Playing Hurt

RECENTLY I READ ABOUT a professional hockey player who is a star of the NHL team in the metro area near where I live. The measure of this man’s stature as a hockey player was not his salary, number of goals scored, or minutes on the ice. Rather, the local sports-writer nominated him for greatness because of his ability to “play hurt.”

Consider the symptoms of this athlete after receiving a hard check in the first period of play in a recent hockey game: He couldn’t take a deep breath, he had bad bruises on his torso, and his shoulder and rib cage felt as though they had been through a meat grinder. His own description of his injuries made me cringe: “I couldn’t breathe. It was lucky my head didn’t land in the boards. I would have been dead, almost.”

He was finished for the rest of that game.

Now consider the prognosis for this athlete: he was expected to return to the lineup after missing one game. Two, at most. To athletes, playing hurt is a badge of honor, reflecting the measure of their inner drive. The team needs them. They have to compete in the event. The work has to go on.

That’s also true in ministry. Sometimes we just have to play hurt. In fact, we often have to play hurt. Some days I think this is what pastoral work is all about. Church conflicts leave scars from which some never fully recover. A battered soul doesn’t heal quickly, yet most of us have to put food on the table—every day we go to the work that causes us pain. To stay in pastoral work means to play hurt in pastoral work.

We are often called to preach, pray, teach, visit, counsel, marry, and bury with wounded hearts.

A close friend is a retired pastor who is still going strong in his early eighties. He and I often talk about ministry, the good and the bad of it. One of his statements has stayed with me: he says that as he looks over his years in ministry and evaluates it quantitatively, the good far outweighs the bad. But he goes on: he says that when he does that same evaluation from a qualitative perspective, the good isn’t that far ahead of the bad. Still, he says he keeps pressing on because he lays hold of the hope expressed by the apostle Paul that in light of eternity, our “troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17).

In my reading of the Bible, I’m often struck with the seemingly unfair advantage I have over the saints of Scripture. When I read stories about Noah, Abraham, Joseph, David, Job, and a host of others, I know the end of the story. Those who lived the stories, of course, didn’t have that perspective. They were unsure of the destination while in the midst of the journey. They didn’t know what God would bring out of it.

That is how we live our lives. We don’t know the details of the end of our stories either. We are called upon to live faithfully without knowing how our story will conclude. Applied to ministry, we are called to play hurt without knowing when or if we will feel better.

Why it’s so hard

Over the years I’ve mentored dozens of young people heading into the pastorate or other vocational ministry. It’s not uncommon for me to hear later from them, once they’ve spent some time in ministry: “I can’t take any more of this. Why didn’t you tell me that life in the ministry could be so brutal?”

As I listen to their questions and their uncertainties about their calling, I often ask them a question I have posed to myself countless times: “Do you ever wonder why doesn’t God do a better job of taking care of us in ministry?”

Surprised I would even ask such a question, they usually answer, “Yes, how’d you know? I didn’t think anyone else ever asked that!”

If I were in God’s place, doing His job for a time, I’d make sure I provided special care and protection for those on the front lines of ministry. But God doesn’t seem to do that. There don’t seem to be many breaks for vocational ministers. Sometimes the hurt seems unbearable.

Not every pastor reading my words will be able to say, “I’ve been through the conflict and have emerged better rather than bitter, healed through the hurt.” There are times when healing, a word that defies definition, seems far away. At times I’ve wondered if I’ll ever feel whole again. I have no pious platitudes.

I have a friend whom I mentored during his seminary years. We’ve stayed in touch through the fifteen years since he graduated and accepted his first pastorate. In his current church, he often says to me, “I feel so stuck here. These people don’t want to move ahead; they want only to take what they need and then demand more. They want so much, pay so little, and then kick me when I’m down. I feel used and abused by them, but God doesn’t seem to do anything about it.”

My friend might read a book like this and ask, “What do you do with the wounds that never heal? Just about the time they scab over, someone comes along and rips off the scab.” I’ve heard my friend paraphrase the words of Job so often, I have it memorized: “As the sparks fly upward, so is the pastor destined for use and abuse.”

By the grace of God, I have found healing from and hope beyond church conflict, but this has come in developing a theology of church conflict. It hasn’t eliminated the pain, but it has helped me press ahead when in the midst of it.

All-sufficient grace

The apostle Paul learned that in his weakness God’s strength was manifest. God didn’t take the thorn away. Instead God offered Paul the assurance that “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Our hope is not so much the removal of our thorn but divine strength at the very time we need it. That’s not much comfort on the one hand—I want relief from the incessant criticism—but on the other, the promise of strength from God means the world.

Another student I mentored some years ago confided in me that he feared standing up to preach in his church because of how angry and hurt he felt. He worried he would say something he would regret. Yet to his amazement, he discovered that while he struggled with anger and resentment, God seemed to continue to speak a clear and powerful message to the congregation each Sunday. My friend wondered how that could be, when he believed he was delivering many of those messages in the weakness of his flesh.

He discovered the power of Christ still rested on him even in weakness. I don’t think God was excusing my friend’s resentment or his inability to forgive his enemies or whatever his part in the conflict was, but God’s grace was still operative in his life. As my friend was faithful to the preaching task, God was faithful to his Word.

I find more encouragement in reading about the woes of the apostle Paul than perhaps about any other biblical character. His words and example help me keep going. Paul recognized the value of the message of the gospel that had been entrusted to him as a bondslave of Jesus Christ. He acknowledged that he himself was weak and frail and not up to the task. Out of that realization he wrote that “we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:7-10).

Though conflict rips out our hearts, God gives us his power to do his work. That strips us of pride and self-sufficiency—there are times when I press forward in my service to him out of total weakness, moving solely on God’s power. Paul seems to indicate that is the norm rather than the exception: “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus. … For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:10-11). With Christ we are never devoid of hope, never left to our own strength. God never abandons us. Our weakness, wounds, and brokenness are opportunities to experience Christ’s power and presence through us.

In my early years of pastoral ministry, I experienced this in a way I’ve never forgotten. I was serving overseas in an international church and was buffeted by repeated struggles with a young couple who was critical of me and negative about our church. I grew fearful of even seeing them on Sunday mornings. It seemed nothing measured up to their expectations.

At the suggestion of a friend in the church, a lay-leader and I scheduled a visit with this couple in their home on a Tuesday morning. As I traveled by tram across town to their apartment, I was nagged by anxiety and began to regret setting up the meeting. Hoping God would confirm my second-guessing and allow me to turn back, I opened my Bible as the tram noisily wound its way through the narrow streets toward my dreaded destination.

Two stops before mine I read, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. … For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” (Isa. 43:1-3). At that moment I felt God’s presence, as if his power was not only within me but around me.

That day my relationship with that couple began to turn around. Over the next four months, we experienced a renewed friendship and partnership in ministry.

Suffering identity

I remember as though it were this morning the first time I read Paul’s startling words in Philippians 3:10-11: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

How could Paul honestly write that?

I was a college student when I felt the joy of serving Christ; I certainly wasn’t interested in knowing much about suffering. Two decades later my wife and I sat together at a Good Friday service in the church we were attending at the time. I had recently resigned from the church where I had been pastor. I was out of the pastorate. Suzanne and I were still in shock from the pain and disillusionment of the past two years.

Worshiping in that Good Friday service, I suddenly began to understand the previously confounding words of the apostle Paul. Out of my suffering for the sake of Christ came a deeper understanding of the suffering he endured to accomplish my salvation. I couldn’t escape the thought that if Jesus had suffered that much for me, didn’t he have the right to ask me to share in that suffering?

I arrived at a deeper understanding of God’s love for me—God had given absolutely everything to bring me into his family. In light of that, I could endure seasons of suffering, knowing that is part of establishing Christ as the Lord of my life.

Learning to trust and obey

One final truth from God’s Word that has sustained me through conflict, through times of playing hurt, is that even Jesus, God’s Son, “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). Jesus was not following a script. He fully lived his life, choosing obedience at every turn. The Gospels record how some of his choices resulted in suffering, even for the Son of God. But it was from that suffering—playing hurt— that Jesus learned more about continued obedience to the will of his Father.

I was struck by that truth in the life of Gladys Aylward, missionary to China during and after World War II. Gladys’s ministry in China was chronicled in the film “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.” She suffered terribly during her journey across the mountains of China in order to take a hundred orphans to safety in Sian in Shensi. Ranging in age from four to fifteen years old, these children were saved because of Gladys’s faithful obedience to God.

But it was not without cost.

When Gladys arrived in Sian with the children, she was gravely ill and almost delirious. She suffered internal injuries from a beating by the Japanese invaders in the mission compound at Tsechow. In addition, she suffered from relapsing fever, typhus, pneumonia, malnutrition, shock, and fatigue.

Through her ordeal, Gladys learned to choose Christ over anything else life had to offer—so much so that when the man she loved, Colonel Linnan, came to visit her in Sian as she was recovering and asked her to marry him, she declined. In her heart she knew she could not marry him and continue the work God had for her among the children of China. Out of her obedience to God, she said good-bye to Linnan at the Sian train station, and they never met again. Gladys continued serving God faithfully in China and England until her death in 1970.

Through our suffering in ministry, God wants us to increase our maturity in Christ. Today I’m better able to trust God and obey him because of my painful experiences. Harsh criticism I’ve received in the past has taught me to listen longer and respond with a gentler answer to my critics today. From suffering I learn more about obedience.

Recently a man in our church opined in a meeting that I had lied to the congregation in a recent sermon. There was a time when he wouldn’t have finished his sentence before I would have challenged what he said and set him straight. But sometimes there is wisdom in remaining silent before accusers. I never had a chance to respond to his accusations. One after another, people stood up and confronted his erroneous statements and challenged his harsh indictments. His response after being rebutted was, “I guess I jumped to unwarranted conclusions and was harsh in my judgments.”

Then, turning to me, he said, “I’m sorry for what I said.”

I’m learning more about what it means to allow God to be my defender, rather than jumping to my own defense. It’s tough to trust God with that, but doing so is part of my obedience in allowing him to work out his plan in and through my life.

Playing hurt in pastoral work is no one’s idea of fun. Somehow, through pain and perseverance, we can discover the truth Paul expressed so eloquently: “We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Rom. 5:3-5).