I should like country music. I live in Nashville, in a house overlooking the Grand Ole Opry, next door to a well-known country music star.
“You gotta love country,” people say.
“Well, I can’t exactly say I saw the light, heard the Wabash Cannonball, or had an achy, breaky heart,” I confess.
Yet I’ll admit I’ve grown especially close to one performer. This is tough to write; I’ve never before acknowledged this relationship. I’ve tried to keep it quiet.
And I detest name-dropping.
Oh, well, I might as well blurt it out: Dolly Parton and I are friends. More than friends, in fact. We secretly rendezvous most summer mornings in a secluded garden near my house.
Lest you draw a wrong conclusion, I assure you I have my scruples. I’m never alone with her. In the garden with us are Patsy Cline and Queen Elizabeth. Nearby are John F. Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and Lucille Ball.
I’m a rosarian by hobby. I’ve grown roses for years, and my favorites are the ones in my “Name Dropper’s Rose Garden”–Dolly Parton (bright red, very fragrant), Queen Elizabeth (a pink Grandiflora), Lady Bird (a red/orange Hybrid Tea), John F. Kennedy (white, but inconsistent), and a flaming orange-red rose named Lucille Ball.
I’ve learned a lot from my botanical friends. God built a conspicuous correspondence between the physical realm and the spiritual one; we learn about the latter by observing the former.
The Lord, for example, cultivates souls like we cultivate plants. Jesus described fruitful Christians as crops in fertile soil yielding an abundant harvest. Though Christ didn’t mention roses, the comparisons are nonetheless there: the need for sunshine, the danger of blackspot, the importance of pruning, and …
… the value of manure.
To put it delicately: Dolly likes organic fertilizer.
I guess that’s why God created such endless supplies of, well, dung, to use biblical terminology. It’s a gardener’s bonanza. I’m even thinking of marketing a bumper sticker saying, “Manure Makes It Happen.” You’ve never seen blooms like those induced by generous amounts of compost.
Seems strange, doesn’t it? Something so foul produces something so fine.
It seems strange, too, that stress and sorrows can produce fruitful ministers. William Secker, an obscure seventeenth-century pastor, wrote, “There are some things good, but not pleasant, as sorrow and affliction. … By affliction, the Lord separates the sin that He hates from the soul that He loves.”
The most accelerated spiritual growth in my life has occurred during times of trouble and periods of pain. I don’t necessarily mean life-shattering catastrophes, but I’ve had to muddle through my share of ministerial manure. God has used it to teach me lessons well worth the price.
Here are several of those lessons.
FAITH IN FLAMES
I completed graduate school in 1976, married, and confidently offered myself for pastoring, only to find no one wanted me. I interviewed more than a year in churches big and small. I was too educated for the mountain churches and too inexperienced for the city ones. My hair was too long for some; my resume too short for others.
So I worked at J.C. Penney until they laid me off, then at Sears until I quit. My friends said I should have gotten the kind of education that would have given me something “to fall back on.”
And then my wife told me she thought she was pregnant. When the diagnosis was confirmed, I left the doctor’s office wondering what to do. No job. No insurance. No church. No income. No prospects.
All I had was twenty rejections and a family to feed. I reached for the car radio and flipped it on just as this song began to play:
Be not dismayed whatever betide,
God will take care of you;
Beneath His wings of love abide,
God will take care of you.
I’ll never forget that moment. “Trust me!” the Lord seemed to be saying. I mustered my faith, and shortly afterward a little stone church near the Smokies welcomed me as pastor. Our firstborn came along, and life seemed idyllic.
Until the house burned down.
Early one morning, Katrina rolled out of bed to see why the baby was crying, and a moment later her bloodcurdling screams jerked me awake. The living room was an inferno. I grabbed a blanket to smother the fire, but it was too late. The house ignited like flashpaper.
We had no insurance, so we borrowed a tiny trailer, then tried to explain to the church why we had destroyed their parsonage. They didn’t have insurance, either. Not much, at least.
But we had saved the baby, and we had each other. The church rallied around us, and God took care of us. Strangers in the community would shake my hand, leaving ten or twenty dollars in my palm. A nearby congregation gave us five hundred dollars. As the smoke cleared, we saw the merciful hand of God. The church began talking of a new parsonage on a closer, larger spot of land.
The following Sunday I managed a sermon from Psalm 104:4 – “He makes flames of fire His servants.”
Yeah, I know. I jerked the verse from its context. But God had used those flames to teach us to trust him in a way we’d never experienced before.
STALKED BY FAILURE
After two years in the Smokies, I was invited to pastor a small church in Nashville. For the first couple of years, the church grew like I knew it would. Then it stopped growing as fast as I thought it should. A chart in the church office measured each Sunday’s attendance with that of previous years. Glancing at that chart became a weekly trauma. If attendance was down, my heart sank. If it was up, I’d worry that it wouldn’t stay that way.
I had entered the pastorate “expecting great things from God”–which I interpreted to mean five thousand sets of ears straining to hear every word every week. As the years passed, I grew weary of waiting for dreams to materialize, and I wondered why the five thousand weren’t showing up. We were a long way from four digits.
I considered leaving the pastorate to open a little feed-and-seed store where I could sell Dolly Partons and Patsy Clines. Feelings of failure stalked me like a serial killer. The haunting sense of worthlessness kept me awake at night.
One night I sat on the edge of the bed and asked Katrina if she had ever considered the feed-and-seed business. She hadn’t. And the prospects didn’t interest her. We decided to fly to California to see a wise man, Loren Lillistrand, whom a friend had recommended.
Loren asked why I was so gripped by feelings of failure.
“Does your wife think you’ve failed?” he asked.
“No.”
“Does your church?”
“No. They love me.”
“Do your friends think you’ve failed?”
“No, they think I’m doing pretty good.”
“Does God think you’ve failed?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then who thinks you’re a failure?” he demanded.
“I do! I think I’m a failure!”
“So you know more than your wife, your church, your friends, and God–all put together?
“You may be smart,” he added, “but you’re not that smart.”
Numbers, I finally realized, were a precarious indicator of success. Just ask Gideon, who found 300 preferable to 22,000. I’d always assumed 22,000 looked better on the wall chart than 300.
Or ask Edward Payson, a famous preacher of a bygone day. One stormy Sunday, he had only one person in his audience. Payson preached his sermon as carefully and earnestly as though the great building had been thronged with eager listeners Some months later, his listener called on him.
“I was led to the Savior through that service,” he said. “For whenever you talked about sin and salvation, I glanced around to see to whom you referred; but since there was no one there but me, I had no alternative but to lay every word to my heart and conscience!”
I’ve come to realize that God often does the most with the least F.W. Boreham said, “I’m fond of little things. I like little flowers. I like little hills. I can’t love anything that isn’t a pocket edition. An acorn is a wonderful thing; it is a pocket edition of a forest. Time is a wonderful thing; it is the tabloid of eternity. The Bible is a wonderful thing; it is a pocket edition of the thought of God.”
I’m not saying numbers aren’t important. An entire book in the Bible is named for them. The apostles counted their converts in Acts; numbers represent living people with eternal needs. I still work and pray for numbers of people to enter the kingdom.
But I no longer use them as a basis of self-esteem. I must treat numbers with the attitude of John the Baptist. After he had done his very best, he saw his numbers erode as his crowds rushed to a new preacher. It upset John’s disciples, but not John. His self-fulfillment wasn’t in his ledgers but in his relationship with the Bridegroom.
“A man can receive only what is given him from heaven,” he explained. “The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine.”
God didn’t call me to find fulfillment in the quantity of my work for him but in the quality of my walk with him. Psalm 63 says, “My soul finds rest in God alone.”
I’m grateful for the sleepless nights and inner turmoil God used to teach me that truth.
THE MUCK OF LETHARGY
Eventually the church regained speed, and we launched into a building program. Building programs are never a sweet dream; this was a nightmare at its worst. The contractor absconded with funds, leaving a parade of furious subcontractors filing liens against our church. I’ll never forget my panic when I realized we were facing a liquidation as ominous, it seemed, as Noah’s.
And speaking of floods, they came as soon as we had the cabinets installed in the basement. Torrential rains fell one Saturday, leaving our furnishings floating in an indoor lake.
We engaged an attorney to resolve our legal problems and another builder to solve the waterproofing ones. But though I didn’t realize it, my emotional reserves were as exhausted as our church’s financial ones.
I had another problem, too. At my request the church added to the staff a young man I had discipled and, like Dickens’s Pip, raised by hand. But as he developed his own wings, he grew discontent with my flight pattern. A journal entry records some of my feelings:
“4:30 A. M.–I’m sitting here, looking at the Christmas tree, trying to fend off the worry and fear that stole my sleep. Our new building is unfinished, leaking, and further delayed by this week’s rain.
“At the same time, I’m pained about my small full-time staff of one. I led him to Christian surrender and discipleship. I fought to get him hired here, and now, just when he should be ready to help lead our church into a new cycle of growth, he’s grown distant and critical and cynical. He told me the other day that our church was totally devoid of the Holy Spirit, and he’s thinking of taking some of our families to start another church across town. I feel demoralized.”
I plodded on, but the sparkle was gone. The work was wearisome. I stopped enjoying pasturing; all seemed toil and trouble. Another journal entry said, “I wasn’t in a particularly good mood yesterday, and I don’t think I’ll be in one today.”
Then I read Psalm 100.
It came up routinely in my daily Bible reading, but that morning two words struck me like a bullet.
“Serve the Lord,” it said, “with gladness!”
I was serving the Lord with drudgery. I took a few days by myself in a nearby state park, slept a lot, and devoured Martin Lloyd-Jones’ “Spiritual Depression.”
Then I took several pieces of blank paper and wrote atop each a sentence or two describing my frustrations. Underneath each heading, I started jotting Scripture verses as God’s answers to my struggles.
That day the Lord began rebuilding my morale. It didn’t happen overnight, but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to muddle through ministry with acedia-spiritual lethargy–as the ancients called it. Abraham Lincoln was right: A person is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be. Gladness was a choice I had to make, based on an improved perspective garnered from God’s Word.
A passage in the ancient “Shepherd of Hermas” says, “Put sadness far away from thee, saith he; for truly sadness is the sister of halfheartedness. … Array thee in the joy that always finds favour in God’s sight and is acceptable with Him. For everyone that is joyous worketh and thinketh those things that are good, and despiseth sadness. But he that is sad doth always wickedly. Therefore cleanse thyself from this wicked sadness, and thou shalt live unto God.”
Acedia still plagues me. I frequently search the Scriptures for new promises to bolster my resolve to serve him with joy. But the promises are there, the Presence is real, and I could never have begun learning the secrets of gladness if my feet hadn’t sloshed in the muck.
A century ago, British divine Francis Paget put it this way: “It may be impossible at times to feel what one would; it is not impossible to will what one should; and that, if the will be real and honest, is what matters most.”
Only one letter separates manure from mature. God has used the regular, relentless pressures of ministry to facilitate growth in my life. The process, I’m afraid, is far from over. But that’s okay. “We rejoice in our sufferings,” noted another minister long ago, “because we know that suffering produces … character.”
Some lessons, I guess, we only learn in the muck and mire of ministry.
Some flowers, it seems, grow best in compost.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
