This post was already started when Tim Challies reminded his readers that he was going to develop a Testimony Tuesday. He has been gracious enough to include this not so "Reformed" Christian Critter in his repertoire of contributors. There are many other stories of God's loving, delivering intervention in the lives of those that have contributed there. It's like looking through the glass into the Heavenly Natal Ward!
I've been adopted twice. Don't feel sorry for me though, I actually feel sorry for all you children that haven't been adopted. At birth I was given up for good reasons I'm sure; but I will never know. That really doesn't matter. Just because we don't understand why God allows what at first would seem to be horrible things to happen, doesn't mean that things won't turn out even better. I am living proof. Jesus was dying (and living) proof.
God placed me into the most loving home that a child could grow up in. I was loved, first, by my adoptive mother. Mom has loved me for over 53 years and in her heart she still loves the little red headed boy that she and Dad took home from the hospital, not because they had gotten pregnant and had to have me, but because they deeply wanted me. I was hard to get. Even then there were tough standards established by the state to qualify for an adoptive child. Mom and Dad taught me God's Love even before they had found Christ themselves; by making the sacrifices necessary to be able to adopt me.
Dad followed the big construction jobs in Arizona. He often had to stay away all week at the distant job site because we couldn't afford to follow him around. But he would drive all night after work Friday just to get to spend the weekend with his wife and "little stinker". Again, sacrificial love being demonstrated.
When we finally did get to move to Page where he worked we had been placed not only at one of the largest construction sites in the world at that time, but we had been, again, providentially placed in God's place where we all three could find God's Love.
Through the rather diverse ministry (missionary to the Indians, Mormons, and the itinerant construction crews of the Southwest) of Rev. Wilder at First Baptist Church of Page Arizona, one by one, we each prayed a sincere prayer for Jesus to become our Lord and Savior. I would later realize that this was a second adoption for me, into an eternal family. We were each baptized there in the church. I still remember the stark dressing room where I put on the robe, the cool metal stairs on my feet as I walked down into the pool and the odd words of Brother Wilder. Later I would realize he had made a prophetic announcement over me. "This young man will minister for Christ".
This loving second adoption with its accompanying purposeful pronouncement would direct the course of my life, even when I wasn't fully aware of it. I'm living proof of the providential (caring) role of the Lord in our lives.
Not surprisingly then, as a teen I surrendered to ministry, as did my girlfriend. We attended the same Baptist School, got married half way through, and worked for the Home Mission Board for two years before returning to school at SWBT Seminary. Upon graduating, we continued our ministerial journey for 5 more years. Then the train wreck of divorce from my high school sweetheart derailed what appeared to be a bright future of service to the Lord. Though I was exonerated with a 100% vote of confidence from my church at the time, just a few years thereafter I left the ministry and even the church altogether, because I began to make decisions based on pathological loneliness rather than from the Word and Love of God.
Those are the bones of the journey. The flesh of the journey was much less about where I ministered and what I studied than about Christ's Love sustaining. The heart of my testimony is not the life that went right, no matter how much I might have desired it, but of how God's Motherly Hen Love will not let us go when life doesn't follow it's expected path.
I was in the proverbial desert away from the church and close fellowship with my Spiritual Father for over 10 years. He was always there though, because I was His adopted son. I ignored Him because he reminded me of my personal disappointment. It wasn't His fault. But He is gentle with a broken heart. Blessed are the broken hearted for they shall be comforted...even if it takes a long time.
My testimony is one of hope for the disillusioned and derailed lives of the well intended adopted kids who run away from home. When our expectations of noble service for our God crash on the rocks, we are still on the Rock. He will not let you go. No matter how deep into the cave you hide He will follow you. He will reveal himself in the desert as he did to Moses. My biggest thrill was seeing Him regularly working outside the walls of the cloistered church. I also began to see myself as a minister called to minister in or out of the ministerial title. God called me above all other calls. I also found Him to be just as redemptively active in the world. He doesn't need His Church to do the work. He has just invited us to share in what He’s already doing.
The shame: during the 10 years that I was in my camp of spiritual leprosy, I never once had another Christian ask me if I needed help. But did you know the Lord has an Army of Angels that travel in secular disguises?
How timely. Here is today’s devotional by Dr. Joel Gregory that dovetails wonderfully with what I have said.
"Guess Who’s Coming to Church – Luke 4:18
He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted….
A concerned PH.D. in theology with a concentration in youth ministry interviewed 17 families of teenagers with disabilities. Of these 17, only 3 of the families remained active in church. They had found no help for their special children. Not only had the church not sought them out but had not welcomed them with open arms when they came.
Jesus ministered to a group of people that are not represented in our churches. We do not have Leper’s Ministry, Demoniac’s Day Out or Priority on Prostitute’s Ministry. The kind of people whose faces peer back at us from the New Testament is not represented in our churches. Oh, occasionally there is the curious character that comes in from the street and makes everyone feel uncomfortable. Yet the people we meet on page after page of the New Testament – the marginal, the afflicted, the begging, and the challenged – are simply not represented in our fellowships. How did we get from where Christianity started to where it is today?
We have baptized the church in the culture. We have raised our hands over the cultural baptismal pool and declared, “I baptize the Church in the name of consumerism, hedonism and celebrity.” World without end. Our culture is the culture of beauty, wealth, sophistication, cosmetic surgery and tooth whitener. In such a world the challenged make us nervous, remind us of what might have been and otherwise rain on our parade.
Now that presents us with a real problem as Christians. Our Leader seemed never to hang out with the very kind of people we want to be. Our churches will break their holy neck to reach more people just like the people already there. Jesus gathered around Him the people who very definitely are not in our churches.
Has it come to this? Do we either hang with Him or with the church? Try this. Make one friend of someone who makes everyone else at church uncomfortable. Take on a quadriplegic. Make friends with a meth addict. Know a real kook. Love them for Jesus’ sake. You will find that He will be there with you."
-Dr. Joel Gregory, www.gregoryministries.org
[permission has been granted for this usage]
Ministers give special attention to the opportunity of Dr. Gregory's Proclaimers Place . If I were still in the pulpit I would make taking advantage of this opportunity a top priority. Dr. Gregory is a modern day Spurgeon.
I would offer that we should likewise be redemptively reaching out to those kooky forever family members who may be, for whatever reason, still hiding in the caves. Need examples, just go looking at the cave people of the Bible. Quite a colorful bunch, but they could still serve an important role.(i.e. 1 Kings 19:9-18).
What a message for us all to hear and act upon!
propheT...Kooky Too
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comments:
I like it best when it's your words, brother, and not the added material quoted from others. There's a lot I could comment on, out of my own life, but I want to excerpt these words from your testimony that spoke most deeply to my heart:
"When our expectations of noble service for our God crash on the rocks, we are still on the Rock. He will not let you go. No matter how deep into the cave you hide He will follow you. He will reveal himself in the desert as he did to Moses… …seeing Him regularly working outside the walls of the cloistered church. I also began to see myself as a minister called to minister in or out of the ministerial title. God called me above all other calls. I also found Him to be just as redemptively active in the world. He doesn't need His Church to do the work. He has just invited us to share in what he’s already doing. The shame: during the 10 years that I was in my camp of spiritual leprosy, I never once had another Christian ask me if I needed help. But did you know the Lord has an Army of Angels that travel in secular disguises?"
Since my childhood, I knew that I was called to do something for the Lord, didn't know what though, for sure. Growing up a "house Catholic" (people who were baptised Catholic but we're kicked out of church for whatever reason, yet still believing), I naturally assumed I should be a priest. Youthful fantasies are made of what they've been fed on. In my young adulthood (college years), still afraid of and also scorning "church", but seeking desperately for community in God, I actually started my own home-made religion, based not on the Bible (which is what I'd have done if brought up a Baptist) but on the Bible PLUS a holy book that I composed myself, like the Book of Mormon. In fact, it was just a New Age reshuffle of ancient and modern heresies with my name on it, making me a "prophet". I gathered at least a dozen or so fellow students, quit school after three years, emigrated to Canada, and formed a religious commune in Alberta based on my "teachings." Thanks be to God, "the Faith House" (as we called it) self-destructed after only about 8 months, and "the Faith" rapidly collapsed within the next year or so. After moving back to the States, to Oregon, I had my "theophany", my meeting with the Living God and accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, within the next year, everyone I was still in contact with had also left behind the fantasies we had followed, and rejoined Christianity in one form or another. I reentered as a born-again Episcopalian along with my wife. It took another dozen years to make it back to Orthodoxy, but we did, finally, when I was 37. It turned out that Orthodoxy had been the religion of my wife's family until her Mom's generation. In fact, my wife's great grandfather was the last in a long line of Orthodox priests, her family was a "priestly" family from the northern Balkans. Now, our oldest son is a seminary graduate and waiting for ordination to the Orthodox priesthood (he must be married first).
But, you see, what I wanted in ignorance is coming to pass in ways I couldn't have imagined. My original desire to become a priest myself has passed to the next generation, not tainted with the stain of my sins. What the Lord has given me to do, to minister to everyone He puts into my path, which I've been doing since I was born again at the age of 24, is exactly what He made me for. Though some think otherwise of me, this is no fantasy, and there is no earthly glory in it for me either, only apparent shame and loss. At my age, I "shouldn't be doing such things."
But you're right, that when we (you and I) have been in greatest need of help, no member of the Church came to look for us and help us. The Lord had to come Himself, to drive us into the desert, and there to minister to us. Though prophet is a designation I took to myself as a confused youth, it's not one I would ever take now, and yet, I now know what it means to be a prophet, to be called to that life, because I am in fact living that life, and it is not an easy life. One of the greatest miracles to me is that I have found another such person who is only a youth and already there. We are in the desert together, and when God wants to reveal us, He does. Otherwise we are invisible to the world, and both thought of as mad men when they do see us.
This has become more than a mere comment. I hope you don't mind.
I've been a full member of the Greek Orthodox Church for 19 years now. They have a place for people like us. On the institutional level, not, but Orthodoxy is Christianity in its fullness, and because they venerate people who like us have found their call outside the mainstream, they are forced by their own tradition to accept us, and even endorse us, albeit secretly sometimes as Nikodemos endorsed Jesus.
I was edified by your testimony, brother. We have met and are living together in God's Spirit and His Kingdom. May we some day meet in this world also. His will be done.
Καλη αναστασις! Beautiful resurrection!
Post a Comment