I trudged to the mailbox after a draining counseling session. I hoped to find a letter from the search committee of a big church. Or a large care package with giant homemade cookies and cheery notes from grateful church members. Or a check made out to me with an attached note: “Dear Pastor, consider this $1,000 a small token of our love for you. … “
No such luck.
The mailbox contained two medical bills from my wife’s surgery, a phone bill, and the quarterly car insurance premium. Seeing the medical bills made my head throb. The church treasurer recently had bounced a check to the insurance company; we weren’t sure if my wife’s surgery was covered. The pile felt heavy as I dumped it on the kitchen counter.
In seventeen years of marriage and ministry, my wife, Joy, and I have had our share of “bad mail days.” Each one raises the “I wonder” questions about God’s provision for us.
I WONDER IF GOD WILL PROVIDE FOR MY NEEDS
When stress piles up as high as my stack of bills, I start wondering if we’ll ever dig out. Our needs seem immediate, our wants seem unreachable. It’s easy to think, Why don’t I get out of this mess and get a real job?
But those words sound similar to those spoken by Satan to Jesus in the desert: “Use those natural abilities to turn stones into bread. Why not cash in on your special abilities?”
Similar thoughts tempted me when I was a church planter, with our third child on the way. Two weeks before my wife’s due date, we gave God a tenth of our meager income (not too cheerfully, I recall). We drove home from church wondering what our child-to-be would wear to the church’s grand-opening service. We had given most of our baby clothes to an expectant mother in our former church.
The next day a UPS truck pulled up in front of our house and dropped off a huge box.
“What is it?” we muttered, tearing it open. The return address was from South Carolina. We didn’t know anyone in South Carolina.
Inside the box, atop a stack of beautifully wrapped packages, we found a note, rubberbanded to a dozen snapshots: “We asked your mission board for a missionary family to help. They gave us your name and address. Here are the pictures from the baby shower we held for you. We hope you have as much fun opening them as we had wrapping them.” Six smiling strangers had signed the card.
Joy and I sat on the floor amid wrapping paper and ribbons, blubbering like babies as we opened box after box of new baby clothes and items.
That year, we developed a relationship with the UPS driver. Box after box arrived with unexpected gifts for babies, birthdays, and Christmas.
One day the UPS man asked, “Where does all this stuff come from?”
We answered with a question of our own: “Do you believe God provides?”
Now, when the bills pile up and the “I wonder” questions form, we rehearse the many miraculous provision stories from the past, which we’ve listed. The list includes the sacks of groceries that mysteriously appeared in the back seat of our car and the church’s help in paying a hospital bill for our daughter’s broken arm.
These markers on the ministry highway remind us that God has never left us stranded.
I WONDER IF I’M WORTH MORE
One Christmas, we visited my wife’s brother and his family. He’s a pastor, too; we enjoy each other’s company. After a relaxing visit we drove home–a four-hour drive. For the first two hours, I mentally compared myself with my brother-in-law.
His family lives in a nice parsonage; mine rents a small Cape Cod. He preaches to two hundred each week; I preach to ninety. He can afford a family sedan and a van; we’re a one-car family (and in good-weather months, I pedal a ten-speed to run errands).
I began to feel worthless and wondered if I would be worth more elsewhere, in a larger ministry.
God often breaks into my life immediately after such downward spirals. One time a church member phoned me to meet him at the hospital. He had crashed a borrowed car into the back of a flatbed trailer. When I arrived, his 4-year-old daughter, Becky, lay on the emergency room table.
“I looked down to answer Becky’s question,” he said, holding a cloth to his bloody forehead, “and when I looked up everything had exploded.”
His daughter was thrown out of the seatbelt over the top of the airbag and was wedged between the windshield and the airbag. He told me how he yanked her free and carried her to the car behind them, begging total strangers to drive them to the hospital.
In such moments, when all I can do is nod and listen, the “I wonder if I’m worth more” question fades quickly. I hurt with the little girl whose jaw is broken. I wince with the father who cries because he knows it’s his fault; he didn’t see the truck’s blinker. I hug him and his wife when they learn their daughter has no brain damage.
Suddenly, I feel a renewed sense of worth because of what Christ has called me to do. My presence is important to this family. I have been used by God to accomplish his purposes. There is no monetary value to that.
I WONDER IF I’M REALLY HELPING ANYONE
Blood rushed to my temples as I answered the phone. My eyes cleared enough to see the clock: 2:30 A.M. I put on my best pastoral voice and tried to sound wide awake, as if I were waiting for the phone to ring. It was the wife of the man who, just weeks earlier, had stood on my doorstep and threatened to kill her.
Great, I thought, they’re at it again.
I tried to listen. The wife, who struggled emotionally, babbled on about a house that was about to blow up and an apocalyptic dream. Then she told me the sheriff’s deputy had just showed up.
“Could I speak with him?” I asked.
I explained to him what I thought she needed.
“Can you convince her,” the deputy asked, “to go to the hospital on her own?”
I handed the phone to Joy. After five unsuccessful minutes, my wife shrugged and handed back the phone. The peace officer finally called an ambulance and then coaxed the woman into it.
At 5:30 A.M., I got a call from her husband. He wanted to say thanks and let me know he had checked her in at the stress center and that she was taking her medication. I told him I was glad he called (though I really wished he would have waited until noon).
This word of thanks was from the same man who, weeks earlier, had given me a dozen reasons why he planned to attend another church. The next week, he asked me to steer him and his wife through their latest crisis. In a matter of days, he went from disgruntled church member to desperate disciple. My wife calls people like these our “high-maintenance” friends.
It doesn’t take many episodes like this to make me wonder if I really am doing anyone any good. Chronic problems make me feel incompetent. I want to see progress. I think, Face it: Some people will never get better. I’ve sat in my study, like Elijah in the cave, and asked God to move me to another church.
Once, about the time I was ready to update my resume, I received a letter from a high-maintenance friend. He wrote that he had been sober for forty-four months and was working on his college degree. He admitted that his problems were caused by his attempts at managing his affairs and that before, he had not surrendered to God. He went on: “I’ve become a ‘wounded healer’ for others in need of God’s grace.” He thanked me profusely for the times I agonized over his problem. “I’m praying for you and your family,” he wrote.
Such letters are like cold water splashed on a wound; they sting but refresh. I feel the sting when I recall my disgust with him. But I feel rejuvenated knowing how much I cared for him. I thought the Lord could do great things with him if he submitted to his authority. I really wanted God’s best for him.
If Jesus had used my measuring methods, he might have given up on most of his hardheaded disciples and high-maintenance followers. After such letters I quit wondering if I’m doing anyone any good. I realize I can’t do anyone any good. But Christ living within me can.
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Clark Cothern is pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Adrian, Michigan.
1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
