Post 4: The Pursuit.

Happy New Year!!

Umm. It seems I missed the train on that one. Sorry.

So, ya. Life got busy and such. I hope everyone had a great holiday season. And New Year beginning. And. And.

Nirma and I went to Puerto Rico in January. It was a good time. Actually, I could write an entire blog on the experience. Something about diversity and cultural difference and how it needs to impact our thinking. Maybe I will do that. But not today.

We arrived back to our house on a Thursday afternoon from Puerto Rico. That left me with less than 24 hours, including sleep time, to write 2 sermons, have an elder's meeting, finalize and reherse a special joint communion service between a couple of the local churches of which I was hosting and in charge of, and return the myriad of messages that had accumlated while I was gone. It was a bit of a whirlwind.

However, I was ready for the next week of work and grateful for a full week to get my next sermon written.

Depending on how one works and thinks, the process of putting together a sermon will vary. My process goes a little like this. I pray alot. I want God to write my sermon for me. I read until something starts to formulate in my mind. Once the idea gets rolling, I go take a shower. Yes, that is correct. I shower. For some reason, I think so much better in the shower. Plus, my office is in the basement, and it gets really cold in my basement, so a warm shower is a nice break. Then I come back and start to write. Now, mind you, this takes most of a week. The formulating of ideas, and then running and coalescing thoughts in my head can take a couple days. The bulk of sermon writing happens in ones head, not on paper. At least it does for me. Usually by thursday night or early friday, it's all done and printed. And by done and printed I mean that I have an outline from which I will preach from. I don't use a manuscript. I like the flexability of an ouline. Plus, it requires me to have a better grip on my subject matter than having a manuscript in front of me.

Anyway. I share that so I can share this. Monday comes around and I can't seem to pull anything together in my head. But that's not entirely unusual. Sometimes it takes a couple days to find a direction.

But when Thursday rolled around and I had nothing, not a single idea to run with, I was getting a little concerned. Friday came, and I had nothing. It was friday afternoon and, while I wasn't exactly panicking, I was a bit worried. No one wants to walk up to the pulpit and start there sermon like this, "Today, our sermon will be taken from this magazine I found on the sidewalk... let me see... ah yes, it says here that Honda will be releasing not one, but three new motorcycles this year. And this is much like how Jesus, um, decided that all of the... easter bunnies, yes, that's it, Easter Bunnies, should be made from chocolate for all eternity. May His Glorious name be praised. Amen."

I'm pretty sure they have had people committed for less than that.

Well, I was sitting my chair trying to figure out what was wrong. Why was my mind blank? Why couldn't I come up with a single new thought? It was at that point that a disturbing thought entered my mind.

I realized I had nothing more to say. When part of what you do is based around the concept of conveying information to people in order to help/teach/encourage/admonish/etc., and you suddenly realize you have nothing more to say... well, you can see the problem that creates.

I was going over in my head all the different concepts and ideas and I realized that I had said everything I knew how to say about them. Many of them I had hit more than once from different angles and I didn't know how to make it different. I didn't know how else to say it, and even more, I wasn't sure it was going to make any difference even if I did.

Now, if you were paying attention to my dissertation on how I write sermons, you will realize one glaring problem. I was upset because I had nothing to say, and yet, the whole purpose of doing what I do is to convey what God wants said. I was focusing on me and not on God.

One thing sermon writing has done for me is to answer my own questions about things. I still have unanswered questions about many things, but I've answered most of the ones that had caused me problems. For me sermon writing is not only highly educational, but also in many ways cathartic. It allows me to work out theological quandaries but also to pass on what I've learned to those around me. I'm not saying I'm always right, but it has brought be a measure of peace.

And there were two other parts to my distrubed conclusion. One, I was feeling like maybe I'd hit a block and become so overconfident in my "knowledge" that I had rendered myself unteachable. Which is bad and is also self diluted cause I really know better. The essense of learning is that, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Secondly, I had grown increasingly frustrated that my people weren't "getting it." Week after week, day after day, I try to get them moving in a direction, and consistantly meet failure. Or at least it often seems that way. As if progress depends on my definition of it.

All these things I know better than to fall into, and yet, there I was. I wasn't burnt out, but I think I was at the very least ignoring my own teaching. Perhaps headed toward burnout.

It was at that moment, I remembered something I had read from Rob Bell. He had a very similar situation happen to him, except for the opposite reasons. So I went back and read.

He describes a moment he had before going up front to preach one day. Rob Bell is the pastor of Mars Hill church in... Michigan? Yes. Let's go with Michigan. It is a hugely successful church with thousands of attending members. So here he is, postor boy for young successful pastors, and he is hiding in a back room with his car keys in his hands, five minutes before he walks up to preach, ready to sneak and walk away from it all. And his reason?

"I realized I had nothing else to say."

A small lesson there is, success and failure have nothing to do with satisfaction, happiness and burnout.

But even though our situations were vastly different, I discovered that our causes had a similar source. He describes talking to a councelor. During this visit the councelor tells him, "Rob, I know what your problem is."

"It's sin."

Rob had one of those "say what?" moments.

But the councelors response was one of the more profound things I have heard in a long time.

"Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God wants you to be. Anything else in your life is sin and you must repent of it."

Now, I think we can all agree that is a bit over generalized and over simplified. But the underlying point is no less true. And for those of you who may not put much stock in God, the point is still a valid one and I'll say it differently.

Your job is the relentless pursuit of who you are suppose to be, and anything else is a waste of time.

It's mostly the first half of that, that I like. "The relentless pursuit of who God wants you to be."

For Rob, the problem was that he was trying to be what everyone else wanted him to be. Superpastor. Everywhere, all the time, fitting the mold to make everyone happy.

And I found, as I thought about it, that even though I protest so much at being just another typical pastor, in many ways I had been just reacting. Making decisions based on everyone around me. But not based on me at all. I don't mean that in a selfish way. It's good to be selfless. But one can't ignore ones self. You can't ignore your instincts. Your better judgement. Your own personal needs. Otherwise you just collapse.

Your pursuit of whatever you pursue just becomes hollow. You become hollow.

And you find that you have nothing left to say.

After all that, I had a sermon to write. And I wrote in less than 2 hours. Every successful preaching and sermon giving teacher will tell you that 2 hours is about 10 hours too short at the minimum to write a good sermon. And usually they are correct.

I went in to church the next day. Instead of a typical biblical sermon, I told three stories. One of a guy from Union College named Mike Needles. Another of Solomon. And the third of Rob.
Solomons is short and simple. Read Ecclesiastes 1:12-2:17 if you want to see the words. The short of it is this. Solomon was trying to find the meaning of his existance. And he searched everywhere, tried everything whether good or bad, and succeeded in every endeavor. But at every point he found it meaningless. He kept finding himself unworthy of the great king who had come before him, his father David. Over and again it was meaningless.

Like chasing after the wind. And he hated it all.

But at the very end of the book he finds the one thing that actually mattered. Fear God and keep his command.

Solomon was looking for meaning every where. But he neglected the one place that actually mattered. God wanted him to be something, to fill a role, and he was fighting it. Trying to be wise, but ignoring wisdom.

Just like Rob was looking to everyone else to find his purpose.

The story of Mike is the success story. The short of it is that we were all together at a function and someone broke into his car and ripped him off and trashed it. But he didn't get mad. He remembered that he had been no different at one point in his life, he remember where he had come from, and now knew who he was to be. He figured he had it coming, but more than that, he knew who we was suppose to be and understood that one day those kids who did that to him would figure it out. Maybe.

I've never forgotten that day.

Now, the point of the sermon when I tied it all up had to do with people who had junk in their past, but unlike Mike had never come to terms with it. They can't let the memory of it go even if the problem is no longer there.

People who, like Solomon are trying to find meaning everywhere in everything, only to find it hollow and empty and to have taken them somewhere they didn't want to go.

Or like Rob, trying to please everyone, and keep pushing through. Putting on the mask, sucking it up, and going forward until one day you have nothing left to give. And everything falls apart.
That was the jist of my sermon. But here is the part that amazed me.

Before I got the sermon, before I had really talked to anyone, we had the portion of the service where people can tell what they are thankful for, or give a request for prayer. What amazed me was that out of the 10 or so people who spoke up, every single one of them asked for help because they were feeling that they had were reaching this point of running out of steam. Not sure if they could keep going or keep it up.

I was totally oblivious to any of these things. Some pastor I am. But the point that this made to me was that I was trying to figure out what I needed to tell these people, what they needed to be hearing, and the reality was, what they needed to hear had nothing to do with my ability to discern it.

Why I thought I had nothing to say, God took my nothing and used it anyway. I wrote that sermon because of me. I didn't write it for them. At least, I didn't know I was writing for them. It turned out to be one of my top 3 sermons of all time. Not because it was good, but because it was relevant.
This may all seem a little scattered in scope so I'll bring this back around to the purpose. Which is actually two fold.

One. Never think that what you are doing is irrelevant. That you aren't making an impact. That you have nothing left to offer. You do. You ALWAYS do, even if you don't realize it.

Two. Our job in life is to be who God wants us to be. Who we are meant to be. Define that as you will. Not what anybody else wants us to be. Everyone has this stuff in their past that controls their thinking and decision making. It holds us back. We are still trying live according to someone elses mindset. Which would be ok if we were, in fact, them. But we aren't. And this we have to deal with and kill it. Not ignore or run away from it. We can't run from it. It just finds us again. There is a saying that says, "Where ever you go, there you are." Our problems follow us because we are the problem.

We, as individuals, must deal with our personal histories, external expectations, and start being who we are suppose to be.

Everything else in our lives hinges upon us figuring that out.

Good luck and God speed.