. As such, there was no Wharton’s jelly protecting the cord at the connection to the placenta. There was no problem for the pregnancy at that time, but if Ginny went into labor there would be a major risk that the cord would rupture with death of the baby in childbirth as a significantly possible outcome. It was a scary proposition. Ginny and I sought extensive prayer for this. We knew a number people were praying for us. After church at CCC, there are prayer councilors there and we sought them out after service each week and they prayed for us each week. Six months into the pregnancy, we had another ultrasound taken and the connection to the placenta had moved to a more traditional spot, and this connection was inside Wharton’s jelly, so the cord was now protected. We can’t explain how this happened, but were thankful that it did. Ginny and I still went to the prayer councilors after service each week to pray for the health of the baby, because we thought that a sign of obedience would be continuing to ask for God’s intervention when all appeared well, as we did not want to take God’s remedy for the situation to be taken for granted. In retrospect, I wish we’d had a few of these prayers also touch on the health of Ginny as well.
On August 19th, Ginny starts going into labor. She did this at a picnic that my company was doing. Ginny, having had a c-section for the first pregnancy (and we were having this child by c-section again due to the dangers of a natural child birth after having had a c-section) and did not recognize the signs of being in labor. She was in labor for at least 5 hours before I convinced her that she was in labor and that her contractions were now less than five minutes apart. I shudder to think what would have happened had God not given his protection to Adelaide by moving the cord to a protected area.
At the hospital, the baby was coming. The hospital tried slowing the delivery down as they needed to do a c-section. Eventually, they bring Ginny into the delivery area and I’m with her. All of a sudden, I see blood everywhere on the floor and things are not going well. The baby had started coming down the birth canal and got stuck – her head was too big to fit through. They could not get the baby out, and the baby was stuck in the canal. At points in the delivery, they are literally lifting my wife off the table with the force of trying to get the baby out. They start paging for more doctors to come up to the operating area. I’m scared out of my mind and am in the most intensive prayer of my life “Please let Ginny and the baby be OK”, rapid fire, over and over again. Ginny later told me that she was just praying for the health of the baby at this time – again something that was indicative of things to come. After what seemed like an eternity, the baby came free, was out, and all was well. In this picture, taken shortly after Adelaide was born, you can see a deep line down the side of her face. That’s where it was stuck into Ginny’s pelvis.
This was such a hard pregnancy and it took a lot out of us, but clearly there was something more than the standard going on with Ginny. Before she left the hospital, when her OBGYN came in at one point, Ginny broke down in tears for no apparent reason. Her OB gave her a prescription for mild anti-depressants. Three months later in November, at a check up from the c-section to make sure that everything was healing correctly, her doctor doubled the dosage of the anti-depressants. I knew things were off, as I was doing all night time feedings after 2AM. Ginny would go for five or more days without showering because she spent all of her energy on her kids. Ginny just wasn’t well, and it was more than what happened on our first pregnancy.
So, on Friday, February 5, at our church small group meeting, it was so apparent that Ginny was not doing well as another wife told Ginny that she would call in sick for a day next week and take the kids for a day so Ginny could get a day off. February 7 was the Super Bowl, and Ginny was so far out of her normal state of mind that she has no memory of anything on that day.
On Monday, February 8, I asked my wife the most significant question of our lives. I had just arrived home from work at 6:30 and Ginny had just gotten home after running errands with the kids. We were eating dinner and Ginny clearly was not herself. We sat down to dinner, and I asked the question that only following God’s Holy Spirit could I have asked. The question was “Are you suicidal”? I mean, who does that over dinner? You don’t just sit down to dinner and say “Dinner smells great, pass the peas, and are you suicidal?” I am utterly convinced that I would not have had to courage to ask this question myself. Fortunately, now being a Christian for 11 months, I was not on my own. While not having the courage to ask the question myself, I could ask the question when God’s Holy Spirit inside of me encouraged me to ask the question.
Ginny’s answer was “no, but I was thinking that the kids would be better off with (her sister) Amy.” I have later learned that if someone is to take action on suicidal thoughts, the vast majority do so within an hour of first having the thought. God put this question on me within half an hour of Ginny having the thought. I am truly in awe of the power of following God in your life when I reflect on this.
That night, I put the kids to bed and the following morning, I call Ginny’s OBGYN office who had prescribed the anti-depressant medication. They tell me in no uncertain terms that I am to take her to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elgin. I’m a bit floored by the seriousness of this, as we sometimes don’t realize where things really are as we are in the middle of them. I call Ginny’s mom, who had recently retired, and tell her what’s going on and ask her if she can take the kids so that we can do what we need to do.
Now, I have a dilemma. How in the heck am I going to get Ginny to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the emergency room no less? I know that I am risking my marriage in how I approach this situation, and again am in prayer for the answer. I could try to bring her to the hospital without her knowing where we were going, but this clearly wasn’t the right approach. While it might get her to the hospital, doing this would have set a tone that she can’t trust me at a time when this can’t be something that she can question. No, I had to convince her to go with me, willingly, to St. Joseph’s. I don’t fully remember how I did this, which I take as a sign that God was leading my actions and I merely had the courage to follow where God was leading me.
I had let Ginny sleep in, knowing that she always does better when she can sleep later. I had called in from work. Ginny comes down at around 10:30 and after letting her wake up for a few minutes, I tell her that the doctor’s office said I needed to take her to St. Joseph’s. Ginny, being from Elgin, knew the significance of this hospital in Elgin, as there are multiple hospitals in Elgin, but St. Joseph’s has a specialty in mental illness. She later told me that the only reason she agreed to go was that if I was telling her that I needed to take her there, she knew it had to be serious enough to go.
So, we go to St. Joseph’s, and it’s pretty serious. They are considering if they should have her inpatient for 24 hours a day, our have her in outpatient where she is at the hospital from 8 to 5 every weekday. They recommend outpatient only because they didn’t want to fully remove her from the day to day of having two little ones at home – thinking that removing her from our kids would create an unhealthy situation when she did come out of the program.
And that was our life for a while. Over the first year and a half (until I went to the Czech), things continued to get slowly, progressively better. Adelaide’s first birthday was such a milestone for us. We had her baptized at this time and picked two Godparents that we likely would not have selected a year earlier. Even though we still had a big hill to climb, we were able to pause and celebrate that God has led us out of the depths of the valley.
I don’t know how this would have turned out had I not followed Ginny’s long lead and become a Christian a year earlier. Being a Christian doesn’t magically make life’s problems go away. However, it does mean that you never have to go through any of life’s problems alone. I was forced to lean on God so much during this time just to get through each day. I don’t think I would have had the strength to step in here without following God’s lead. But, there is much poetry in knowing that my wife led me to accept the truth of Jesus Christ, securing my place in the afterlife, and by doing so, she was then able to follow God’s lead through me to secure her place in the here and now.
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It was clear to me that this was the right story to tell in the Czech. What I loved the most is now that I had put myself out there in this way, people were free to come up to me because they had all seen into my soul in a way that most people don’t talk about in a day to day. The story resonated for a number of reasons, but one way is that those in attendance who were not believers in Jesus had an adult they could talk to who could understand being in a position where they may not know him (I had not forgotten my first 35 years of life not knowing Jesus). My story was a real one – there was no “and we lived happily ever after” moment, because each day is a new day with challenges, and those challenges don’t magically go away. Ginny still takes medication for depression and utilizes the skills she learned in therapy. Another aspect that it touches on is a Christian marrying a non-Christian. In the Czech Republic, the second most atheistic country in the world, the community of believers is small. As such, some Christians will inevitably find a mate outside of the Christian community. I’m so glad that I was able to share this with the people of the Czech Republic, and I am strongly considering going back this year.
Feel free to read part 1 first (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-does-someone-follow-god-part-1.html)
So, in 2011 I went on a mission trip to the Czech Republic. I felt God inside of me during this time more intensely that at other times in my life. It was clear that he was working inside of me and directing my path while I was there.
One of the things that some of us had the opportunity to do was to submit stories relating to our walk in Christianity, and how we’ve seen God show up in life. Each night at camp, two stories were able to be told during “talk show”, a nightly event where we had entertainment mixed with some of the bigger issues of life. This is a critical venue in Czech, the second most atheistic country in the world so that they can hear dialog like this with God being a part of the narrative. The story I submitted was similar to the blog post I made here a couple of years ago (http://eclecticdavidcory.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-journey.html).
So, during the first night of the talk show, Gary and Lorna Gowler were speaking about the incredible circumstances around their son’s medical history. That’s when I started to get a really strong feeling within me that was telling me that the story I submitted wasn’t the story I was supposed to be sharing – that I needed to share the story that Ginny and I had traveled. Now, if I shared this story, I’d really be giving a portion of myself. This would not be easy to retell, as it involved easily the most difficult portion of my life. And yet, I almost instantly knew that I had to tell this, as God was prodding me to do it.
Being at the camp, and with a non-satellite cell phone, I could not call my wife to make sure it was OK that I shared this journey of ours. The camp didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t easily get a message to her either. And yet, I knew that I needed to stop asking why I shouldn’t tell this story, rather that I needed to trust God and go in the direction he was leading me. So, after talk show on that Tuesday night, I went back to my room and started writing out this new testimony. I think I got it to a place where I was happy with it by about 1:30 in the morning that night.
Now, people generally didn’t know if they were being selected to have their testimony selected until the day of the talk show, so I had no idea if this new testimony would be shared. The following morning, I found Joel, the pastor who ran the talk show, and let him know that the testimony I had written ahead of time I had just replaced as I felt God was leading me to want to tell something different, and I gave him a 30 second view of what it was about.
I was selected to give my testimony on Thursday night. The theme of the night was personal struggle. Linda from our team went first, and it was very apparent that God was with those in attendance and with her that night. Joel asked a general introductory question, and Linda went straight through telling her testimony, uninterrupted, for thirty minutes. It was a riveting and very inspiring talk. My testimony would be the last activity of the night. I had been hoping to have a video of this so that a link could be provided, but it appears that this isn’t in the cards. So, below I’m going to share (to the best of my memory) what I shared that night.
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It’s Sunday, February 7, 2010 and my wife and I sit down to do what we do every year on that day, watch the Super Bowl as a family. That game featured one of the most memorable plays in Super Bowl history, where the Saints opened the second half by recovering an onside kick. Unfortunately, my wife has no memory of that play or anything that happened at any point that day. The following day, I asked her the most important question I’ve ever asked her in my life.
The second most important question I’ve asked her in my life was “will you marry me” on February 10, 1998. We had been dating on again and off again for years, and had finally got our relationship to where it was time to take the next step. We had a church wedding in February 1999. The church portion didn’t matter to me at the time, as I was not a Christian. It was important to Ginny, so we were married in the church she grew up in. I had nothing against being married in a church, so long as we were able to have a party afterwards. That’s where I was at spiritually at the time.
This set a tone in our marriage for the first eight years. My wife, being a Christian, wanted to find a church home that she could worship at and be connected to God. Certainly, it would help our marriage if we did this together. And yet, I had absolutely no desire to do any of this. My “church” was the National Football League and I saw no need to attend a religious service. I could believe in an afterlife without needing to attend a religious service, so this is something that my wife would need to do on her own.
And that was the story of our marriage for the first eight years. There was one period where we attended Willow Creek for about a month together, but other than that, I never attended a church regularly in my life, and this was something that Ginny would need to do without the support of her husband. And yet, Ginny was always encouraging me to attend church with her. What kind of a husband has their wife asking them for 2 hours a week and isn’t willing to give that to her? The answer to that question is not an answer I am proud of.
After eight years of marriage, we moved back to Elgin, the city where my wife grew up, and were ready to start a family. In the fall of 2006, for the first time in my life, I started to attend a church regularly. We were expecting our first child in the winter, and I knew that I missed out on something by not being involved in church when I grew up. Again, what did it say about who I was that I was willing to do something for a daughter that I hadn’t met yet, that I was unwilling to do for my wife? Interestingly, in the back of my mind, I think that I thought that if I attended church and appeared to go through the motions, and with my wife doing more than going through the motions, that somehow my daughter would magically not go through the motions, she would believe because it would be what she knew.
Ginny and I started getting involved in the church. I find it humorous looking back that one thing that I did was act in church skits. They had a propensity to cast me in the role of Jesus for these skits (finding a willing male in his ‘30’s with long hair I think was qualifier enough). Ironically, I’d be doing the skits for a church who knew these stories, and it was my first exposure to them. Nothing was ever explained in the skit, certainly not to me, about what the true meaning of them was, as “everyone” knew the stories and significance.
Within only a month or two, Ginny and I were selected to be in charge of the outreach committee, which is an important post in a church that had mainly been doing “church for the churched”. This still makes me chuckle, and I now know that God put me through this for a reason (training a non-Christian on how to talk to non-Christians and lead a campaign for Christ is really funny when you stop to think about it). We built up over a two year period to a big launch date in the fall of 2008, where we were hoping to be able to have new folks begin to attend regularly. Even though I was co-chair of this committee, I was approaching it like I would a business marketing campaign. As such, I wasn’t regularly asking for God’s assistance to bless the campaign, reach his desired outcome, etc. because this would be a “waste” of my time.
Ginny and I knew something was wrong as we were nearing the culmination of the campaign. Our goal was to call 20,000 households in the Elgin area. We did not achieve that goal, but we did call 12,800 households, which is still a heck of an amount to call in a 4 week period. I personally did the most calling, with 865 calls. In addition to that, I was tabulating the results at the end of the night of who was called, etc. There were racist events that happened with individual members of the congregation during this campaign. Let me be clear, the church was not a racist organization, and the leadership of the church did not have any tolerance for racism, but there were multiple events during this campaign that showed racism at its worst.
The first event I noticed when I was checking in the call sheets at the end of the night, I noticed that the words “no English” were written at the top of the page with a line down the page. This should mean that all twenty of the households on the page were called and that none of them spoke in English (pages were alphabetically by last name, so let’s say that the last name on all 20 entries on the page were Rodriguez). Certainly, when I called households and the initial greeting was in Spanish, there would be cause to write “no English” next to an individual name. But to write it on an entire page as a blanket statement? Someone is stating that a household with Melissa Rodriguez as the contact point doesn’t speak any English? I found that very hard to believe. Sure enough, I called Melissa and heard the phone was answered in English, not Spanish. Could this campaign be something that God wanted if racism was so clearly playing a role? I didn’t think so. Of course, it all makes sense in retrospect. If a non-Christian is leading the campaign to bring God’s message to people without a church home, it didn’t have God’s power on it and as such, one should expect it not to reach the desired outcome.
There was another incident of racism that happened at the party that was to thank all the volunteers about a week before the launch date. People were sharing stories of the campaign and specifically of the people who made phone calls. One woman stated “I got so tired of calling houses and having them pick up the phone and say hola”. Now, I made 865 calls and not once did I call anyone in the Elgin area and have them pick up the phone and say hola. I called more than my share of Spanish speaking households as I would go out of my way to take the Rodriguez pages after seeing that someone else may say they were called without calling them. When I called a household where the greeting was in Spanish, they said bueno. This means that the person who complained about “hola” either lied about making any calls to a Spanish household or didn’t listen even once to the person on the other end of the phone. It was damning. Certainly, both Ginny and I felt that this is not where we were supposed to be (for my Christian friends, keep in mind that God lead me away from this church while I was a non-believer – never underestimate how God can be leading someone who has yet to recognize God for who he is). Obviously, this was much tougher for Ginny than me, as it’s the church she grew up in.
There were some positives that I noticed from my two years of attending church. One was that weekly rhythm that you get from attending each week. It sets your week up in a way that can’t be described to someone who hasn’t regularly attended a church before. It gave me exposure to bible stories. I had started to read the bible. And certainly, except for the culmination of the campaign, I recognized the value of going to church as a whole family. During the campaign, we would know that the call was not going to end with the chance that they would be coming to our church when they started being overtly positive upon hearing why we were calling. The reason is obvious. These people already had a church home and were ecstatic that someone was calling them to tell them of the good news. By far, the church that had the most attendees respond in this way was Christ Community Church. So, in January of 2009, Ginny and I started attending Christ Community Church.
For Ginny, having grown up in Methodist churches her whole life, CCC was just different. But she was very willing to go with me to CCC because I still wanted to go to church. She knew that I was still in the investigation stage of figuring out what God, Jesus, and Christianity were all about after attending the other church for two years.
So, after only two months of attendance and after our first meeting at a couple’s group, I gave my life to Christ in March 2009. This was a path that my wife gently led me on for 12+ years. Never being overt, but with a gradual softening. She was the key figure in securing that my eternal destiny has been assured, and I can’t put into words how grateful I am for this. I believe that I owe her everything.
Things were different after I gave my life to Christ. One example is that I used to do numerology and put a lot of stock in what these results would say. There certainly seemed to be a correlation between what a numerology reading would say and the results to people. When I did a reading I’d hit on some big truths for people about 80% of the time. But now that I was a Christian, I felt almost no desire to consult the numbers for anything. The reason was simple – let’s suppose that God put numerology here and that numerology readings are an echo of what has, is, and will be happening. Why would I consult an echo of God, when I now have the Holy Spirit alive in me and can consult directly with God himself. It just seems like a waste of time now.
Additionally, I believe that Ginny was able to lead me to Christ only because Ginny completely accepted me for who I was first. She did not come into the marriage with an agenda to get me to become a different person in marriage. Such hidden motives do not build an environment of trust that is essential for a marriage to work. While she obviously would have liked me to become a Christian, she had to completely accept who I was as a non-Christian. Thus, the paradox that only with her total acceptance of me as a non-Christian was the groundwork set for me to become a Christian
So, as Ginny and I were attending Christ Community Church (CCC), we were expecting our second child. The ultrasound revealed a problem with the pregnancy. The umbilical cord was connected at an unusual spot on the placenta. As such, there was no Wharton’s jelly protecting the cord at the connection to the placenta. There was no problem for the pregnancy at that time, but if Ginny went into labor there would be a major risk that the cord would rupture with death of the baby in childbirth as a significantly possible outcome. It was a scary proposition. Ginny and I sought extensive prayer for this. We knew a number people were praying for us. After church at CCC, there are prayer councilors there and we sought them out after service each week and they prayed for us each week. Six months into the pregnancy, we had another ultrasound taken and the connection to the placenta had moved to a more traditional spot, and this connection was inside Wharton’s jelly, so the cord was now protected. We can’t explain how this happened, but were thankful that it did. Ginny and I still went to the prayer councilors after service each week to pray for the health of the baby, because we thought that a sign of obedience would be continuing to ask for God’s intervention when all appeared well, as we did not want to take God’s remedy for the situation to be taken for granted. In retrospect, I wish we’d had a few of these prayers also touch on the health of Ginny as well.
On August 19th, Ginny starts going into labor. She did this at a picnic that my company was doing. Ginny, having had a c-section for the first pregnancy (and we were having this child by c-section again due to the dangers of a natural child birth after having had a c-section) and did not recognize the signs of being in labor. She was in labor for at least 5 hours before I convinced her that she was in labor and that her contractions were now less than five minutes apart. I shudder to think what would have happened had God not given his protection to Adelaide by moving the cord to a protected area.
At the hospital, the baby was coming. The hospital tried slowing the delivery down as they needed to do a c-section. Eventually, they bring Ginny into the delivery area and I’m with her. All of a sudden, I see blood everywhere on the floor and things are not going well. The baby had started coming down the birth canal and got stuck – her head was too big to fit through. They could not get the baby out, and the baby was stuck in the canal. At points in the delivery, they are literally lifting my wife off the table with the force of trying to get the baby out. They start paging for more doctors to come up to the operating area. I’m scared out of my mind and am in the most intensive prayer of my life “Please let Ginny and the baby be OK”, rapid fire, over and over again. Ginny later told me that she was just praying for the health of the baby at this time – again something that was indicative of things to come. After what seemed like an eternity, the baby came free, was out, and all was well. In this picture, taken shortly after Adelaide was born, you can see a deep line down the side of her face. That’s where it was stuck into Ginny’s pelvis.
This was such a hard pregnancy and it took a lot out of us, but clearly there was something more than the standard going on with Ginny. Before she left the hospital, when her OBGYN came in at one point, Ginny broke down in tears for no apparent reason. Her OB gave her a prescription for mild anti-depressants. Three months later in November, at a check up from the c-section to make sure that everything was healing correctly, her doctor doubled the dosage of the anti-depressants. I knew things were off, as I was doing all night time feedings after 2AM. Ginny would go for five or more days without showering because she spent all of her energy on her kids. Ginny just wasn’t well, and it was more than what happened on our first pregnancy.
So, on Friday, February 5, at our church small group meeting, it was so apparent that Ginny was not doing well as another wife told Ginny that she would call in sick for a day next week and take the kids for a day so Ginny could get a day off. February 7 was the Super Bowl, and Ginny was so far out of her normal state of mind that she has no memory of anything on that day.
On Monday, February 8, I asked my wife the most significant question of our lives. I had just arrived home from work at 6:30 and Ginny had just gotten home after running errands with the kids. We were eating dinner and Ginny clearly was not herself. We sat down to dinner, and I asked the question that only following God’s Holy Spirit could I have asked. The question was “Are you suicidal”? I mean, who does that over dinner? You don’t just sit down to dinner and say “Dinner smells great, pass the peas, and are you suicidal?” I am utterly convinced that I would not have had to courage to ask this question myself. Fortunately, now being a Christian for 11 months, I was not on my own. While not having the courage to ask the question myself, I could ask the question when God’s Holy Spirit inside of me encouraged me to ask the question.
Ginny’s answer was “no, but I was thinking that the kids would be better off with (her sister) Amy.” I have later learned that if someone is to take action on suicidal thoughts, the vast majority do so within an hour of first having the thought. God put this question on me within half an hour of Ginny having the thought. I am truly in awe of the power of following God in your life when I reflect on this.
That night, I put the kids to bed and the following morning, I call Ginny’s OBGYN office who had prescribed the anti-depressant medication. They tell me in no uncertain terms that I am to take her to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elgin. I’m a bit floored by the seriousness of this, as we sometimes don’t realize where things really are as we are in the middle of them. I call Ginny’s mom, who had recently retired, and tell her what’s going on and ask her if she can take the kids so that we can do what we need to do.
Now, I have a dilemma. How in the heck am I going to get Ginny to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the emergency room no less? I know that I am risking my marriage in how I approach this situation, and again am in prayer for the answer. I could try to bring her to the hospital without her knowing where we were going, but this clearly wasn’t the right approach. While it might get her to the hospital, doing this would have set a tone that she can’t trust me at a time when this can’t be something that she can question. No, I had to convince her to go with me, willingly, to St. Joseph’s. I don’t fully remember how I did this, which I take as a sign that God was leading my actions and I merely had the courage to follow where God was leading me.
I had let Ginny sleep in, knowing that she always does better when she can sleep later. I had called in from work. Ginny comes down at around 10:30 and after letting her wake up for a few minutes, I tell her that the doctor’s office said I needed to take her to St. Joseph’s. Ginny, being from Elgin, knew the significance of this hospital in Elgin, as there are multiple hospitals in Elgin, but St. Joseph’s has a specialty in mental illness. She later told me that the only reason she agreed to go was that if I was telling her that I needed to take her there, she knew it had to be serious enough to go.
So, we go to St. Joseph’s, and it’s pretty serious. They are considering if they should have her inpatient for 24 hours a day, our have her in outpatient where she is at the hospital from 8 to 5 every weekday. They recommend outpatient only because they didn’t want to fully remove her from the day to day of having two little ones at home – thinking that removing her from our kids would create an unhealthy situation when she did come out of the program.
And that was our life for a while. Over the first year and a half (until I went to the Czech), things continued to get slowly, progressively better. Adelaide’s first birthday was such a milestone for us. We had her baptized at this time and picked two Godparents that we likely would not have selected a year earlier. Even though we still had a big hill to climb, we were able to pause and celebrate that God has led us out of the depths of the valley.
I don’t know how this would have turned out had I not followed Ginny’s long lead and become a Christian a year earlier. Being a Christian doesn’t magically make life’s problems go away. However, it does mean that you never have to go through any of life’s problems alone. I was forced to lean on God so much during this time just to get through each day. I don’t think I would have had the strength to step in here without following God’s lead. But, there is much poetry in knowing that my wife led me to accept the truth of Jesus Christ, securing my place in the afterlife, and by doing so, she was then able to follow God’s lead through me to secure her place in the here and now.
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It was clear to me that this was the right story to tell in the Czech. What I loved the most is now that I had put myself out there in this way, people were free to come up to me because they had all seen into my soul in a way that most people don’t talk about in a day to day. The story resonated for a number of reasons, but one way is that those in attendance who were not believers in Jesus had an adult they could talk to who could understand being in a position where they may not know him (I had not forgotten my first 35 years of life not knowing Jesus). My story was a real one – there was no “and we lived happily ever after” moment, because each day is a new day with challenges, and those challenges don’t magically go away. Ginny still takes medication for depression and utilizes the skills she learned in therapy. Another aspect that it touches on is a Christian marrying a non-Christian. In the Czech Republic, the second most atheistic country in the world, the community of believers is small. As such, some Christians will inevitably find a mate outside of the Christian community. I’m so glad that I was able to share this with the people of the Czech Republic, and I am strongly considering going back this year.
Monday, December 26, 2011
How does someone follow God? - part 1
Sorry for taking so long for my next post.
So, what does it mean to follow God? This can mean many things to many people, and it’s really difficult to explain what an evangelical Christian means when they say things like “God spoke to me” or “I’m following God” or “As the Spirit moves me” etc. I know for people outside of the evangelical Christian community, this can unfortunately conjure up images that resemble Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. For me, there isn’t an actual voice. I’d describe it as an inexplicable strong feeling that there isn’t a logical reason for why it got there. Perhaps many non-believers have this and chalk it up to the universe, intuition, etc.
I think a lot of people have this “voice” inside of them. Having the courage to ask for this voice to speak to you, listen for this voice (not let it get drowned out by everything else going on), and then actually follow it is how you can have God lead your life. The two things the I pray for more than anything else for me is: 1) For God’s light to shine through me so that others can see it and 2) For God to lead me to where I’m supposed to be. From my experience, these two prayers, if you have the courage to follow, will lead you to places that you’d never expect. I certainly never expected to be lead to the Czech Republic in the summer of 2011. Let me explain.
I was a fairly new Christian attending Christ Community Church in St. Charles IL. In April 2010, I was flying to Austin to go to Dell headquarters on a company business trip. Leading up to the trip, I had God talking to me (aka an inexplicable strong feeling) that I should talk to the people who sit by me on the plane. I had this pretty strongly for the week or so leading up to the trip. So, as I’m on the plane, about 30 minutes into the flight, I start talking to the man sitting in my area. He was flying to Austin TX, from Romania, and this was his last leg of the trip. He’s an entrepreneur, in his late 20’s. We spoke about life in America, and I was very interested to hear his perspective about life under communism, even though it crumbled before he came of age. Here’s something mind blowing to those of us in the west. Under communism in Romania, youths would be preparing for a test they took (I think when they were 15 or so). This test would essentially determine the course of their entire life – where the government placed them to live, work, etc. Absolutely mind blowing that a test when you are 15 would set the course of your entire life like this (and it makes the SAT/ACT tests look completely unimportant by comparison).Thank God that the experiment into communism failed and that the people of Eastern Europe now have liberty.
The conversation then turned to faith/religion. The man’s name was, ironically enough, Christian. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian. Religion as a whole didn’t have a good name in Romania. After communism crumbled, all large institutions got a bad name because of the fear/concern of centralized power and large scale institutions. Also amazing to me was that Christian shared with me that he believed that believe in God had actually gone down since communism lifted. When communism was in place, the people needed religion, even with fear of imprisonment, etc. to keep them sane in such a society. However, as communism lifted, the reasons for belief seemed to have lifted as well.
All on this trip (I believe it was about 4 days), God was speaking to me again. I needed to go to Eastern Europe and spread the gospel. It was a bit mind blowing to be coming to this realization, when I had only been a believer myself for a year. In reality, who better to understand where a non-believer is coming from than someone who recently didn’t believe?
Part II in a future update.
So, what does it mean to follow God? This can mean many things to many people, and it’s really difficult to explain what an evangelical Christian means when they say things like “God spoke to me” or “I’m following God” or “As the Spirit moves me” etc. I know for people outside of the evangelical Christian community, this can unfortunately conjure up images that resemble Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. For me, there isn’t an actual voice. I’d describe it as an inexplicable strong feeling that there isn’t a logical reason for why it got there. Perhaps many non-believers have this and chalk it up to the universe, intuition, etc.
I think a lot of people have this “voice” inside of them. Having the courage to ask for this voice to speak to you, listen for this voice (not let it get drowned out by everything else going on), and then actually follow it is how you can have God lead your life. The two things the I pray for more than anything else for me is: 1) For God’s light to shine through me so that others can see it and 2) For God to lead me to where I’m supposed to be. From my experience, these two prayers, if you have the courage to follow, will lead you to places that you’d never expect. I certainly never expected to be lead to the Czech Republic in the summer of 2011. Let me explain.
I was a fairly new Christian attending Christ Community Church in St. Charles IL. In April 2010, I was flying to Austin to go to Dell headquarters on a company business trip. Leading up to the trip, I had God talking to me (aka an inexplicable strong feeling) that I should talk to the people who sit by me on the plane. I had this pretty strongly for the week or so leading up to the trip. So, as I’m on the plane, about 30 minutes into the flight, I start talking to the man sitting in my area. He was flying to Austin TX, from Romania, and this was his last leg of the trip. He’s an entrepreneur, in his late 20’s. We spoke about life in America, and I was very interested to hear his perspective about life under communism, even though it crumbled before he came of age. Here’s something mind blowing to those of us in the west. Under communism in Romania, youths would be preparing for a test they took (I think when they were 15 or so). This test would essentially determine the course of their entire life – where the government placed them to live, work, etc. Absolutely mind blowing that a test when you are 15 would set the course of your entire life like this (and it makes the SAT/ACT tests look completely unimportant by comparison).Thank God that the experiment into communism failed and that the people of Eastern Europe now have liberty.
The conversation then turned to faith/religion. The man’s name was, ironically enough, Christian. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian. Religion as a whole didn’t have a good name in Romania. After communism crumbled, all large institutions got a bad name because of the fear/concern of centralized power and large scale institutions. Also amazing to me was that Christian shared with me that he believed that believe in God had actually gone down since communism lifted. When communism was in place, the people needed religion, even with fear of imprisonment, etc. to keep them sane in such a society. However, as communism lifted, the reasons for belief seemed to have lifted as well.
All on this trip (I believe it was about 4 days), God was speaking to me again. I needed to go to Eastern Europe and spread the gospel. It was a bit mind blowing to be coming to this realization, when I had only been a believer myself for a year. In reality, who better to understand where a non-believer is coming from than someone who recently didn’t believe?
Part II in a future update.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Mission trip article #1 – The Prodigal Son
Are you familiar with the story of the Prodigal Son? This is one of Jesus’s parables. Luke 15: 11-32. I’ve copied it below as I’m sure that not everyone is aware of this passage of scripture.
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The Parable of the Lost Son
11 Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
13 “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. 14 After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. 16 He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
17 “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ 20 So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
21 “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
25 “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 27 ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
28 “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
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Perhaps this is the most well known of Jesus’s parables. It’s a great parable that both illustrates why Christians so want to bring people to know Christ, and why when they are faithful, they need to remain humble. It doesn’t matter your “years of service” for the Lord, what matters is that you come home, humble yourself before your father (God) and put yourself under His guidance.
I just returned from a mission trip to the Czech Republic. It was the first time that I had ever served the Lord on a multi-day outing – an 11 day trip. The purposes of the trip were to teach English and to build relationships. I built relationships with a number of people, both from the US team and with the Czechs. One of these relationships was with Honza (Jan). Coming into the week, the best way to describe Honza would be agnostic – he might be able to see some “evidence” of God’s existence, but nothing that was proof, and thus, God’s existence was an open ended question for him.
We were building relationships with many of the folks at the camp. There was a large American/Czech group casually tossing a Frisbee around on Monday. Jared Ackles had this bike ride odyssey with him that seemed to allow him to see the Americans through fresh eyes, and then talked to him about spiritual matters until 2 in the morning that night. He, like many of the Czechs, was concerned with what can best be described as “attempts at manipulation”. Born out of the roots of Communism and their high value placed on intelligence and education, Czechs by nature tend to be suspicious of large institutions, of which the Church qualifies.
Many folks spoke with Honza during the week, and he and I sat down after lunch on Thursday. We were going back and forth a lot, and were finding significant commonality in our spiritual thoughts. Part of our discussion went back to manipulation. He had previously read Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ”, which I’ve also read. He didn’t like the presentation style of the book, as Lee Strobel (a former atheist and editor of the Chicago Tribune who set out to disprove Jesus’s ascension from the grave and instead quit his job and became a pastor due to what he discovered from that journey) makes a case for why we can believe Jesus rose after death and as such, why we should believe what he and the bible say. Honza stated that he would have preferred an approach where half the book would be arguments for Jesus, half the book arguments against Jesus, and then let the reader decide. Not presenting this information in this fashion was a blatant attempt at manipulation in his opinion. After already connecting with him on some things, I was able to allow him to see it differently. When I read a book that has a thesis like this, I’m going to follow along with the arguments. However, if an argument doesn’t hold water (the author states something but then draws a conclusion that isn’t fully supported by the arguments), it will jump out at me when I’m reading it, and as such, it will call the entire overall conclusion into question. For me, “The Case for Christ” is a book that was powerful and there were no holes in the arguments. Honza hadn’t thought of it in that respect before – that if the arguments weren’t solid it would be apparent when reading it. Because of this point, I could feel walls coming down.
In another part of our conversation, he was talking about seeing “evidence” of God, but failing to see proof of God. I found myself taking a very analytical approach to this with him. I asked him to envision himself on a jury, asked to make a decision on the evidence in front of him. Juries (at least in the United States) are asked to render a verdict, not based on absolute proof, rather “beyond a reasonable doubt”. This was what seemed to strike a chord with him, and he was able to concede that his belief in God fit this mold – beyond a reasonable doubt even though he didn’t have absolute proof. I invited him to continue revisiting this every 6 months or so, in the event that the evidence he sees changes. However, if he was able to conclude that he believed in God beyond a reasonable doubt, this would have implications for his life. At the end of a couple of hours of talking, he and I had agreement that our beliefs were very similar. I told him I thought he was now a Christian, and he agreed. He stated to me that this was the first time that Christianity made sense to him. With that said, I didn’t think it was the time to push the conversation any more. He needed time to “incubate” on it (time for his brain to start thinking about this new way of seeing things and start forming additional questions, etc.).
We spoke again for about 20 or 30 minutes that night, before the evening program. I do recall that one question he had for me was if I get any of my wisdom from sources outside of Christianity. I believe that he was wrestling with not wanting to shut himself off from all other things if he was going to become a Christian. I was able to answer this very truthfully by stating that, yes; I get some of my wisdom from outside of Christianity. I specifically have gained wisdom from folks I know in the Jewish faith. We both believe in the same God, but those who are practicing Jews don’t recognize the same forms of God that I do. As such, much of our moral code is shared, even though there is a major difference in Theology. I think this had a big impact as well. Become a Christian doesn’t mean having to cut yourself off from all other sources; rather it’s the beginning of a refinement process.
On Friday, right after breakfast, we started talking some more. A passage of scripture was coming up in many of my conversations with Czechs, and I looked it up that morning. It was Mark 12: 28-34, and I’ve listed it below:
______________________________
The Greatest Commandment
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
_______________________
This is the entire essence of the Christian gospel, and it comes right from a Q & A with Jesus. If you only know two things about Christianity, it’s to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. As a Christian, this passage guides everything that I do. It’s noteworthy that these are sequential as well – loving God is more important than loving your neighbor (because you can’t love your enemies unless you have the Holy Spirit working inside of you from loving God). If you, even only intellectually, believe this passage of scripture, you are “not far from the kingdom of God”. However, I think the key here is Jesus’s description of how to love God. Yes, you should love God with all your mind, but you can’t JUST love God with all your mind – it takes all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength as well. This goes to why some people look for God for so long and can’t find him – because they are JUST trying to love God with their mind (or heart, etc.) and aren’t engaging their full being (mind – logic & intelligence / heart – emotions / strength – physical body). People outside of the Christian circle will sometimes point to how we will at times act in ways that are not based on logic. This is a correct assessment, but frequently it’s confused with thinking that we take actions in the absence of logic, which is not correct. Logic is surely a part of the equation, and a part that I always consider carefully, but it’s not ALL of the equation, and thus sometimes my actions as a Christian will seem confusing to those who are ONLY engaging in logic.
This assessment hit home with Honza. He was trying to reason through how to love God. He was able to reason through this, and concluded that he was ready to love God with all his mind, but that he hadn’t connected yet because he was just involving his mind. This begged the question, how do you love God with all your heart, soul, and strength as well? I had given my testimony the previous night, and included in that was how I came as a non-believer to turn things over to God two years ago. There are really only two things that have to be done. The first is repenting of your sins. If you truly love God with everything you have, you have to repent of sins and wrongness in your life. It’s silly that we don’t do this. God knows of our sins, but we have to acknowledge them before God. If we can’t do this, we’re holding something back in our relationship with God, and will end up continuing the search. The second thing we have to do is to turn our lives over to God and be willing to follow God’s plan for our life, even if it’s significantly different than our own plan. This is how I ended up in the Czech Republic on this trip in the first place. This doesn’t make sense logically, it doesn’t make sense emotionally, and it doesn’t make sense physically. Yet, this is what we need to do; turn over our whole being to God, as that fulfills needing to love Him with ALL our heart, ALL our soul, ALL our mind, and ALL our strength. Only by taking this leap will God truly enter our lives.
Honza and I spoke Friday morning after breakfast and before class began. Honza was ready to turn his live over to God and Jesus Christ. We made an appointment to talk again after English class was over and before lunch on Friday, then went to class. It’s funny, because sometimes God lines everything up perfectly so that people can move forward. So many people had a hand in getting Honza to this point, but for some reason God wanted me there as he made this decision to follow Jesus.
We met at 12:30 and went to an outside area. I went over with him what he needed to do, repent of his sins and turn his life over to God with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind, and all his strength. He wanted to do this prayer silently, and I agreed that this would be fine, but asked him to finish his prayer vocally, so that I’d know when it was done. While he was doing this, I was praying for him. After a few minutes, he concluded. We started talking, and he vocalized something that surprised me. He stated that as he was doing this, he felt a “darkness in his heart”. Certainly, these aren’t the words that I was expecting to hear from someone when they had just turned their life over to Christ. I immediately said that I’m not sure what this meant, and prayed for discernment. After talking for about 2 minutes, the answer came to me. The darkness that he felt was as he was turning his life over, and this was the remnants of sin that he was casting aside. He was feeling this as it was flowing out of him and he was turning a new page. He truly was committing to love God with all his heart, and as such, his heart was emptying the sin from his previous life. I believe this whole heartedly. We spoke for about five minutes then, and Honza agreed that this sounded accurate as to what had just happened. He did a “temperature check” after that five minutes, and he stated “I don’t know what I feel”. Now this is what I expected to hear initially. He didn’t know what he felt, because he’s never felt that way before in his life. He was now connected to God with the Holy Spirit flowing inside of him, and as such he had no ability to relate this to any past experience or any way he felt previously. Praise God!
Then, we split off and went to lunch. Again, I thought he needed some processing time. Joel, a teacher and bible scholar was on the trip, and I suggested that if he had some additional questions, Joel would be a great person to ask them to. I was excited that one of God’s own had been able to come home, and told a couple of folks, including Jared who had this powerful experience with him earlier in the week.
After lunch, Radka came up to me. Jared had sent her over. Radka is a Christian who has been dating Honza for about 3 years. She had been praying before and during camp that this camp experience would move Honza along the path toward Christianity. She had (happy) tears in her eyes, and was asking if it was true that Honza had just turned his life over to God. Now, you may wonder why I hadn’t mentioned Radka previously. The reason is that we hadn’t spoken more than casually until now. There’s this phrase in English to describe superficial friends as having a relationship “an inch deep and a mile wide”, meaning that they talk about a wide range of things but never go below what’s right on the surface. In that moment, Radka and I had the exact opposite of binds to each other – an inch wide and a mile deep, with the intersecting point where God shows up in people’s lives. Radka was overcome with pure joy, and this is the moment from the trip that I will most treasure for the rest of my days. I now have a human face to put to the story of the Prodigal Son with how much joy God has when one of his own comes home. We spent 30 to 45 minutes together, and we now have this deep unbreakable bond between us. We prayed for what had just happened (I prayed in English while Radka prayed in Czech). I just can’t describe the overwhelming joy that I felt here.
Honza had been around Christians for about 3 years, as he’d been with Radka for that long. He came into the week with questions about if there was a God. He left the week not only knowing who God was, but making a decision to follow him for the rest of his days, and his questions were now about how to follow God. Obviously, making a decision to follow God, and actually following God are two very different things, but you can’t follow God unless you make a decision to follow him. The week wound down and we exchanged gifts. I gave Honza the shirt that I was baptized in from November of 2009. I thought it was wholly appropriate, as his next step (when he’s ready) is to make a public declaration of his faith. This trip and this experience will leave me forever changed. I’m still humbled that God set all of this up so that I was chosen to be with him as Honza made the decision to change the path of his life, after an entire team of people helped get him to that point. The great thing about following God is that you don’t have to ask questions about why you’re chosen to do something; you just have to listen to God and act on the direction. His plan is so much better than any plan I could come up with on my own.
______________
The Parable of the Lost Son
11 Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
13 “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. 14 After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. 16 He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
17 “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ 20 So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
21 “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
25 “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 27 ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
28 “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
_________________
Perhaps this is the most well known of Jesus’s parables. It’s a great parable that both illustrates why Christians so want to bring people to know Christ, and why when they are faithful, they need to remain humble. It doesn’t matter your “years of service” for the Lord, what matters is that you come home, humble yourself before your father (God) and put yourself under His guidance.
I just returned from a mission trip to the Czech Republic. It was the first time that I had ever served the Lord on a multi-day outing – an 11 day trip. The purposes of the trip were to teach English and to build relationships. I built relationships with a number of people, both from the US team and with the Czechs. One of these relationships was with Honza (Jan). Coming into the week, the best way to describe Honza would be agnostic – he might be able to see some “evidence” of God’s existence, but nothing that was proof, and thus, God’s existence was an open ended question for him.
We were building relationships with many of the folks at the camp. There was a large American/Czech group casually tossing a Frisbee around on Monday. Jared Ackles had this bike ride odyssey with him that seemed to allow him to see the Americans through fresh eyes, and then talked to him about spiritual matters until 2 in the morning that night. He, like many of the Czechs, was concerned with what can best be described as “attempts at manipulation”. Born out of the roots of Communism and their high value placed on intelligence and education, Czechs by nature tend to be suspicious of large institutions, of which the Church qualifies.
Many folks spoke with Honza during the week, and he and I sat down after lunch on Thursday. We were going back and forth a lot, and were finding significant commonality in our spiritual thoughts. Part of our discussion went back to manipulation. He had previously read Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ”, which I’ve also read. He didn’t like the presentation style of the book, as Lee Strobel (a former atheist and editor of the Chicago Tribune who set out to disprove Jesus’s ascension from the grave and instead quit his job and became a pastor due to what he discovered from that journey) makes a case for why we can believe Jesus rose after death and as such, why we should believe what he and the bible say. Honza stated that he would have preferred an approach where half the book would be arguments for Jesus, half the book arguments against Jesus, and then let the reader decide. Not presenting this information in this fashion was a blatant attempt at manipulation in his opinion. After already connecting with him on some things, I was able to allow him to see it differently. When I read a book that has a thesis like this, I’m going to follow along with the arguments. However, if an argument doesn’t hold water (the author states something but then draws a conclusion that isn’t fully supported by the arguments), it will jump out at me when I’m reading it, and as such, it will call the entire overall conclusion into question. For me, “The Case for Christ” is a book that was powerful and there were no holes in the arguments. Honza hadn’t thought of it in that respect before – that if the arguments weren’t solid it would be apparent when reading it. Because of this point, I could feel walls coming down.
In another part of our conversation, he was talking about seeing “evidence” of God, but failing to see proof of God. I found myself taking a very analytical approach to this with him. I asked him to envision himself on a jury, asked to make a decision on the evidence in front of him. Juries (at least in the United States) are asked to render a verdict, not based on absolute proof, rather “beyond a reasonable doubt”. This was what seemed to strike a chord with him, and he was able to concede that his belief in God fit this mold – beyond a reasonable doubt even though he didn’t have absolute proof. I invited him to continue revisiting this every 6 months or so, in the event that the evidence he sees changes. However, if he was able to conclude that he believed in God beyond a reasonable doubt, this would have implications for his life. At the end of a couple of hours of talking, he and I had agreement that our beliefs were very similar. I told him I thought he was now a Christian, and he agreed. He stated to me that this was the first time that Christianity made sense to him. With that said, I didn’t think it was the time to push the conversation any more. He needed time to “incubate” on it (time for his brain to start thinking about this new way of seeing things and start forming additional questions, etc.).
We spoke again for about 20 or 30 minutes that night, before the evening program. I do recall that one question he had for me was if I get any of my wisdom from sources outside of Christianity. I believe that he was wrestling with not wanting to shut himself off from all other things if he was going to become a Christian. I was able to answer this very truthfully by stating that, yes; I get some of my wisdom from outside of Christianity. I specifically have gained wisdom from folks I know in the Jewish faith. We both believe in the same God, but those who are practicing Jews don’t recognize the same forms of God that I do. As such, much of our moral code is shared, even though there is a major difference in Theology. I think this had a big impact as well. Become a Christian doesn’t mean having to cut yourself off from all other sources; rather it’s the beginning of a refinement process.
On Friday, right after breakfast, we started talking some more. A passage of scripture was coming up in many of my conversations with Czechs, and I looked it up that morning. It was Mark 12: 28-34, and I’ve listed it below:
______________________________
The Greatest Commandment
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
_______________________
This is the entire essence of the Christian gospel, and it comes right from a Q & A with Jesus. If you only know two things about Christianity, it’s to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. As a Christian, this passage guides everything that I do. It’s noteworthy that these are sequential as well – loving God is more important than loving your neighbor (because you can’t love your enemies unless you have the Holy Spirit working inside of you from loving God). If you, even only intellectually, believe this passage of scripture, you are “not far from the kingdom of God”. However, I think the key here is Jesus’s description of how to love God. Yes, you should love God with all your mind, but you can’t JUST love God with all your mind – it takes all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength as well. This goes to why some people look for God for so long and can’t find him – because they are JUST trying to love God with their mind (or heart, etc.) and aren’t engaging their full being (mind – logic & intelligence / heart – emotions / strength – physical body). People outside of the Christian circle will sometimes point to how we will at times act in ways that are not based on logic. This is a correct assessment, but frequently it’s confused with thinking that we take actions in the absence of logic, which is not correct. Logic is surely a part of the equation, and a part that I always consider carefully, but it’s not ALL of the equation, and thus sometimes my actions as a Christian will seem confusing to those who are ONLY engaging in logic.
This assessment hit home with Honza. He was trying to reason through how to love God. He was able to reason through this, and concluded that he was ready to love God with all his mind, but that he hadn’t connected yet because he was just involving his mind. This begged the question, how do you love God with all your heart, soul, and strength as well? I had given my testimony the previous night, and included in that was how I came as a non-believer to turn things over to God two years ago. There are really only two things that have to be done. The first is repenting of your sins. If you truly love God with everything you have, you have to repent of sins and wrongness in your life. It’s silly that we don’t do this. God knows of our sins, but we have to acknowledge them before God. If we can’t do this, we’re holding something back in our relationship with God, and will end up continuing the search. The second thing we have to do is to turn our lives over to God and be willing to follow God’s plan for our life, even if it’s significantly different than our own plan. This is how I ended up in the Czech Republic on this trip in the first place. This doesn’t make sense logically, it doesn’t make sense emotionally, and it doesn’t make sense physically. Yet, this is what we need to do; turn over our whole being to God, as that fulfills needing to love Him with ALL our heart, ALL our soul, ALL our mind, and ALL our strength. Only by taking this leap will God truly enter our lives.
Honza and I spoke Friday morning after breakfast and before class began. Honza was ready to turn his live over to God and Jesus Christ. We made an appointment to talk again after English class was over and before lunch on Friday, then went to class. It’s funny, because sometimes God lines everything up perfectly so that people can move forward. So many people had a hand in getting Honza to this point, but for some reason God wanted me there as he made this decision to follow Jesus.
We met at 12:30 and went to an outside area. I went over with him what he needed to do, repent of his sins and turn his life over to God with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind, and all his strength. He wanted to do this prayer silently, and I agreed that this would be fine, but asked him to finish his prayer vocally, so that I’d know when it was done. While he was doing this, I was praying for him. After a few minutes, he concluded. We started talking, and he vocalized something that surprised me. He stated that as he was doing this, he felt a “darkness in his heart”. Certainly, these aren’t the words that I was expecting to hear from someone when they had just turned their life over to Christ. I immediately said that I’m not sure what this meant, and prayed for discernment. After talking for about 2 minutes, the answer came to me. The darkness that he felt was as he was turning his life over, and this was the remnants of sin that he was casting aside. He was feeling this as it was flowing out of him and he was turning a new page. He truly was committing to love God with all his heart, and as such, his heart was emptying the sin from his previous life. I believe this whole heartedly. We spoke for about five minutes then, and Honza agreed that this sounded accurate as to what had just happened. He did a “temperature check” after that five minutes, and he stated “I don’t know what I feel”. Now this is what I expected to hear initially. He didn’t know what he felt, because he’s never felt that way before in his life. He was now connected to God with the Holy Spirit flowing inside of him, and as such he had no ability to relate this to any past experience or any way he felt previously. Praise God!
Then, we split off and went to lunch. Again, I thought he needed some processing time. Joel, a teacher and bible scholar was on the trip, and I suggested that if he had some additional questions, Joel would be a great person to ask them to. I was excited that one of God’s own had been able to come home, and told a couple of folks, including Jared who had this powerful experience with him earlier in the week.
After lunch, Radka came up to me. Jared had sent her over. Radka is a Christian who has been dating Honza for about 3 years. She had been praying before and during camp that this camp experience would move Honza along the path toward Christianity. She had (happy) tears in her eyes, and was asking if it was true that Honza had just turned his life over to God. Now, you may wonder why I hadn’t mentioned Radka previously. The reason is that we hadn’t spoken more than casually until now. There’s this phrase in English to describe superficial friends as having a relationship “an inch deep and a mile wide”, meaning that they talk about a wide range of things but never go below what’s right on the surface. In that moment, Radka and I had the exact opposite of binds to each other – an inch wide and a mile deep, with the intersecting point where God shows up in people’s lives. Radka was overcome with pure joy, and this is the moment from the trip that I will most treasure for the rest of my days. I now have a human face to put to the story of the Prodigal Son with how much joy God has when one of his own comes home. We spent 30 to 45 minutes together, and we now have this deep unbreakable bond between us. We prayed for what had just happened (I prayed in English while Radka prayed in Czech). I just can’t describe the overwhelming joy that I felt here.
Honza had been around Christians for about 3 years, as he’d been with Radka for that long. He came into the week with questions about if there was a God. He left the week not only knowing who God was, but making a decision to follow him for the rest of his days, and his questions were now about how to follow God. Obviously, making a decision to follow God, and actually following God are two very different things, but you can’t follow God unless you make a decision to follow him. The week wound down and we exchanged gifts. I gave Honza the shirt that I was baptized in from November of 2009. I thought it was wholly appropriate, as his next step (when he’s ready) is to make a public declaration of his faith. This trip and this experience will leave me forever changed. I’m still humbled that God set all of this up so that I was chosen to be with him as Honza made the decision to change the path of his life, after an entire team of people helped get him to that point. The great thing about following God is that you don’t have to ask questions about why you’re chosen to do something; you just have to listen to God and act on the direction. His plan is so much better than any plan I could come up with on my own.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Recent journey
Four years ago yesterday, my sister-in-law Janet died. What a great person Janet was. Ginny and I liked her so much that Evangeline has Janet as a middle name. Janet lived the last two and a half months at Elmhurst Hospital, and had a stream of people coming through at all times to see her. This was not a tributary, but a full gushing river of people that hospital workers commented that they don’t ever see. What a phenomenal testimony this was to the life she led. Janet had a radiance that you don’t find every day and these hundreds of people (yes, hundreds) who poured through the hospital during her final months had been so moved by the life she led that they had to come.
During this time, Evangeline was born. Also during this time, I had just started going to church on a regular basis for the first time in my life. Janet and I spoke about this in the hospital, and I could tell that not much would give her greater joy than knowing that I had started doing this. I certainly didn’t pretend to understand what Church was all about, but I did know that many of the people who lead the types of lives I wanted led and were known as church goers, so it seemed there was something to it. While it may not have even been on a conscious level, I knew that I was missing out on something that others had by not going to church, and this certainly helped me strengthen my resolve to do so.
Ginny and I attended the Church she grew up in and led a large outreach campaign there. The campaign didn’t go well. For me personally, while I was attending Church regularly, I now know that I was not yet a believer in God or Jesus during this time. It should not be a surprise that the campaign did not reach its desired outcome when a non-believer was co-leading it. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts: 1:8). As someone who wasn’t yet truly following Jesus, I didn’t have God’s power to be leading this outreach campaign, and it should be no surprise that it didn’t work.
Because of what happened with the campaign, in early 2009 Ginny and I decided to start attending a new church – Christ Community Church in St. Charles. By March, we joined a couples group and went for the first time on Friday, March 12, 2009. The group had two parts, a combined bible study, and men’s and women’s accountability time. I wasn’t really comfortable during this accountability time, and some of the guys were talking about some deep personal issues. As such, I decided to choose a “safe” topic and stated that I wanted to try to pray more and get more comfortable praying.
The following Monday, to follow through on the commitment I made, I did some prayer on the way to work. I had also got some praise songs downloaded, so I was playing a song that I had just heard at CCC called “Glorified” by Jared Anderson. The chorus of the song goes like this:
“I’ve come to worship; I’ve come to lift up your name
For you deserve this life laid down like the life that you gave
I have but one voice, one heart, and one sacrifice
So won’t you take this life laid down and be glorified”
As I sang that final lyric with the music, I experienced this incredible feeling like nothing else I had ever known. I now know that it was the presence of the Holy Spirit in me. I had this feeling of borderline euphoria that lasted for days. One seal of how things were different now with the Holy Spirit in me was that I was reacting in a different manner than previously. At work that day, after I provided coaching to one of my direct reports, another team member IMed me saying “nice f------ manager”, but the word was actually spelled out. I asked this person about it, and they became clearly embarrassed. It quickly became clear that the team member intended to send this to the person I just provided coaching to, not to me. I laughed it off. I didn’t choose to react this way, it just happened. Had that happened the week before, I doubt I would have reacted in the same way.
In our community group, we had a prayer list that each couple compiled, turned in, and each member of the group prayed for the prayers the others had. So, in coming back to group the second time, we submitted the following prayer:
“For Dave’s brother Tom and his nephew Eric. Please pray that God will be with the family during this time. April 2 is the anniversary of Tom’s wife Janet’s death. She was a wonderful woman who is sorely missed by all, but is at home with God.”
This was the first prayer that I asked others to pray for since the Holy Spirit was within me (one of two prayers that we submitted overall), and the list was distributed on March 28, 2009. So, we had a team of believers praying this prayer, asking God to be with the family, especially on April 2. On April 2, 2009, an old friend of Tom’s who he had reconnected with from high school through Facebook, Doreen, stopped by to see Tom to pick up some boxes, as he had recently moved (which is another amazing story) and she could put them to use. I’m in awe of the power of the Lord when I reflect on this, as God chose to grant this request in quite a literal fashion (Doreen is a believer in Jesus and the trinity, having the Holy Spirit inside of her, and the Holy Spirit in Doreen visited Tom on the two year anniversary of his wife’s death). To me, it’s as if God was saying “Where have you been for 35 years Dave? I’ll seal this request in a way that will leave you no doubt over who I am, or the power I have. Remember this in the tough times.”
I was baptized in the fall of 2009 and went through what was among the most challenging times in my life a year ago. However, my faith has never wavered since then. Sure, I’ve had times where I’ve been upset with God, but I’ve never doubted his sovereignty or that He can do his will in seemingly impossible odds. The strength and comfort I’ve been able to find in God has been what’s brought me through. I really wish I would have known the Lord earlier, but I know that I have a perspective that many others who were raised in the faith don’t have.
Tom and Doreen were married last summer, and Ginny and I chose Doreen to be Adelaide’s Godmother. It seemed wholly appropriate to seal our daughter’s faith with a reflection of the seal that God used on my faith.
During this time, Evangeline was born. Also during this time, I had just started going to church on a regular basis for the first time in my life. Janet and I spoke about this in the hospital, and I could tell that not much would give her greater joy than knowing that I had started doing this. I certainly didn’t pretend to understand what Church was all about, but I did know that many of the people who lead the types of lives I wanted led and were known as church goers, so it seemed there was something to it. While it may not have even been on a conscious level, I knew that I was missing out on something that others had by not going to church, and this certainly helped me strengthen my resolve to do so.
Ginny and I attended the Church she grew up in and led a large outreach campaign there. The campaign didn’t go well. For me personally, while I was attending Church regularly, I now know that I was not yet a believer in God or Jesus during this time. It should not be a surprise that the campaign did not reach its desired outcome when a non-believer was co-leading it. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts: 1:8). As someone who wasn’t yet truly following Jesus, I didn’t have God’s power to be leading this outreach campaign, and it should be no surprise that it didn’t work.
Because of what happened with the campaign, in early 2009 Ginny and I decided to start attending a new church – Christ Community Church in St. Charles. By March, we joined a couples group and went for the first time on Friday, March 12, 2009. The group had two parts, a combined bible study, and men’s and women’s accountability time. I wasn’t really comfortable during this accountability time, and some of the guys were talking about some deep personal issues. As such, I decided to choose a “safe” topic and stated that I wanted to try to pray more and get more comfortable praying.
The following Monday, to follow through on the commitment I made, I did some prayer on the way to work. I had also got some praise songs downloaded, so I was playing a song that I had just heard at CCC called “Glorified” by Jared Anderson. The chorus of the song goes like this:
“I’ve come to worship; I’ve come to lift up your name
For you deserve this life laid down like the life that you gave
I have but one voice, one heart, and one sacrifice
So won’t you take this life laid down and be glorified”
As I sang that final lyric with the music, I experienced this incredible feeling like nothing else I had ever known. I now know that it was the presence of the Holy Spirit in me. I had this feeling of borderline euphoria that lasted for days. One seal of how things were different now with the Holy Spirit in me was that I was reacting in a different manner than previously. At work that day, after I provided coaching to one of my direct reports, another team member IMed me saying “nice f------ manager”, but the word was actually spelled out. I asked this person about it, and they became clearly embarrassed. It quickly became clear that the team member intended to send this to the person I just provided coaching to, not to me. I laughed it off. I didn’t choose to react this way, it just happened. Had that happened the week before, I doubt I would have reacted in the same way.
In our community group, we had a prayer list that each couple compiled, turned in, and each member of the group prayed for the prayers the others had. So, in coming back to group the second time, we submitted the following prayer:
“For Dave’s brother Tom and his nephew Eric. Please pray that God will be with the family during this time. April 2 is the anniversary of Tom’s wife Janet’s death. She was a wonderful woman who is sorely missed by all, but is at home with God.”
This was the first prayer that I asked others to pray for since the Holy Spirit was within me (one of two prayers that we submitted overall), and the list was distributed on March 28, 2009. So, we had a team of believers praying this prayer, asking God to be with the family, especially on April 2. On April 2, 2009, an old friend of Tom’s who he had reconnected with from high school through Facebook, Doreen, stopped by to see Tom to pick up some boxes, as he had recently moved (which is another amazing story) and she could put them to use. I’m in awe of the power of the Lord when I reflect on this, as God chose to grant this request in quite a literal fashion (Doreen is a believer in Jesus and the trinity, having the Holy Spirit inside of her, and the Holy Spirit in Doreen visited Tom on the two year anniversary of his wife’s death). To me, it’s as if God was saying “Where have you been for 35 years Dave? I’ll seal this request in a way that will leave you no doubt over who I am, or the power I have. Remember this in the tough times.”
I was baptized in the fall of 2009 and went through what was among the most challenging times in my life a year ago. However, my faith has never wavered since then. Sure, I’ve had times where I’ve been upset with God, but I’ve never doubted his sovereignty or that He can do his will in seemingly impossible odds. The strength and comfort I’ve been able to find in God has been what’s brought me through. I really wish I would have known the Lord earlier, but I know that I have a perspective that many others who were raised in the faith don’t have.
Tom and Doreen were married last summer, and Ginny and I chose Doreen to be Adelaide’s Godmother. It seemed wholly appropriate to seal our daughter’s faith with a reflection of the seal that God used on my faith.
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