LAMENT

WARNING:  IT IS GONNA GET HONEST IN HERE

The post below was written a month ago while I was on vacation in Michigan over the holidays.  I have been waffling on posting it.  In the end, inspired by the “Keep it 100” segment on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (which you all should check out), honesty won out.  #keepit100

Today (Sunday Dec. 28, 2014) I listened to a sermon by Nate Bull at Centerpoint Church in Kalamazoo, MI.  Preaching out of Exodus 33 he challenged the congregation to recommit their lives to following Jesus in 2015.  It was an excellent message about seeking God's place in your life and what it means to believe in a God that is light and contains no darkness at all. 

During the message Pastor Bull quoted an author (which was uncredited, unless I missed it) as saying, "God has shown his willingness to bless something He will not inhabit."  Twenty years of ministry and four decades of life tells me this is true (1). The scriptures also show this to be true.  The statement itself is not what has been nagging at me from the second I got out of the service till the time I took out my iPad unable to sleep 12 hours later.  The bit that I can't reconcile is what if God does neither?  What if He doesn't bless or inhabit a life, a ministry, a place, a neighborhood, a season?

This is no abstract theological puzzle (I love those, but never have they kept me up at night).  These questions, and the tears they induced (which I choked back as to not embarrass myself or the family members whose church I was visiting) as I walked out of the auditorium, are very real.  For a long time now I have felt like God is very distant (other than in fleeting moments) and that I have been left alone in my struggle with Him and life.  The best way I know to describe it is that I am tired of fighting.  After a couple of years in which the demands of work and ministry (even when your full time job is ministry the reality is some things are just work, anyone who says different is not telling you the truth), church leadership, as well as family, have left me too tired to fight anymore.  Two years of my wife fighting cancer depleted me.  The ministry I helped found and lead has undergone massive changes that daily leave me feeling stretched beyond my capacity to guide it.  The youth that our ministry serves are among some of the most voiceless in my city and my throat is horse from being a voice for them, with them and to them.  My desire to try to lead change or minister in my home congregation has disappeared in a puff of smoke.  All in all, my spiritual fervor has dwindled to a faint flicker - a spark where a fire used to be.

Those that know me well know me as a determined fighter.  I have always been pushing and struggling, willing to fight to get things done.  In the early days of Parachutes when asked by my boss to write a job description I took a Sharpie and scrawled on a Post-It note "whatever it takes."  I have often joked that my walk up song, if I were a Major League Baseball player, would be The Nightwatchmen's "Whatever it takes."  For years I was willing to do anything and everything (often to the detriment of my family) to make sure Parachutes survived and that I was   ministering in my church and neighborhood the best that I could.

In recent months there has been a sharp contrast in my approach to life.  As I have written before, I experienced a bout with anxiety and depression this past fall and the residue of those struggles continues.  I often think about something I scratched out as I worked through those issues, again written in Sharpie marker: "I have never felt so weak."  And so it was again today.  I feel weak.  I feel like God is neither blessing me or inhabiting my body, my life, my ministry, my family or my mind.  I feel like God has forsaken me.

I grew up in a world were I was told that if you work hard and do what God asks you to do you will be blessed....maybe even inhabited.  But my question is, what if you have worked hard and done what you thought God has asked you to do and in the end all you are is tired?  What if the blessings you have received are cancer, a job that pays almost exactly the same as it did when you took it 14 years ago (and pays 1/4 to 1/3 of what others in the field get paid), a 40 year old mobile home, obscurity, and exhaustion.  It's damn hard to find the blessing in that! 

So if God is out there blessing things, things that He isn't even going to inhabit, why do I feel like I have served the best I can and don't feel blessed, or inhabited, just burned out?  Why do I feel like Jason Bateman’s character in the film “This Is Where I Leave You” when he says, “I’m too old to have this much nothing”?

I'm taking a pretty big risk throwing this out on the Internet.  My family reads this thing.  My wife's family reads this.  I have supporters that read this.  Volunteers and board members read this.  Anyone could read this, it's the worldwide web after all.  Frankly, that has been part of my struggle.  I feel like as a leader I can't share my struggle easily or at all.  Making matters worse is a Christian culture that is quick to arrive at easy answers.  I know that some of you reading this are already formulating the words to share with me that "I am blessed" and to "look what God has done" and a hundred more cliches.  Trust me I know them all because I say them to myself every day and the reality is I still feel like God has walked away from me.

In Lamentations God's people cry out to Him and rail against Him for leaving them.  In that entire book God never speaks.  He leaves space for the cry.  The cry is so important that He lets it be.  One third of the Psalms are Laments.  Lamenting is part of faith, and that gives me some comfort.  On the other hand lamenting sucks!  God's people are in the desert for 40 years.  Being in the desert sucks!

So for 2015 I am not rededicating myself to God...I'm being honest about my Lament and asking God to honor it...but I'm pretty tired of the silence and I wouldn't mind a blessing or inhabitation either.

Joel K

“Doubt is the way of faith sometimes”

                                    - Five O’clock People

(1)  I do think this statement is limited because God could choose to do neither.  Pastor Bull never examined this other option leading the listener to believe God is either blessing or inhabiting things/people/situations, etc., or both inhabiting and blessing, but not neither.  The option for God to remove both His blessing and inhabitation was not even alluded to.