"The hand of the Lord came upon me
and brought me out in the Spirit of
the Lord, and set me down in the midst
of the valley; and it was full of bones." (Ezekiel 37:1)
I am an unexceptional product of the last 50 years of American Christianity. I am the eldest son of an orthodox Lutheran pastor. I committed my life to Jesus in response to an evangelist with Campus Crusade for Christ. I was nurtured by a handful of Jesus-freaks in a Pentecostal house-group, served on a missions team with Youth With a Mission, received an undergraduate degree in Theology and Behavioral Science, before earning a Master’s degree from an interdenominational Seminary in California. I worked with trailblazing teachers, writers and pastors from every flavor of American evangelicalism while serving as an administrator with the largest Doctoral Program in the world. During those years, I studied and promoted the strategies of Church Growth from the inside out. I had numerous offers to work with successful church leaders, and in 1990 I accepted a pastoral position with an aggressively growth-minded church in the Southwest. There I teamed with talented ministers for nearly 20 years and was a zealous advocate for Christian unity and a respected leader of our network of local churches.
As the lead pastor of our vivacious congregation, I was also “the keeper of community”; attending birthday parties, pot lucks, anniversaries, visiting the sick, officiating at weddings, baptismal celebrations and funerals... I was fretful when members disappeared and Sunday morning attendance dipped. I schmoozed guests, massaged volunteers and groomed potential leaders. None-the-less, I was a American Church professional who had become modestly successful in the evangelical system. I had no idea that a confluence was forming that would dismantle my life, radically overhaul my view of the Church and God Himself.
The first tributary burst into my life in August of 2006, as I returned from an unremarkable, four-day retreat. On a half-full flight into Phoenix, Arizona I heard a voice that was audible to my ears. He spoke my name three times and then I heard the word “Breathless”! I have no apology for this experience. His voice was unmistakable; personal and clear.
This encounter branded my soul with a conclusive manifestation of His materiality, validated my mushrooming suspicion that I was neck-deep in spiritual structures that lacked the life-breath of God, and catapulted me into a fierce quest for His favor. I, like Isaiah, was a breathless man dwelling in the midst of a breathless culture.
When I returned home, I attempted to implement some corrections within our small congregation; scheduling more corporate prayer times and creating increased space in our Sunday morning worship times to “wait on the Lord”. These adjustments were largely received in the spirit in which I had conceived them: as organizational modifications. The truth was, I had no idea how to address my own breathlessness, much less the breathlessness of hundreds of others. Furthermore, I had no vision for how breathless we really were; how deeply it mattered to God, and how intent He was to address it. In the months that followed, the grave truth of my own breathlessness would become quite evident.
In January of 2007, my wife of 23 years, was diagnosed with a rare strain of untreatable stomach cancer; “linitus plastica”. The diagnosis itself was a death-sentence. The doctors gave her 9 to 12 months to live.
Within hours of receiving the news, friends, ministry associates, missionaries and denominational leaders were in fervent prayer for Barb, our family and our congregation. Daily, I emailed, imploring friends and colleagues to pray for my wife and our two twelve-year-old girls. Within a week tens of thousands were. Words, promises and affirmations of love poured in. Our small congregation valiantly interceded for God’s intervention, initiating a 24/7 prayer team in a camper trailer outside our home. Our local, multi-denominational network of pastors bound themselves to us with prayer vigils, meals and massive emotional support.
Because of her prognosis, Barb was given only palliative care - medication to reduce the pain. With the approval of our oncologist and with the help of several extraordinary nurses in our congregation, we turned our living room into a make-shift convalescent center. This meant Barb could receive the heavy pain-relievers there close to her daughters, in an atmosphere filled with worship, and familiar sights and sounds.
Barb was diagnosed in January. Three months later, in a house filled with family, care-providers, intercessors and worshippers, she died of respiratory failure.
In the weeks before her death, I had privately ventured a query with a dozen close friends and pastors: “We serve a God Who not only heals, but Who also raises the dead, do we not?” Within an hour of Barb’s passing all twelve of these dear friends were in our home, praying, loving us & worshipping God. They prayed all night and into the next morning. By noon the following day these lion-hearted saints embraced me with the tears of shared grief.
Abruptly, I was a 48 year old, emotionally razed widower, and a single-father of two preteen girls. After Barb’s memorial our congregation graciously gave me an indefinite leave of absence. I took three months to travel, visiting family and friends; looking for some relief from the billows of fear, pain and empty loneliness. When we returned home and I resumed pastoral responsibilities, our friends came to our side; working around the house, bringing us meals, taking the girls on outings and attending to our smallest needs.
While bathed in tenderness, my heart was also being buffeted with a typhoon of questions that submerged every theological point that I had held as a “matter of fact”.
I had believed in God’s omni-presence all of my life. Now I could only confirm His omni-absence. Our church friends were tremendously understanding as their pastor stood before them: weeping, praying and speculating.
They could see their friend was gasping in a fathomless ocean.
Neither was I alone in my pain and suffering. In less than two years, our small church buried 6 dear mothers, grandmothers, wives and sisters - all highly involved in our congregation and deeply loved. The hole left by the loss of these women was enormous.
I felt ripped by the tension between offering substantive hope to my grieving friends and tending to the absence of God in my own mouth and soul. Were I merely expected to elucidate humanistic abstractions, I could have been content to ponder them with some wistful abstraction. But when I was expected to supply “blessed assurance” for a New Testament community that was borne from the lineage of Jesus and the Apostles I agonized, “How much of my pastoral counsel is really cultural “party-line” verbiage? Am I really giving people the substance of the God of 500 billion galaxies, or sentimental, folk religion? What if my “theology” is no more effectual than my prayers?” I yearned to boldly assert God’s direction, encourage and minister with quiet certitude. Instead, I increasingly felt the unholy strain of bridging the gap between the desolation of my very mortal congregation and my own semi-heretical questions.
I winced at the sound of my own vapid words.
I complained about our vacuum of powerlessness.
I yearned for His presence.
The faith that Paul had passed down to us was meant to be more than profundities and philosophical “words of human wisdom” (1 Corinthians 2:5). Where was the substance of that which we hoped for? Where was the “stuff” that only God could “pull off”?
There was plenty of professional impetus for me to plough into a church-sponsored, human-powered, status-quo. I don’t want to sound “high and mighty”, because, in truth, my longing was rooted in the depth of my own desolation, but I wanted the stuff that Jesus promised and the apostles did! I did not want to compromise with what our most basic creeds hold out as elemental: A God Who creates everything with one Word from His mouth; a virgin giving birth to an uncreated God; an executed man being resurrected from the dead; the return of that same resurrected, first-century Jewish man; a church that is won from every race and nationality on earth and a bodily reconstitution of every saint that has ever died from a bullet, a lion, an auto-accident or cancer. It was becoming increasingly incongruous that I should recite a creed and preach from a book that was filled with the phenomenal, and not also anticipate it’s manifestation within my life. Without it, ministry was feeling like a long, forced march with no legs; a “breathless” march. One, I was loathe to endure, much less encourage others to make with me.
“O that I may know where to find Him, that I might even come to His dwelling.” (Job 23:3)
Emotionally dismantled, hounded by my own quest for answers, professionally vexed and desperate for God’s authentication I brought down my organizational-charts, boxed up my books and resigned from 20 years of professional ministry.
I had no alternative prospect for employment; no vast wealth in reserve. I ventured, “If He was the One Who called me into ministry then I’ve got to believe that He will sustain me, and perhaps - meet with me. If He doesn’t, then I haven’t really lost anything.” I told friends and colleagues that I was simply going to “Meet with Him in the tent of meeting”; a reference to Joshua in Exodus 33, who in the face of Israel’s failure to inherit the promise “did not depart from the tent of meeting, day or night”.
The simple testimony of these past two years is that this same YHWH God, has been monumentally faithful to create a “tent of meeting” for me. But far from a peaceful place where I have blissfully encountered His breath like a gentle breeze, meeting with Him has been, most often, like surviving a tornado. Apart from my design, (or vote) the Holy Spirit has seen fit to align my life with the life of Job - decimating relationships, meager status and wealth that I had accumulated in exchange for the disruptive whirlwind of His presence. Henri Nouwen observes that “it’s in solitude that I lose my scaffolding.” I would say that in the whirlwind of solitude I have also lost my theology; I am losing my ambitions and am enormously distrustful of my confidence.
I can also testify that for these past 24 months, even while our nation is in economic decline, He has marvelously sustained me and my family, supplying us with the means to live entirely debt-free. He’s drawn both of my teen-aged daughters into a deep love-relationship with Him. He’s brought me into a new, soul-enriching marriage with a companion who, through her own extraordinary humility, teaches me daily what it means to walk with His breath of life. He’s led us into a new community of pilgrims who are radically committed to seeking Him in our barrenness.
Most directly, in spite of my tangled prayers, dull spirit and incessant impulse to justify myself, the Holy Spirit has been faithful to bring me face to face with my own “breathlessness”; piercing my soul, showering me with the gift of repentance, purging me from ways that are incompatible with His Kingdom and filling me with zeal for the things that enlarge my capacity to receive His breath.
JSB • Spring 2011
