A Good Answer
Stories
There’s an old saying, “Watch what you pray for, you might get it.” A cautionary tale.
I always worry about giving people a rosy picture, a way to solve their problems. Having grown up with sit-coms, indoctrinated with the attitude that every problem could be fixed in a half hour (with commercials), except for the complicated ones (those took an hour), you’d think I’d expect happy endings and easy fixes. But somewhere along the line I was taught or osmosed a different attitude.
It might have come from my family’s insistence on making the cross a living reality. I learned that even God suffered. I learned that love is not never having to say you’re sorry, it’s giving without counting the cost.
It drives me nuts when people try to make Christianity a solution for unhappiness. Jesus wept. He was the suffering servant. He died broken, and we celebrate it on a regular basis. So praying isn’t a process of getting what we want or even what we need, unless you include being a suffering servant.
Life has edges, sharp ones. It’s not an easy journey, and sometimes it’s not a lot of fun. I’m told there’s a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I’ll tell ya’, it feels like my fairy god-mother laid that one on me in the cradle. I could write a book. (Oh, I did.)
I wrestled with the call to ministry for a long time. Having a family of ministers, growing up with ministers and church leaders as family friends, seeing the skirmishes and some of the battles waged in churches, knowing the blood spilled by my parents and my brother, growing in the shadow of great preachers and courageous witnesses, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get tangled in the same jungle and bitten by the same bugs. I also didn’t know if I had the chops.
While in seminary, I was confronted by the pain of the city (that’s another story). I prayed that I would go anywhere, into the mission field, even to Wisconsin (I’m not big on cold), but I just couldn’t do what was necessary to do ministry in the inner city. I thought that was settled.
It was a circuitous process, but I ended up in Newark, as in Newark, New Jersey. See what I mean? I have an interesting life.
I discovered that what I’d picked up along the way was correct. Solutions have little to do with the good news we are given to preach. But I also learned that the Apostles, the ones that walked around with Jesus, the ones he chose, had no more of a clue than I did. And I learned that after they experienced the horror of their Lord’s brutal end, in their confusion and guilt they realized they had been out of their depth all along. But instead of running away from this painful intersection between glory and suffering, they chose it as a way of life. They gave up. They surrendered. Which is what they needed to do.
I’ve aged and learned. I try to remember Joni Mitchell’s line, “I don’t know who I am, but life is for learning.” And when all the cylinders are firing I realize I have learned along the way. But I still don’t have any sense of nice neat solutions.
I do have a sense that very few of us have much of a clue about how things work. I’ve made a list of life rules. And I read through them regularly, and add to them when epiphanies intrude. But even with my rules I can see that they don’t solve what we face. They offer perspective and an invitation to humility.
One Sunday I asked the kids in the Sunday school to write questions they wanted to ask me. It took them a few weeks to get rolling, but they filled up a box. In worship they pulled out the questions, one by one, read them and let me squirm. Some were fun, some were deep. The one I’ll always remember was, “What’s the first thing you want Jesus to say to you?”
I started to cry. I realized something. All I hoped for from my Lord was to be with him. I got it together and said, “Thank you. You just helped me learn something. What I want Jesus to say to me is, ‘David’.”
I don’t know if my answer was disappointing to them. But it was honest. Like I said, I’ve had an interesting life.
*****************************************
StoryShare, October 21, 2018, issue.
Copyright 2018 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
I always worry about giving people a rosy picture, a way to solve their problems. Having grown up with sit-coms, indoctrinated with the attitude that every problem could be fixed in a half hour (with commercials), except for the complicated ones (those took an hour), you’d think I’d expect happy endings and easy fixes. But somewhere along the line I was taught or osmosed a different attitude.
It might have come from my family’s insistence on making the cross a living reality. I learned that even God suffered. I learned that love is not never having to say you’re sorry, it’s giving without counting the cost.
It drives me nuts when people try to make Christianity a solution for unhappiness. Jesus wept. He was the suffering servant. He died broken, and we celebrate it on a regular basis. So praying isn’t a process of getting what we want or even what we need, unless you include being a suffering servant.
Life has edges, sharp ones. It’s not an easy journey, and sometimes it’s not a lot of fun. I’m told there’s a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I’ll tell ya’, it feels like my fairy god-mother laid that one on me in the cradle. I could write a book. (Oh, I did.)
I wrestled with the call to ministry for a long time. Having a family of ministers, growing up with ministers and church leaders as family friends, seeing the skirmishes and some of the battles waged in churches, knowing the blood spilled by my parents and my brother, growing in the shadow of great preachers and courageous witnesses, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get tangled in the same jungle and bitten by the same bugs. I also didn’t know if I had the chops.
While in seminary, I was confronted by the pain of the city (that’s another story). I prayed that I would go anywhere, into the mission field, even to Wisconsin (I’m not big on cold), but I just couldn’t do what was necessary to do ministry in the inner city. I thought that was settled.
It was a circuitous process, but I ended up in Newark, as in Newark, New Jersey. See what I mean? I have an interesting life.
I discovered that what I’d picked up along the way was correct. Solutions have little to do with the good news we are given to preach. But I also learned that the Apostles, the ones that walked around with Jesus, the ones he chose, had no more of a clue than I did. And I learned that after they experienced the horror of their Lord’s brutal end, in their confusion and guilt they realized they had been out of their depth all along. But instead of running away from this painful intersection between glory and suffering, they chose it as a way of life. They gave up. They surrendered. Which is what they needed to do.
I’ve aged and learned. I try to remember Joni Mitchell’s line, “I don’t know who I am, but life is for learning.” And when all the cylinders are firing I realize I have learned along the way. But I still don’t have any sense of nice neat solutions.
I do have a sense that very few of us have much of a clue about how things work. I’ve made a list of life rules. And I read through them regularly, and add to them when epiphanies intrude. But even with my rules I can see that they don’t solve what we face. They offer perspective and an invitation to humility.
One Sunday I asked the kids in the Sunday school to write questions they wanted to ask me. It took them a few weeks to get rolling, but they filled up a box. In worship they pulled out the questions, one by one, read them and let me squirm. Some were fun, some were deep. The one I’ll always remember was, “What’s the first thing you want Jesus to say to you?”
I started to cry. I realized something. All I hoped for from my Lord was to be with him. I got it together and said, “Thank you. You just helped me learn something. What I want Jesus to say to me is, ‘David’.”
I don’t know if my answer was disappointing to them. But it was honest. Like I said, I’ve had an interesting life.
*****************************************
StoryShare, October 21, 2018, issue.
Copyright 2018 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
