Greater than Shame

“Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith;

who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross,

despising the shame,

and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” 

Hebrews 12:2

 

Shame. 

 

It first shows up in Genesis 2:25.  Adam and Eve, prior to their fall, “were both naked . . .and were not ashamed.”  Half a chapter later, though, they took the forbidden fruit and immediately needed clothes to cover their shame.  Lacking understanding of what had really just taken place, Adam weakly admitted to God, “I was afraid because I was naked.” 

 

The image of Adam and Eve, crouched in brush, desperately trying to “sew” fig leaves together, weaving them with thorns and vines and whatever they could find, reminds us of our own hearts when we discover sin.  Shame brings misery, even in the middle of a perfect garden.  I wonder how many forces in history have been the result of shame—covering up sin, covering up damage, covering up human frailty, covering up weaknesses.   Six thousand years later, we continue to sew fig leaves.   

 

Shame is the pebble in our shoe that forces us to face our sin and prompts us to get right with God.  It’s the reminder, sometimes daily, that we are sinners, frail and needy, who can’t get very far without our Shepherd.  Shame protects us from further damage by producing inhibitions in our behavior that protect us from sinful scrutiny and evil.   We cover up and thereby prevent further shame. 

 

And Jesus despised His shame.

 

The word “despise” doesn’t mean what you think it means.  Our modern usage would make it synonymous with “hate.”  If someone “despises” cottage cheese, they really, really don’t like it.  If they despise me, I feel loathed. 

 

The Bible repeatedly uses the word “despise” to mean “to think little of.”   When we are told to “despise not” our mothers when they are old, it’s not asking us to stop hating them.  It’s telling us not to throw them, or their advice, away as the years take their toll.  Esau “despised” his birthright.  He didn’t hate it—he just thought nothing of it.  He could toss it aside for a bowl of stew.  Timothy was admonished to “let no man despise” his youth.  He was to “study to shew himself approved of God,” so that no one could dismiss him as “just a kid.”  Leaning hard on the authority of well-placed Scripture, he could stand tall and not be “thought little of.”  The Bible even makes a word play on this meaning when it says, “Despise not small things.”  In other words—“Don’t think little of little things.” 

 

At the cross, we see the juxtaposition of these two words:  Shame.  Despise. 

 

The awfulness of shame—the nakedness, the jeering, the robe being shredded into strips at the foot of the cross, a public execution, visible enough from the top of Mount Calvary to stop an entire city from its Passover preparation—and the triumph of despise—like Esau’s birthright, this horrible death becoming a small thing compared to the joy that was set before Jesus that day.

 

We often sing about what our salvation means to us, but we do well to consider what our salvation means to Jesus.   My redemption meant more to Jesus than the shame of the cross.   As awful and dark as that day was—enough to send fishermen into hiding and a Roman governor into frenzied hand-washing and armed guards to the tomb of a poor Carpenter—the suffering of the cross is a sub-theme of the real story.  The mission of the cross is about my salvation, and the love that drove that mission is so indescribable that it makes thorns and spears and nails seem small.

 

 

“Thanks be to God, for His unspeakable gift.”  II Corinthians 9:15

Plastic

A few weeks ago, I accidentally ended up with a different kind of dish soap than what I usually get.  I’m a big fan of Palmolive Original, with all those shiny bubbles and squeaky-clean rinse, but I ended up with this oily, “soft-hand”, flowery stuff.  Within a few days, everyone was complaining that our water tasted odd.  Kaitlyn finally realized our problem:  Our plastic drinking cups were absorbing the flavor of the flowery-scented dish soap.  Our water tasted like roses.  Ick.  

 

As Christians, we like to think that we are made of glass—or at least ceramic.  We don’t absorb; we deflect.  We rinse well.  Nothing sticks.  But the Bible says differently:  We are plastic—and over time, we humans absorb what we are exposed to, until eventually we are characterized by it. 

 

It is hypocritical to suggest that our lives are changed by a 30-minute sermon on Sunday, but not affected by 13 hours of television the rest of the week; that we are affected by 12 minutes of Bible reading in the morning, but not by 8 hours of country music for the rest of the day. 

 

God is the One Who created us to be “plastic.”  It is this quality that allows God’s Word to transform us through constant exposure.  It’s what allows parents to influence their children for God, and enables godly Christians to disciple new believers.  But in the wrong hands, our “plastic” nature can harm us.  God warns us of this characteristic by admonishing us to “make no friendship with an angry man, lest thou learn his ways.”  He reminds us that “evil communications corrupt good manners.”    

 

When the Allied forces stormed through Germany at the end of World War II and liberated concentration camps, their grisly discoveries shocked the world.  LIFE magazine photographers caught images that still make us shudder—living skeletons blanketed in prison garb, staring out from barracks.  Even General Eisenhower famously reacted upon his discovery of those awful camps and the real story of the Third Reich that had lain hidden under Hitler’s deceptions and his vigorous handshakes with cowards who had fallen under his spell. 

 

Yet, beyond the skeletons was a story of how real people learned how to live among monsters.  They came back from Warsaw, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruck with their stories of survival—how they sat on straw in the lice-ridden barracks of Auschwitz, exchanging detailed recipes and stories, and playing card games with pieces of rubbish they found.  Similarly, the POW’s of Vietnam came back home thirty years later, after severe torture and isolation, and told how they named ants and rats, how they played checkers with bits of gravel, and how they created intricate knocking codes that went undetected by the cruel captors who guarded their cells.  They adjusted.  In the face of horror, they eventually shed their shock and learned how to live among demons.

 

The coping mechanism that God created in us to help us survive life on this sinful planet is part of our “plastic,” our ability to stop being shocked at what we see so that we can proceed to make rational decisions that can save our lives. 

 

I remember one of our kids coming home one summer and telling me how an adult had shown “concern” that we homeschool our children.  This man told our daughter, “It’s too bad your parents have sheltered you so much, because someday you will really be shocked at what’s out in the world.”  

 

The Bible tells us that when Paul discovered an entire city given over to idolatry, “his spirit was stirred in him.”  (Acts 17:16).  When he discovered what was “out in the world,” he didn’t shrug his shoulders in wise, all-knowing indifference.  He was moved.   

 

I hope I never stop being stirred.  Numbness is a coping mechanism for those who are victimized, not a practice of those who are living in liberty.  Anesthesia is not a gift for healthy people.  The emaciated prisoners who stared back from bunkers, dull emptiness glazing over their eyes, were no longer shocked by murder, rape, torture, profanity, abuse, and starvation.  General Eisenhower was.  I’m with Ike. 

 

Desensitization tears down our inhibitions, making us more accommodating of sin.  It is a method used on kidnapping victims and prisoners of war.  It is what happened to the precious Indian girls who were sold into debauchery in Indian temples a hundred years ago.  The more we watch and listen to sin, the less we can be moved by it.  We cannot be used to sin and stirred by it at the same time. 

 

The Bible says that Lot—a “righteous” man, by the apostle Peter’s assessment—was “vexed” from living in Sodom.  His years of surviving in a world where wrong seemed right, where gross sin was glorified, took their toll.  And like my plastic drinking cups that now add a sickening floral scent to water, Lot’s life and family were eventually characterized by the sin that probably had shocked him at one time. 

 

We are commanded to be “simple concerning evil,” and not even to “ask of those things done . . . in secret.”   While God does not want us to be taken advantage of, we are not to make ourselves students of sin.  Anyone who has read the Bible in its entirely will not be surprised by what man can do.  The Book of Judges?   Enough said.  But only God is able to convey sin in a way that does not corrupt the reader. 

 

Our society is regularly plagued by people who admit to killing and attacking others because of the influence of violent video games.  Many studies have proven over and over again that those games make killing machines out of kids.  Yet, when was the last time you heard of someone who beat his brother to death because he read Genesis 4?  Likewise, God gives us a glimpse into the sins Pharaoh, Ahab, Judas Iscariot, Herod, and Jezebel without drawing us into their sin and thus making sinners of us.  The Bible can discreetly educate us on sin in ways that the world cannot. 

 

David wrote, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me.”  (Psalm 101:3).  When making entertainment and music choices, our question ought to be, “Do I want this to become a part of who I am?” 

 

We are plastic.  We will become what we listen to, read, and watch.   To choose what you allow into your mind is to choose who you will become.  Choose well. 

 

“That thou mayest walk in the way of good men,

and keep the paths of the righteous.”  (Proverbs 2:20)

Broken Pictures, Mended Hearts

I remember hearing a news report many years ago of a criminal on death row.  He had committed numerous unspeakable crimes, and the night before his execution, people carried signs of rejoicing outside the prison in celebration of his impending death.  That grim night, he received one phone call:  From his mother.  She called to say goodbye, and to tell him that she still loved him. 

 

I am not familiar enough with this man’s story to be able to say whether his mother was at all culpable in his demise, but her phone call makes a remarkable statement about motherhood:  If you sell yourself to work evil and to multiply tragedy to innocent victims; if you find yourself the most hated man in the world; and if righteous people must take the most drastic of measures to protect their society from you;  then be assured that in your darkest final hour, part of my heart will lie down and die beside you anyway.  Because I am your mother. 

 

Motherhood is an earthly picture of God’s great love for us.  Like the mother of a criminal on death row, making that last anguished phone call to the child she once held, God demonstrated His love to us in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” 

 

Mother’s Day is not just the story of how powerful a mother’s love is; this is the human picture of how much God loves us.  You want to measure God’s love?  You want to know what it means to be loved by someone who loves you even more than you could love yourself; for someone to feel your pain even more acutely than you can feel it yourself?  Here is your yardstick:  That’s what a mother does.  I am so blessed to have one of those spiritual “yardsticks,” a mother who prays for me, loves me, and has consistently demonstrated God’s love to me.  I never struggled to understand God’s love.  My picture is intact, and with each passing year I am more and more thankful for how well my sacrificial, godly mother has illustrated God’s love for me.    

 

But for some people, Mother’s Day is a painful reminder of what wasn’t.  The picture of God’s love has been marred by harsh treatment, abandonment, neglect, and absence.  Mother’s Day cards, with their sweet sentiments, sharply injure where hurtful words and selfish decisions have left gaping wounds.   The "natural affection" that God gave mothers, to protect us at all costs, has disappeared in some families.  The metaphor has been shattered. 

 

God once created an Old Testament metaphor for salvation.  As the Israelites traveled through the wilderness on their long journey to Canaan, God used a rock to illustrate Jesus Christ, the Rock of our salvation.  At first, Moses was instructed to strike the rock (which he did), and water gushed out.  Later, in Numbers 20, Moses was told to speak to the rock.  This time, though, Moses lost his temper with the people and struck the rock instead.  His disobedience totally disrupted God’s picture of salvation.  God was so displeased with the blasphemy that Moses lost his entrance into the Promised Land.  Yet, miraculously, water still came out of the rock.   Even when an earthly leader smashed God’s metaphor with an impulsive and fleshly snap-decision, God still met the needs of the people He loved. 

 

When human failure breaks down God’s picture, skip the metaphor and run straight to God.  David said, “When my mother and my father forsake me, the Lord will take me up.”  The God Who made water gush from a desert rock, despite the disastrous mistake of a frustrated leader, can work despite human failings.  He can meet your needs, even when the human hands He created for showing His love to you are sadly missing from the picture of your life.  For those of you whose mother was not there—let God fill in those places.  For those who struggle today with the scars of a dysfunctional home, remember that where your mother cannot understand you, accept you, forgive you, or love you with the unconditional love God meant to show you, that is the place where you go straight to the nail-prints and let those hands instead wrap around your hurt. 

 

God is big enough to make water rush from a rock, and He is big enough to be your “mother.”   Choose your focus wisely this Mother's Day.  Turn from your shattered human pictures and aim your eyes higher, to the One Who can mend your heart.  And remember:  "You are loved with an everlasting love."   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fifty Things to Learn from All These Internet Lists

(OK—three things, since we’re busy.)

 

 

1. We all need help.

 

Why do we have lists floating all over the internet, gently educating us on all the stuff we’re not supposed to say to each other?   It's true:  We’re all a little tacky.   We actually do need to be taught some of these things.  Having read many of these internet lists, I realize that at times I have been saying some of the very clichés that people beg us to stop using.  

 

In areas that are particularly painful and personal—such as infertility, divorce, and bereavement--a blog can do a world of good and spare someone the trouble of having to look us in the eye and admit, “You’re killing me with your nosy questions.  Just. Stop.”  Bloggers save us some grief.   I can think of at least three blogs already this year that have completely changed the way I interact with people who are dealing with situations I have not personally encountered.   Why do people have to come along and show us how it feels to be disabled, or lonely, or suffering?  Because, without their education, most of us do very poorly at empathy that requires us to think outside of our own natural experience. 

 

2.  Some kooks  out there are kookier than the rest of us. 

 

I once heard of a guy who, within hours of a funeral, asked the widow what would become of the deceased individual’s valuables.  Seriously?!  Where do these people come from?  And how can we send them back? 

 

Here’s the bad news, on the blogging front:  Some people don’t read blogs any better than they read body language.  They just skip merrily through life, asking personal questions, suffocating us with their nuclear-powered body odor, and answering cell phones during our children’s weddings.  It would be a waste of their giftedness to read someone else’s ideas about convention.  After all, they already know everything.     

 

If blogging helped, I would write a hundred blogs, starting with this one: 

”Three things to remember about showering:   1.  Do it.  2.  Every day.  3.  With soap. “

 

 But I’m also realistic enough to know that the guy who is choking us to death with his fragrance, sitting in Subway, leeching their Wifi in eight-hour shifts and watching Netflix day in and day out, is not reading blogs about manners.  Not gonna fix him—outside of a miraculous accident involving a car wash jet spray and a gallon of Mr. Clean.  Some problems are just here to stay. 

 

3.  We can over-analyze. 

Fellow bloggers, may I tweak and crop a few of your lists just a teensy, weensy bit?  We are listing, detailing, and evaluating everyone to death.  Almost every single day, a new article pops up, sensitizing me with specific bullet points on what I am to say, and not to say, to every group I meet.  Sometimes the bloggers themselves don’t agree on what I am supposed to do.   Everything is getting so carefully scripted that it’s starting to feel more like a play, where I pose as Florence Nightengale, desperately trying to remember what I’ve been told to say for each situation.  Sharing “from the heart” is getting engineered out of the whole sequence, and I’ve got so many lists floating in my head that I’m tempted at times to say nothing at all, lest I accidentally step into one of the many sayings I’ve been admonished not to say.    

 

The Listing Phenomenon is not too different from what evolved with wedding registries.  Back when we were kids, people got married, opened their gifts—and promptly owned 18 toasters.  They spent most of their first year tracking down department stores, making exchanges, or selling all their gifts at garage sales so they could purchase milk and orange juice.  Someone (presumably an executive at Target) came up with the idea of “wedding registries,” where couples could sign up for what they needed, and everyone else could buy accordingly.  It actually worked pretty well at first. 

 

I remember the first time I received a link to a wedding registry that included sporting equipment.  It occurred to me then that we had officially witnessed “the shift”.   Showering impoverished newlyweds with necessities so they wouldn’t have to drink out of tin cans while they paid off their honeymoon had somehow evolved into sponsorship of Parks and Recreation.   No, instead of wading through a ten-page online listing for several stores,  I just send gift cards or checks, and let the honeymooners pick out their own towels and tennis racquets.  Or toasters. 

 

Like a wedding registry that is so detailed it renders itself unusable, some of these internet lists leave us feeling overwhelmed enough to give up trying to help each other out.  When we over-manage each other, with such deep analysis that no one can say anything anymore without it being rigorously tested, we strangle the very compassion we seek

 

I’m listening to your lists.  But please see my heart and forgive me if I mess up sometimes too.  J 

 

What Is Reality?

About two years ago, one of the students on Jason’s school bus decided he wanted to bring a Bible and read it on his way to school.  He came to Jason at the end of the day with a look of shock and said, “I didn’t know Noah got drunk!”  Indeed, Noah got drunk.  Students of Genesis might be tempted to wonder why God included that in the Scriptures.  We admire Noah for finding grace in the sight of God, for his persistence at preaching for 140 years with only his family as his converts, for building the ark precisely as God commanded, and for surviving the only world-wide flood ever to occur.  But we find ourselves a little disappointed when see Noah get off the ark, grow a vineyard, and get drunk.  Why such an ugly ending?  Theologians will have to help us dismantle the story better than I could and decide whether it was a post-flood accident (maybe Noah had never made wine before), or whether it was just God’s reminder to us that all men have feet of clay.  Whichever the case—one of the most popular Bible stories does take an unusual twist at the end. 

 

What if the story of Noah were made into a reality show?  Not the Noah movie—which was as far from reality as any producer could get—but what if there had been cameras, a crew, and an editor to catch reality as it happened?  I suspect there is at least one scene that would have been edited out.   The image of Noah, drunken and naked in his tent, being mocked by his own son, would be replaced with commercials, and we could go on with our happy ending. 

 

One of the troubles with reality shows, social media, and the plethora of images that cross our phones and computers each day is that most of it has been cherry-picked and sometimes even photo-shopped, thus rendering it “partial-reality” at its very best. 

 

Let’s face it:  For your sake as well as mine, I’m not posting pictures of my sons’ bedroom on this bright, Monday morning.  They were told they could not take a bite of breakfast until they cleaned up The Pile.  I think three of them obeyed.  But I can still hear #4 making siren sounds as he distractedly wanders around the bedroom, completely forgetting what I sent him in there to do.

 

Regardless of how much time you spend on Facebook, perusing friends’ vacation pictures and first-day-of-school shots, or watching the various reality shows that come on each week, here is a grain of salt to consider:  Reality is what we can’t cut and splice.  And nobody truly lives the reality that makes good television. 

 

Reality is a one-year-old spitting out his food. 

Reality is spankings for naughty words.

Reality is bad hair, extra pounds, and carpet stains.

Reality is a checkbook that doesn’t always balance.

Reality is a toilet that runs and a fridge that doesn’t. 

Reality is having to repeat a homeschool class. 

Reality is when not everyone likes us.

Reality is a puppy that marks territories--in the living room. 

Reality is egg shells and coffee drips and toast crumbs on the kitchen counter, and an urgent phone call before I can clean up the mess. 

 

Reality is why we need love for each other and God's grace in order to get along.

 

One summer day when Josh was about two, he discovered that he was strong enough to open the sliding door to the deck.  That summer, we also had temporarily adopted a nanny goat—who turned out to be pregnant, thus making us the proud owners of two goats within 24 hours.  Since the kid (the goat, not Josh) was not big enough to restrain with cattle paneling, he ran freely around our property, like the dog, sometimes hanging around on the front porch and sometimes racing in the woods with Tippy.  That sunny day, I discovered my deck door wide open, Josh toddling around on the deck, and a goat in my dining room.  Sometimes that’s reality—the unchecked, unedited version.  And life would be awfully boring without it. 

 

Enjoy your Facebook and your reality TV—but just remember, as you watch and click and scroll, your reality is just as “real” as theirs.  Don’t let picture-perfect families and images steal your joy.  Five-year-olds who dress themselves in mismatched clothes are lovably cute too.  So are buck teeth, frizzy hair, and acne.  Paid-for carpet, with its stains documenting decades of family memories, is just as valuable as shiny hard-wood and an impeccably clean house, where the cameras can roll easily behind the carefully cropped scenes. 

 

The battles we face as families—correcting unpleasant attitudes, instilling manners, and working through the self-doubt of teenagers—do not make for good television or Facebook statuses, but they make strong families when the battle is over.  Fingerprints on the wall, windows that don’t shut quite right, a broken van radio, Ramen noodles for lunch,  disappointing haircuts, parents who sometimes crash on the living room sofa for a power-nap, snoring away with their mouths hanging open:  Life isn’t always tidy. 

 

Don’t let reality shows and social media dim your own reality.  You are the only you God made.   J 

The Story of the Small Church

Studies tell us that over half of the churches in America have fewer than 75 people in them.  Since statistics are compiled by averaging mega-churches with small churches, the technical average church size in America is “184 people.”  But the real indicator is the first statistic:  Over half of us are in churches of fewer than 75. 

 

As a pastor’s wife in one of those smaller-than-average churches, where a Sunday crowd that tops 55 people feels like the “Great Awakening,” I am intrigued by the story that these numbers tell because . . . it’s my story.  This is my life.

 

There is a raw fact that is often overlooked in ministry preparation:  Most young people entering the ministry have been prepared for larger works than what they will actually encounter. 

 

Part of that is logistical.  Bible colleges and seminaries often turn to men who are established and well-known nationally when selecting the pastors who will be mentoring their young men through chapel services and revival meetings.  Naturally, radio stations, magazines, books, blogs, and broad ministry exposure allow certain speakers to hold influence over large populations of people.  Having established themselves with good testimonies as well as wisdom in public speaking and managerial skills, they are no doubt fitted for the job of preparing the next generation of preachers.  There is nothing wrong with this at all.  Yet, because colleges typically draw from larger ministries, the story of the small church tends to be overlooked in ministry preparation.  Pastors of small churches find themselves with shelves of leftover college lecture notes on such topics as “How to Keep Unity Among Your Staff,” and “The Pastor and His Retirement Fund, ”  when they’d really like to know how to have meaningful devotions after three hours of sleep, or how to locate a septic tank that was buried before the health department kept records.   

 

Secondly, summer internships and other similar programs are almost always held at larger churches, since exceptionally small churches rarely have the budget to host interns, group evangelistic teams, or musical groups.  In fact, most of these small churches are not really equipped to hire an assistant or even a secretary.  The economy has not kept up with the prosperity of the 1980’s, and many of the teenagers (like myself) who grew up in churches with thriving youth groups and multiple layers of leadership are now surprised to be working in churches where the toilet paper and windex are brought in by volunteers. 

 

And so . . . here we are, most of us serving in smaller churches than we grew up in, smaller churches than we prepared for, smaller churches than we ever even imagined existed.   

 

Here are four things to consider about exceptionally small churches, from the perspective of a pastor’s wife: 

 

1.  There are many reasons why churches are small. 

 

When I went to my grandma’s funeral six years ago, I was reunited with a lady from my childhood church.  She and I had not seen each other in at least 30 years, and we enjoyed getting caught up with each other.  When she asked what my husband and I do for a living, I answered, “We live in Illinois, and my husband is the pastor of a small country church.”  It wasn’t meant as an excuse; it’s just our reality.  She quickly corrected me:  “But it doesn’t have to be small!  You can grow!”  I remember wondering if she thought we preferred for our church to stay small.  Didn’t she realize that most pastors pray for new members, and work zealously to that end?  It wasn’t really worth a tangled discussion at my grandma’s funeral, so I just agreed with a smile.  

 

Churches are small for lots of reasons, and if we accept that fact, our ministry can become a joy and not a frustration.  We pray for growth, we work tirelessly to reach others for Christ, we expend ourselves and our resources almost daily for our ministry, we go to bed exhausted and get up before we are really rested, we pay for small expenses without reimbursement, and we are small.  I’m OK with that.  My husband doesn’t need a frustrated wife to add to his heavy load.  God uses small churches.  My job is just to make sure that I am a “clean vessel,” set aside for His use, so that He can use our little church in His big kingdom. 

 

2.  There are opportunities in small churches. 

 

I’m convinced that criticism is burden, turned on its head.  What you see first, when you walk into our church, is your job staring back at you.  Do you notice that our music is a little off-key, or that I’m clearly not an expert on the organ?  Those are the observations of musicians, and we’ve got room for those with that gift to aid in our worship service.  Is it the need for renovation that strikes you most—our dated pews, or our plumbing problems in the restrooms?  Maybe you have the gift of helps.  Do you notice the bevy of little van kids, runny noses and hair falling out of place, making paper airplanes out of their Sunday school papers in the front row?  Maybe you have a spot in your pew for one of them.  And maybe it will be your smile they remember, thirty years from now, when they try to imagine what Jesus looks like.

 

Sometimes people will tell us, “You need to get more young families into this church!”   We agree wholeheartedly!   What a blessing you can be at welcoming new people to your home for dessert, or just adding a friendly face to our crowd.   Show your support for a small church by joining them in membership, and then lend a hand!  There’s plenty of room for your gifts here.  We’re not quite as polished as the guys on TV, who have video editors to take out the coughing and the mistakes.  But if you get sick and have to be hospitalized—my husband will come see you.  That TV preacher, as nice as he is, and as much as he probably appreciates your monthly gift, will not be there.  Come help us encourage others. 

 

When Joshua was born five years ago, I hated to schedule my faithful ladies to watch him in the nursery every Sunday night.  These were the same ladies who already did so much—from teaching Sunday school and singing in the choir, to working in our ladies’ missionary circle each month and helping to clean the church and serve for special events.  Since it was just our own child on Sunday evenings, we started scheduling our other children to take turns in the nursery for Sunday nights so that I could hear the preaching.  We like to laugh about the night Nathan got fired from the job, though.  As a six-year-old, his career in nursery work was cut short when he got so absorbed reading  Dora the Explorer  that he failed to noticed Josh making a quick escape—all the way out of the door and down the front aisle of the church!  Yes, we have a job for you here. 

 

3.  Every skill counts.

 

I’m thankful for every single thing anyone ever taught my husband and me—from making homemade bread to sewing, from laying tile to hanging drywall.  My husband just finished repairing our church lawn mower, and now he is headed out the door to drive a school bus.  Some of those lessons were learned when we were growing up; some of them were learned under other mentors; and some of them have been learned right here, when lay people with specific expertise taught us how to do these things. 

 

Discipleship and delegation are crucial in ministry, but small churches still find themselves with a pretty large to-do list for the pastor—and especially in aging congregations.  Do we wait until we have more converts and helpers before we paint the bathrooms, or do we just go ahead and get ‘er done? 

 

Anyone who is called into ministry ought to become a student of every life skill and ministry skill he can find.  Rather than complaining that all the churches are asking for a pastor’s wife who can play the piano—get a book.  Even simple chords with a melody line make a big difference in congregational singing and keep Sunday mornings from sounding like a monastery. 

 

4.  God provides for small churches too. 

              

We don’t have to be intimidated by the small church budget.  Ruth said to Naomi, “Thy God shall be my God.”  When I see a church with a massive gymnasium, Christian school, or updated auditorium, I say, “I have that God too!”  He pays my water bill.  He keeps our van running.  He gave my kids money to go to camp this year, and jobs for our twins to save up for a missions trip to Haiti this fall. 

 

I am afraid that sometimes we try to “self-medicate” when it comes to meeting our own needs, instead of laying our burden out before the Lord and letting Him provide.  About five years ago, God led us to give up our major credit cards.  It was a personal decision, and not based on a conviction that everyone else has to do that.  In fact, some people find that they actually make money using credit cards.  But for us, we just felt God wanted us to use our money toward saving for future emergencies rather than constantly trying to pay past emergencies off.   And God has not failed to pay for our needs. 

 

One week we had some extra expenses to pay, and we had what we jokingly call the “week of 35.”  We had $35 left that week for groceries.  As you can imagine, with four teenagers and two other children, it was going to take some real planning!  Amazingly, we had three different loads of food given to us that Monday, by people who spontaneously called and said they “happened” to be cleaning out cupboards and needed to get rid of extra food!  No one knew we were going to try to scrimp by on eggs, rice, black beans, and milk that week.  But God knew, and He provided food I wouldn’t even have indulged in on a “good” week!  Our pantry was suddenly overflowing.  One lady gave us at least three or four bags of cappuccino mix. Who buys gallons of cappuccino mix when they can barely afford butter?  That’s just how God works!

                                 

We prayed for a full-time bus job for my husband since 2007.  He worked many hours substitute driving and even accepting a challenging position for one school year, driving to the alternative school (for kids who have been expelled from the local district).  The hours were very long and taxing, and the spiritual challenges were very immense, since the boys on the bus were involved with pornography and lewd behavior and language.  We earnestly prayed for a local job with the children in our own district—although it seemed out of reach.  There were two other drivers ahead of Jason in seniority, and they both seemed to enjoy their positions.  Last summer, one of them moved unexpectedly.  The other one accepted a position elsewhere and, without warning, resigned his job.  Jason got the job we had prayed for!  He drives past the church twice a day, past his own deer blind in the fall, and all the while he marvels at the amazing creation of our gorgeous farmland right here on Rural Route Three.   That’s how God works! 

 

I openly share this with you because you have that God too.  Those of you who are considering ministry:  Don’t be afraid of the small church, the church plant, or the mission field where funds can be tight.  God can use you to bring healing to a hurting ministry, to bring reviving growth to a stagnant ministry, and to make that small field your field, for the glory of God.   And those of you who are looking for a church to attend, set aside your checklists.  We don’t have a big youth group or an orchestra or a Christian school.  We just have jobs, places to serve for those who are willing to pitch in, lend a hand, and store up eternal rewards.