It has been three months since we held our baby Joey in our arms. Our world is not what we expected. It is hard to gather motivation for tasks. It is hard to see other babies though there is a joy in it as well. In the last three months we have spent a lot of time with friends and family. I have been told I was being laid off and accepted a new job offer doing the same job with a different contractor. I currently sit here with poison ivy all over my arm and spots on my face thinking how hard it is to suffer and preach. I am really at peace with God yet lack the enthusiasm I feel should be poured into preaching. How do you remain faithful and genuine? Where is the line between authentically broken and also proclaiming truth that you have to fight to claim for yourself? Not sure there is a good answer, but find myself pondering the question. Much of sermon prep is done through tears. I just pray that in some way someone is lifted up by the voicing of my struggles. I do believe that God is in the redemption business so I pray my pain is redeemed in beauty. 

Billy would be 11 today. So many unanswered questions and broken dreams? What would Billy be like? Would he love sports or school or music? What kind of big brother would he be? Would he be a mama's boy or daddy's little dude?

I wish I could remember 11 years and 1 day ago when stillborn was not a word in my vocabulary. Back when pregnancy ended with a healthy baby.

I wonder how many people have been touched by Billy's short life. I also wonder how many would have been touched if he lived a full life. I wonder why God allows this to happen. I wonder how a loving God allows this to happen twice to a family that seeks to follow Him.

I thank God I have come through depression, heartache, and tragedy making it through another day. I thank God for my wife because we suffer together which is much better than suffering alone. I thank God for community that support us. There are many days I am fine and others that I question everything. There are days that I am fine and break down in tears for seemingly no reason. There are days that I just want to stay in bed and not face the world, but I still believe there is a God of love and redemption so even if I feel let down I want to redeem these broken dreams for His glory (even though I hate it has to be this way).

Do faithful and obedient people suffer?

People have praised my honesty. Honestly yesterday was a terrible day. I was off work to recover from the drive home from Tennessee. For the first time since Joey died, I had worked up the motivation to do some work around the house. I got out the pressure washer which my dad had kindly loaned me. I sprayed for about 20 minutes kicking up caked mud off my driveway and retaining wall. It was okay because i would wash it off once I got all the mud up. The mud did not get washed off before the pressure washer broke. It just fell apart, then I fell apart. 

What caused me to fall apart? I suppose it is being in a fragile place. I tend to get stuck in thought of worthlessness. This time I was stuck on a recent series of Bible studies. A major point of the Bible study that I attended was obedience always leads to blessing. This was preached time and time again across multiple weeks, sometimes with qualifiers and other times without. I could not help but think about how disobedient I must be and how God did not want another disobedient failure like me in the world which is why every son Alice has been pregnant with has died. Four males in utero . Zero live births. My only thought was that God must have been protecting the world from people like me. Obedience always leads to blessing so not being blessed is only logically a failure to be obedient. 

Let me acknowledge that I am not perfect and not completely obedient to God and His word, but who is worthy of the blessing that comes from obedience. I'm pretty sure none of us so I don't get the point of preaching obedience leads to blessing. In fact I think it can be quite harmful. Does God want our obedience? Sure does. Does obedience lead to blessing in many cases? Yes. Does it always coincide? Nope!  If our mere obedience always leads to blessing, then we could control God. He would have no say in the matter.  He would have to bless us.  The caveat may be that Jesus says to love Him is to obey his commands and thus in proclaiming our love for Jesus through obedience we are adopted into a covenant of salvation, then I agree that obedience leads to blessing. However fixating on obedience and blessing beats down those, like me, that are already brokenhearted and grief-stricken in a way Jesus never intended (I am sure the preacher did not intend this either).

My point is not to beat down another preacher. My point is that grief and depression are real. I am not sure which effects me more or that they can truly be separated. All I know is that I'm left a shell of myself more times than anyone will ever know. I fixate on all my shortcomings and hate who I am. 

Now the response of many lovely people is to quote scripture and tell me not to be so hard on yourself. These are truth, but what if sometimes we are not called to a quick fix. What if sometimes it is healthier to sit in the pain? I don't think it is healthy to go there by myself, but one of the things I have appreciated about facebook is hearing how hard my situation is. It is healing for me to know that others think it is hard. I know we are not meant to face this hard world on our own. I need to know that although others do not completely know my pain, at least they see it and say it is okay to hurt. You have given me permission to not feel okay. My greatest comfort is the knowledge that this torture was not a direct result of my failings and whatever my failings are they are covered at the cross. What if Jesus bought me and my babies eternity in heaven and they never have to know any suffering outside the womb? Then this temporary struggle is worth it all. 

good people

I am once and all conviced that there is absolutely no such thing as good people. My logic would be as follows, I would think most people would with maybe some deliberation consider me a "good" person yet I know the evil that exists in my heart and mind placing me so far from the aforementioned "good" standard that I could not touch "good" with a hundred foot pool. Assuming that I am not alone in my inner depraved and evil thoughts then my conclusion is that deep at the heart of all humanity is an incredible propensity toward evil hence sinfulness. Not that this is anything new, but I guess I had always hoped that there was more hope than I found in myself. It is a painful realization to come to grips not only with my own sinfulness, but the realization that most others are nearly as evil in their thought and private lives as I am. I find it incredible that anyone could ever be honest with themselves and be in any kind of relationship and still label mankind as "good." It takes either an incredible amount of pride or insincerety to look at the problem of sin and say no problem. Unfortunately the more you grow the harder it gets. Sometimes I would much rather throw away the Christian life and just pursue my own depravity. Much less fulfilling, but more pleasurable and it is conceivable that living such a way would bring much less heart ache. So in the end, it can not be a question of morality or even a question of good and evil, it really falls into relationship. What types of relationships do you have that will keep you from being devoured from your own sinfulness? Of course the easy Christian response is well Christ will do that, but what if he doesn't? I get sick of Christians sugar coating the truth and selling Jesus like He is some sort of elixir that will fix every problem we ever have if we just have faith or if we allow Him. I believe that there is a sense that the most Godly men and women look a lot more like David than Job. It is all we can do to call crawling back to God adulterers and murderers certainly in our hearts if not with our hands. How does this all work? Where is the hope? I guess the hope comes in the hope that in God lies a goodness and love that cannot be fathomed amidst our endless chasms of sin. There is a purity so great that though we know it we cannot pursue it as we ought. There is this sense that we were created for another kingdom, yet we constantly settle, maybe not settle maybe we just grovel in our own sinful state. We do battle in the heavenlies while on earth and we can't comprehend it. We lose more than we win, but we have already won. It is fairly mind blowing that what I can't do for myself God has done for me yet for now he has equipped with tools, truth, and relationships in order to try to someway fight a war that is over. What is that all about? Does God want me to prove myself worthy? I can't. Does he want me to prove my love? I try, but it is not the unfailing love that He has for me. In the end, I love evil because I love myself and my heart is evil, but in the midst of my greatness darkness there is that still small voice, sometimes very small reminding me that I don't have to do it. I don't have to win, it has been done for me. Grab hold of the victory, claim Christ as the victor or continue to fail on your own. So in the end the choice is mine or if anyone actually reads this I suppose the choice is ours. Continue struggling with evil and hating yourself or claiming the victory in Christ and loving the righteousness that we can claim through His redemption. So as bad as the suck gets, and the suck gets pretty bad, we must know that our hope is in Christ alone. He is the victor, even when we don't know it or refuse to admit it. It often takes me at least 24 hours -6 weeks to admit that I am struggling in a way that is beyond my control and my strength and that I can only be delivered by the hand of God.

A modern day psalm (even if I am not a poet): The pain of grief and the blanket of mourning

How long, Oh God, How long?
I wonder have I done something wrong?
Sometimes, I can't overcome the pain.
waiting for the sun, but only feel the rain.
All I can do is cry out your name.
Is this life for real or just a game?
Is my pain just in the physical,
or is it all in the spiritual

Does prayer really change things?
do we ever change or just go on flings?
sometimes I feel under attack
i am tempted to hang it on the rack.

The Christian life is truly rough
Christ, can I be that tough?
never can I do it on my own,
even my life is out on loan.
life does not belong to this earth,
but where do we find rebirth?
it is found in Christ alone
not in money, not in your home.

The pain is just so great!
sometimes I feel so full of hate.
I can't even deal with my self,
my faith just sits on the shelf
while I lay in bed overcome by grief.
in the end this will feel brief.
even under the blanket of mourning
I think God has given us warning.
he promised us our cross
in Christ, my life is loss.

Am I advancing the kingdom of God?
or is it about doing my job?
Sometimes it is all about the pay,
but would i love people anyway?
God, please don't take our child!
can't we just enjoy them for a while?
I am not going to lie
just the thought makes me cry.
In you, I have placed my faith,
God is it all a waste?

God please show me the impossible way,
that we can all eternally play.
Jesus, I want to seek you,
Billy, I want to greet you,
Faith, I want to hold you,
God don't let me scold you.
You know the best,
but Lord give me rest.

I am under the pain of grief and the blanket of mourning,
Lord please bring Jesus and that precious eternal morning.

Church Newsletter

I thought I would post the most recent letter I have written for the church newsletter. It helps reveal what has been dominating my thinking recently so here it is.

Dear friends at Lebanon,
I have decided to fill this section of each newsletter with some theological ramblings that are hopefully as helpful to you as they are therapeutic for me. (please keep reading even though I said theological) It is good for me to let the thoughts that fill my brain evacuate and fill up a sheet of paper. It is helpful for me because I can theologize things to death. What do I mean? Being a Christian, one should always keep God at the center of one’s thought. Do I do that? Absolutely not, but as one deals with tragedy and suffering it is much easier to question God and give Him time at the front and center of your mind. Needless to say, God has been spending a lot of time at the front of my mind in recent days.
I have thought a lot about who God is and what the Bible says about His character. I have thought about these things while looking at them through the lens of my life experience. You may wonder, how could a loving God do this to me? I know that is a question many of us ask. I know some of us get to the point that God’s very existence may be questionable if we are only looking at our circumstances. So what has two pregnancies and zero living babies taught me about our God? It has taught me that God is a God of supreme love that can be questioned, but probably never understood. How is God love if He won’t give my wife and I what we want so desperately? Very simple, God sees all of history at once, and God’s plan is bigger than last year. God has shown me that not only is He a God of love, but much more importantly, God is a God of redemption. It is this knowledge that gives me hope that not only is God’s promise of eternal life that is guaranteed to us through the cross and resurrection of Christ good for us, but also for unborn children. It is with this hope that God gives me great joy and hope amidst my grief and pain. It is not that God hates Alice and I, that He took our kids from us. In fact, it is only a gift of God that we were ever pregnant at all. How many people never get to enjoy the gift of loving a child of their own? I have loved my children even if we were separated by a womb. This experience of being a father has given me even more insight into what the heavenly Father’s love must be like for us. The hopes and dreams that God has for us and the desire for us to spend time together is more real to me than ever. God desires to be with us. He desires for us to love Him. More importantly, it is God’s great desire to love us. It doesn’t matter to God how good you are or whether you are happy, sad, angry, or depressed. God wants to be close to you. God wants you to be His child so bad that God even sacrificed Jesus to make it possible.
Finally, I want to thank God that He is redeeming our children’s lives. What does this mean? First of all, to think that God is somehow evil by allowing stillbirth and miscarriages to happen is beyond absurd for the Christian. Sure our human nature takes us there if we let it, but when we think about the love of God in perspective, it is then that we know that God’s children born or unborn are under God’s covenant of grace. This means that God gave our children the privilege of glory with no suffering. It is a great a gift to go straight to heaven to dwell in the glory of God without dwelling on this earth dealing with the stench of sin. God has not made me angry, bitter, or sad when I have spent time with Him. Instead God has challenged me to reveal His true nature to people so that they might also believe that God is love. This does not mean that I am not emotional. I still grieve as any parent grieves, but the grieving and the grave is only the beginning of a beautiful redemption story. Thanks be to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit through whom all grace mercy and peace are ours.

Blessings,


Pastor Bill

2008 Over, but not forgotten

There are lots of things that people will remember from 2008 as we now embark on 2009. It has been a year in which I have learned more than quite possibly any other year in my life. The most important lessons that I have learned in the past year are this. I spend too much time thinking about things and far too little time thinking about God and people. I learned that every minute is a gift from God and should not be taken for granted. I learned that pregnancies do not always end in healthy babies. I learned that being a pastor is both more challenging and more rewarding than I could have imagined. I have learned that no one is strong enough to make it on their own. We all need people, I would call this community. I have learned that God can do more than you think He can. I have learned that God uses ordinary men. I have learned that no matter how long I am sick, no matter how long I grieve, no matter how much I hurt God knows my pain and walks with me. I have learned that God really is a God of love. I have learned that I love myself a lot more when I recognize God's love for me. I have learned that churches do not change and that is sad. I have learned that God is bigger than church, but that God is active in the church. I have learned that there is only so much one person can do and that God does not require more than He has called me to give. I have continued to learn the power of sin and the enemy. I am beginning to see the power of prayer in dealing with the enemy's attacks. I have learned that God is incredible and sometimes you have to go through the downs in order to understand that we are incapable of anything. So for 2009, I hope to learn how to give more and more of my life to God. I want to learn what it truly means to die to self in order to be used by God. I want to learn what it looks like when God raises a man from the dead and uses him.This picture sums up my 2008. It may be my first full year at Lebanon. It will also be remembered as the year of the Civic as my family purchased 3 civics this past year. With all that has happened in the past year, it is the year that I realized that I was dead and that only God could lift me from death. Thanks be to God that by His grace, God lifts us from death to life. May you all find that life abundant that Christ came to give you. Finally Thank God for friends and family.