My Dear Friends, in the Pastors Column I Want to Focus My Thoughts on Us
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My dear friends, In the pastors column I want to focus my thoughts on us getting to know each other. So I will begin here by sharing with you some things about my own life, a life which has become for me a song I sing in praise of God’s wonderful Mercy to me and my family. Though I was born in Kansas City Missouri, I grew up in the small river town of Prescott Wisconsin, that beautiful land flowing with milk and butter. There are five in my family. I have an older sister, Susan, and a younger brother, Michael–both of my parents are still living–praise God. For the first nine years in Prescott we lived in a trailer park on the outer edge of town, and next to this park was a large field. This field and the river bluffs became the play ground for me and my brother. As far back as I can remember I was always deeply fascinated by nature, that first book of revelation called “creation.” Though my stronger interests were in rocks and insects, I would bring home just about anything I could find: snakes, lizards, frogs, turtles, spiders–all those things my mother wished I had left in the field. This enjoyment and connection with nature became the place of my first encounters with God, for my family did not practice much faith beyond meal prayers until I was 10 years old. Though I did not have much of an idea about God at that time, I sensed His presence at certain moments, and sometimes it would make me joyful or leave me feeling peaceful. It wasn’t until years later, looking back on this time of my life, that I realized these gentle touches were God. All those days and hours we spent roaming our little wilderness kept us innocent and gave us temporary relief from the heavy burdens of our broken family life. My father struggled with alcoholism for much of my childhood, and this brought a lot of pain and heart-ache into our family, weighing especially heavy on our mother. While we often struggled financially because of this, the hardest part for me was not having a father who was able to model and nurture in me a sense of identity, self-worth, and those noble qualities of a true man. My father has changed so much since then, and I thank the Lord for blessing him so generously and making him a new creation in Christ–but back at that time I had to try as best I could to figure things out on my own, which I did not do very well. As part of an attempt to steer our family in a better direction, our parents had us baptized when I was ten years old. I also remember my mother and father sitting us down one evening to teach us the Lord’s Prayer before bedtime. Hope started to grow in our hearts and the sense of a “new beginning.” And things did get better for a time–my father even stopped drinking–but, unfortunately, this new beginning didn’t hold out for very long. Though we had received the gift of New Life in Christ through the waters of baptism, we had no one to help us understand this wonderful Gift and what it meant for our life. Not having any close adults or peer models to mentor me, and only a weak faith to guide me, I was very vulnerable and weak to the influences of the peer groups at school and the secular culture around me. So, little by little, with my heart thirsting for love and acceptance, I started drifting further and further away from God and the path of goodness by seeking love and happiness in the wrong places and in ways hurtful to myself and others. We tend to think that God is absent or distant from us at these wayward moments of our life, and yet here is where Grace is so amazing, for God, in allowing sin and all it’s painful consequences, is able to use it to love us right back into His arms. It is true, I had abandoned God, but God never abandoned me, nor did He ever stop loving me. The song lyrics “looking for love in all the wrong places” best describes my teenage years. We see this with so many people today—both young and old—searching desperately for love and happiness, but not finding it where they thought they would. The world promises so much, it glitters and makes a lot of noise–but in the end it’s promises leave us feeling empty, it’s version of happiness disappoints. I wanted to be happy like everyone around me, to know love and true friendship, to find a fulfilling purpose for my life, to become a real man. But where are we to find these things our hearts desire? With many of my peers, we looked to the world for the answers. But the fallen world always seems to propose the same answers: “buy and have more, strive for power and recognition, seek greater comfort and pleasure–for having more you’ll be content; if you become “cool” and “macho” you’ll be a man; there’s nothing beyond this life, Christianity is an oppressive myth, so pursue as much sensible pleasure you can, keep yourselves entertained and you’ll be happy.” So I and many of my high school friends put all our energy into striving for this seductive “ideal,” not realizing where it was leading us, not seeing the sign hidden along this path that read: “dead end.” Following this path made me increasingly more selfish. I became proud and arrogant, competitive and ambitious, tearing other people down to build myself up. By compromising my deeper sense of right and wrong to fit in and be accepted, I often hurt myself further, as well as the people I wanted to love. During this time our family was attending a Lutheran Church in town every Sunday. Though I did not find the homilies very inspiring, I still heard the Bible stories Sunday after Sunday. But as quickly as I heard these teachings about the Christian life, I just as quickly pushed them out of my mind and tried to forget them. The guilt I felt when I compared my life with the Gospel was more than I could deal with, and the deeper truth was that I did not want to give up my wayward lifestyle—I was a slave to sin, unable to break free. At best I had only a ‘legalistic’ understanding of faith then, a list of do’s and don’t’s—a sense of a deeply personal relationship with Jesus Christ was not within my experience–I did not yet know the One, True, and Living God speaking to me in the words of the bible. What I find very moving and wonderful, which I mentioned above, is as I was drifting further and further from the Lord, God was drawing closer and closer to me, pursuing me in ways that I did not recognize until years later. This is the Good News of the Gospel: God does not abandon or forsake sinners, but through Jesus Christ, has come precisely to seek out and save all who are lost. The light that God was trying to shine into my heart was easy to leave behind at Church. But what was I to do when that same light became tangibly present every day in our home through my little brother, and a short time later through my sister? At the end of my sophomore year in high school my brother was moved to give his whole life over to God and follow Jesus Christ. He was not one of those “preachy” types, but his changes were quick, obvious, and powerful—especially when he stopped teasing me. I’ll never forget the nights I woke up and found him praying. We shared a room together, and often, when he thought I was asleep, he would get out of his bed in the dark, kneel down and pray. I would watch in silence. I didn’t know it then, but my brother was praying for me and our whole family. God heard those prayers of the night, and the fruit they produced in the events that unfolded is still a source of joy for us. It was during my senior year in high school that my soul and conscience began to awaken and I started searching for God. The same grace was given to one of my close classmates. Together we began to realize that the egotistical pursuit of machoism and the selfish lifestyle of building happiness on the passing pleasures of this world was leading us no where—that it was all vanity–a “house built on sand.” The seductive happiness promised by the secular culture was an illusion, leaving us empty and discouraged. For years I had put on the outward appearance that all was “OK,” that I had it together, that I was “having fun.” Yet inside I was hurting, I felt so restless and lost, so tired of all the games I had to play to fit in and be accepted. In the span of a few months the “false gods” I had placed my hopes in and which gave me the illusion of happiness completely failed, the house I had built on sand was washing away, leaving me feeling very weak and helpless.