For the Sake of the Call

Lesson: Learning to make every small thing matter, stop letting myself off the hook, and step into a new decade with an aggressive pursuit of a very high calling.

Just a couple months ago, my mom would have turned 61 years old. She passed away in October 2022, and my world has been shaken ever since. Now, interestingly enough, though I spent several years driving for Uber, I never, personally, take Ubers. But, ironically, I found myself in one recently, and the driver had just, similarly, lost his wife last year. 

He mentioned a sad reality that’s very difficult to cope with after losing a loved one, but it’s reality nonetheless: Despite being in a difficult spot and doing Uber to avoid being in the bar every night, he said, “Life goes on.” Then, after it came out that I’d lost my mother, he said something along the lines of losing a mother is unique in that it turns your world upside down in such a way that makes you feel alone forever. 

While I cannot possibly know if I’ll feel alone forever (and I hope it’s not the case), I can say that since my mother’s passing, life has gone on. At some point, the sympathy stops. At some point, you’re expected not only to move on, but to move on like nothing happened. At some point, you have to get your bearings and move forward; otherwise, life will absolutely pass you by. 

But I can also say that, so far, it’s been a very true statement that losing my mom has made me feel utterly, utterly alone. Now, my depression diagnosis came a couple years before her passing, and I believe I struggled with depression long before she grew sick, so I’m not new to feeling alone. But there’s something different about already feeling a lack of connection, then, in one moment, the person who birthed you, raised you, sacrificed everything for you, became your best friend, and loved you consistently and as perfectly as an imperfect human could is suddenly gone forever. That leaves you with a massive hole in your life, and you feel immensely alone. 

Full Circle

Why do I bring this up? Because life goes on. And I’ve learned to deal because I have to move forward with life. 

Well, maybe I bring this up because her absence has been accentuating my loneliness in a very real way lately. March 14, my mother’s birthday, I woke up in the hospital for the second day of what would become a five-day stay in the last hospital she was in before being transferred to hospice. 

I remember seeing her get lifted into the ambulance, seizing. And once I was able to visit her in the hospital shortly after, parts of her memory were gone, and she was having conversations with people who were not in the room. I remember asking her what I did for a living, and I could see her face scrunch as she painfully tried to force herself to remember. 

And as I sat in that hospital room, this time as a patient myself, dragging an IV tower to the restroom, lying in an uncomfortable bed unable to move without significant pain, I felt miserable and alone. My mom would take care of me before I became an adult. And although I’m now a man, I was put in a position where I needed someone, once again, to take care of me. But this time, my mom wasn’t there, and I had no one else to take on that role.

Disturbed

Lately, I’ve felt off. Like I can’t do anything right despite making so many efforts to do so much that I find important both at work and in my personal life. 

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and ADHD. The conflicting thing is that I feel like I’ve been doing much better mentally and emotionally especially as life has taken a turn for the better: I have two jobs that I thoroughly enjoy and feel called to, and they’re bringing in enough income for me to take care of myself. But I’ve begun to dig deep as I’ve wondered how many of my struggles might be related to my diagnoses … without wanting to make excuses and slap a medical label on something in a manner that’s ill-fitting. 

From a very young age, I’ve always taken pride in being a man of my word. That’s who my mom raised me to be, and since I was, in many ways, wounded by a father who was the complete opposite, I’d sought to uphold my words with conviction and to never take lightly the trust of others.

Here’s the problem: I made a commitment to a few people that I’d update my blog monthly. If you read my last post, I’d mentioned that I’d have “me days” every Saturday to assess my life and what my aim needs to be for the upcoming week before communicating that to my pastor and mentor. Neither of these things happened. 

Now, it may seem futile to you, but the reason this is important to me is because it outlines a larger issue: I’m allowing this disturbance; be it from bioneurological factors, the effects of being a single man without a “helper,” or my own shortcomings; to hold me back from becoming the fullness of who God’s called me to be. And if you don’t know, who God has called me to be is everything to me. 

If you scroll to the top of this page, it reads: Transparency, Flaws, and Faith. On the “About” page, I divulge that I am unapologetically Christian in two senses: “Defined by my need to repent; filled with filth, hypocrisy, and lust;” yet “madly in love with God and unwilling to compromise our relationship in order to meet the standards of a misguided, self-worshipping, and idolatrous culture.” I aim to never apologize for my name nor my faith but to be unapologetically Christian for the sake of allowing a perfect and holy God, who I find myself immensely indebted to, to shape and mold me into a better image of himself so I might serve this world with all I have to the very death of me just like Christ did. 

That’s why becoming the fullness of who God has called me to be is so imperative to me, and in order to do that adequately, I must rule this disturbance in such a way that my focused, undistracted devotion increases for the one I love so dearly … that the evidence of my life clearly reflects the devotion I claim to have.

I believe you are listening

And I believe that you move at the sound of my voice

So give me dove’s eyes

Give me undistracted devotion

For only You

“Doves Eyes” by Tasha Cobbs

The Love of God; Better Yet, the God, Love: The Intersection of This Disturbance and Who I’m Currently Becoming

Why is this disturbance so heavily on my mind lately, and why do I find it so imperative to resolve? Because I’m currently pondering life in a new way as I wrap up the last few months of my 20s and prepare to enter into a new decade. In the words of many of the volunteers I lead at my job, I’m an unc!! And the question that’s weighing on my mind in this season is “Who am I becoming?” 

I always strive to live a life that pleases God, and I’ve always been heavily future oriented. But the funny thing about life is that the journey is nowhere near as cookie-cutter as we plan for it to be, and because of this, I’ve allowed my present circumstances over the past several years to force me to live life in reaction-mode, constantly working to push through hardship or climb out of a hole of some sort. This was a necessary pivot and focal point in my 20s, but now it’s time to reassess and ask myself, When I look at my goals and my calling, does my life right now look like I’m heading in the direction of those goals?

Now, I do want to say that I find it important to not put pressure on myself to have everything figured out just because I’m turning thirty. This life is a journey, and I’ll be in pursuit of God’s calling for my life forever. But if my present isn’t obviously aimed at the future I desire for myself, then I need to make whatever changes necessary to ensure that at the end of the next decade, I’m not in the same place I am now, and I’m not finding myself further away from my ultimate calling.

Practically speaking, I’m blessed and immensely grateful that I’m meeting my financial goals. But as an upcoming thirty-year-old who aspires to someday have a wife and family, I find it important to rethink these financial goals. I love what I do for a living, and I feel called to be where I am currently; however, I know the career path God has called me to, and this is not the final stop.

Now, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with the heading of this section (or maybe you haven’t noticed the lack of connection, or maybe you just don’t care). But there is a distinction in scripture that the apostle, John, makes about love. In John 4, he says that God is love. Now, you could spend a lifetime trying to figure out what this distinction between having love and being love actually means (and if John actually intended to make that distinction), but what I want to highlight is that whatever this idea of God BEING love means, the entailment of the claim seems to be that the God, love, gave everything for us, and here’s the thing that many of us fail to acknowledge: in return, he wants everything. To be even more firm: he requires everything. Not some things. Not most things. But absolutely everything.

Recently, I had a conversation with my mentor about my life goals and how I feel like the grandiosity of those goals requires more than I’m capable of giving without a partner. In my last post, in a section I titled “A Not-So-Settled Tension: Painfully Struggling to Achieve Without My ‘Helper,’” I went in depth regarding this struggle and how I feel that, even biblically, a man (in most cases) is limited in his impact while single, so I won’t be redundant here. But I’ll just say what I’m currently coming to terms with is the fact that though these sentiments may be true, I cannot wait for the ideal to occur in order to make strides toward my future.

Developing an undistracted devotion to God and thus becoming who he’s created me to be is so important because it acknowledges what he’s done for me, and it’s the only possible way to lay down my life in a way that’s useful and in a way that leads to life change for others. Just because there might be limits to what I can accomplish given the current state of my life as a single man doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t push to do absolutely all I can to maximize my effectiveness now and get as close as I possibly can to the vision. In other words, I don’t know where the boundaries of my abilities stop and where the threshold of what I can’t do alone begins, so I must move forward rather than becoming paralyzed by the anticipation of where my power ends.

I’ve been waiting for the day for my father come around

Waiting for that moment when we would paint the town but

Then it all hit me last night, nobody’s coming

I’ve been waiting for that moment when my heart heals

Waiting for someone to take away the pain that I feel

Then it all hit me last night, nobody’s coming

But why should I dwell on the things that I can’t change?

What if I’m the answer for things that I’ve prayed?

All I know is

If nothing changes before I’m gone

I got no one else I can blame it on

And we been waiting way too long

What if we’re the ones that we’re waiting on

I might just have to be

What I never had for me

“Nobody’s Coming” by Andy Mineo

A New Life

On Easter this year, during one of the 3,000 services I worked, my pastor posed the following question: If Easter presents an opportunity for new life, how am I believing and trusting God for new life? What new thing does God want to do in your life? What does he want to resurrect?

As I think through that question now, amidst what I’m trying to express that God’s teaching me in this post, I believe that what God is working to resurrect in my life is the active pursuit of the career goals he’s called me to. The challenge, then, is to position my current life to be prepared for and to inch closer to who and where he’s expecting me to be in the next decade.

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. - Ephesians 2:10 NLT

I’m carrying the weight of a massive calling that I’m intentionally not being very specific about (though I know that that counters the purpose of this blog … being vulnerable), but if you, the one reading this, learn anything or hold onto anything from this post, I plead with you to understand and accept the fact that God considers you his masterpiece, and as a masterpiece in this world, he’s given you the ability to do great things; in fact, he’s pre-planned what those great things are, and he has purposed for you to do them. And if God is creator and king, he ought to have the authority in your life to command you — to place expectations on you.

Many people have told me through the years that I should write a book, and my response has always jokingly but seriously been, “I’ll write a book once people find me worth listening to!” Whenever that day comes, I hope to become known for several sayings that have been grounding for me throughout my life, one of which being, “There are people at the other end of your calling.” 

When I was in college studying theology, one of my professors who was also a pastor and easily one of the most disciplined people I’ve ever met was asked what pushed him to become the committed and disciplined person he is today. His answer was that at one point, he’d realized that there will one day be people under his leadership who depend on his service, and while he may not be expected to know everything, they will need him, as a pastor, to have answers. He told all of us aspiring pastors, if that doesn’t motivate you to lead a disciplined life, to develop healthy spiritual rhythms, and to study and know God’s word, then you’re in the wrong field.

Similarly, I now say this to people all the time, even to those who do not want to have a career in ministry because I find it to be true regardless — God has planned good things for each of us to spend a lifetime doing, and there are people at the other end of our calling. However, I’m now needing to repeat my own words to myself.

I haven’t been consistent in my Bible reading; I’ve allowed the aforementioned disturbance, my ailments, and frankly, bad habits, to get in the way of how God expects me to utilize my time for his glory; and I haven’t labored unwaveringly in my commitment to serve God’s church beyond what I get paid to do.

That last one might sound a bit excessive to you, but I want to serve God’s church as a career because I diligently serve his church as a lifestyle. That’s the way it started, and that’s why I have a job right now. I labored and gave dozens of hours per week volunteering for God’s church decades before being asked to make it my job. But that’s not the way it’s currently going. Currently, I serve God’s church diligently as a career, but I let myself off the hook whenever I fail to serve his church with my life. And that’s not okay.

While ministry afforded Jesus the lifestyle he lived during his three years in full time ministry, his ministry went far beyond his “career.” (I know Jesus did not live in a modern westernized world, but hopefully you get the idea.) Jesus was already “clocked out” and exhausted after a full day’s work in ministry, after not having eaten all day, and after the discovery of his loved one being brutally murdered when several thousand people showed up to hear from him. Scripture says, “When He saw the crowds, He felt compassion for them, because they were weary and worn out, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36 HCSB). The ministry didn’t stop because it wasn’t just a job; it was a lifestyle. 

Your Dumbest Hour

Now, let’s get practical. As a writer, I realize that typically, the most articulate, eloquent phrases are what people find themselves enamored by, similar to how we are allured by a person’s beauty and how they make us feel; however, over time, you find out that it’s actually the mundane, the practical, the aspects that aren’t so fun that end up being the most pivotal. When you’re in year five of a committed relationship and, say, three kids deep and tragedy strikes your home, you’re not going to care how funny this person is or how many fuzzy feelings they give you. When life gets real and you’re no longer blinded by foolishness, you’ll want consistency, you’ll want stability, you’ll want reliability, you’ll want presence.

This section is that. It may not be cute and eloquent, it may not be the beautiful girl with the nice figure, and it may not be the smooth-talking guy who gives you butterflies and always makes you laugh, but it’s a realization that I believe will take me into the next decade well. It’s what actually matters.

How long will you stay in bed, you slacker? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the arms to rest, and your poverty will come like a robber, your need, like a bandit. - Proverbs 6:9-11 CSB

I’m reading through Proverbs with a men’s group I’m a part of, and this idea really challenged me … the reality of just a little sleep and just a little slumber … just a little bit of you letting yourself off the hook and saying, “It’s okay,” “I still have time,” “I’m still young,” “I’ll get to it later,” “I’ll figure it out eventually,” “Maybe someday,” will ultimately lead to poverty coming upon you like a robber — you sitting in a life that feels like a prison that you somehow happened upon overnight.

A leader that I highly respect, named Craig Groeschel, says that successful leaders don’t hit snooze. It’s easy to overlook a single snooze of an alarm, a momentary reprioritization of your morning, before time slips away from you and you’ve suddenly lost control of your day and you’re no longer proactively in control but a slave reacting to whatever the wind blows across your calendar for the next 24 hours.

I’m not really a snoozer, and you might think I’m weird, but I actually hate sleep. But I hope I’m painting this picture well enough for you to realize that this sharp language in Proverbs goes far beyond a person’s sleep schedule; it’s actually the insidious habit of letting yourself off the hook in the small things, and that’s where folly awaits.

To be a bit raw, every morning, without fail, I’m conflicted by the collision of my hopes and dreams; both my work and personal responsibilities; the immense loneliness of having lost the one woman in my life who ever cared enough to make me a central point in her life before I could ever be blessed with another; and the hollowness of a worn out, dopamine-starved ADHD brain and a depressed disposition.

This is the state I find myself in at the hour most Christians would say we should be devoting ourselves to God in an effort to set up our day well. And as a Christian who has valued discipline for a good while now, who finds time spent with God and his word to be imperative, I can’t shake the question, “Why would I give God my dumbest hour?” Why would any of us aim to give God our dumbest hour hoping to somehow be shaped by the time we’re least cognizant; most vulnerable to folly; and, in my case, neurobiologically the weakest?

As I approach thirty, I’m coming to terms with the fact that wisdom is not learning to white-knuckle my way into discipline and holiness through sheer willpower and some deeper level of prayer that somehow self-actualizes me through some form of mystic permeation. Instead, I believe wisdom is far more calculated. In the words of James Clear, author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, it is learning to make good habits easy and bad habits difficult — controlling tensions in a way that, through micro changes, molds you over time into the person God’s created you to be.

True devotion, then, doesn’t always look like sitting in silence with a Bible in front of you at 6 a.m. Sometimes, it looks like setting up a rigid, almost ridiculous system — forcing myself to scan codes just to turn off alarms, and fleeing the isolation of my apartment for a coffee shop. I am learning to control my environment and fiercely defend my schedule so that when I do open God’s word, I am fully awake, alert, distraction-free, and ready to actually engage with a powerful God who can use my “best hour” to mold me into who he desires for me to become.

Proverbs 9:13-18 CSB

Proverbs 9:3b-6 CSB

Folly is a rowdy woman; she is gullible and knows nothing.She sits by the doorway of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city,calling to those who pass by, who go straight ahead on their paths:“Whoever is inexperienced, enter here!” To the one who lacks sense, she says,“Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten secretly is tasty!”But he doesn’t know that the departed spirits are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.

(Wisdom) calls out from the highest points of the city:“Whoever is inexperienced, enter here!” To the one who lacks sense, she says, “Come, eat my bread, and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave inexperience behind, and you will live; pursue the way of understanding.

Both wisdom and folly are calling out to me — they do so every morning. One promises life, and one promises momentary gratification. But I’m choosing to no longer let myself off the hook. To not get through another day without having that one thing done that will make me proudly say I’ve taken one step closer to my goals. I’m choosing to end each day with life rather than what feels good or rather than what might be a little less difficult.

Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live! - Deuteronomy 30:19 NLT

It was on a day like no other

Seeking your face when I discovered

My life was no longer my own, but yours

Then I heard you say, “Go and tell them

To open your heart, let me in

And I will supply your every need.”

Then I cried, “Lord, I don’t know if I can do it.”

“You will find your strength in me. Only believe.”

Then I said, “What if I fail? I just couldn’t take it”

“I have given you my ability.”

For the sake of the call

I am laying down my all

No turning back

Moving straight ahead

I’m on the right track

And it’s all for the sake of the call

Sister, let me encourage your heart

Brother, leave doubt behind, stay your part

Know that he’s with you, yes, he’s there all the time

You may feel like you can’t go on any longer

Though you are weak, remember he’s stronger

Through him you can do most anything

You might cry, “Lord I don’t know if I can do it”

You will find your strength in him only believe

You might say, “What if I fail? I just couldn’t take it.”

He has given you the ability

For the sake of the call

Will you lay down your all?

No turning back

Moving straight ahead

Stay on the right track

And risk all for the sake of the call

Daily I press toward the mark for the prize

Of the high calling of God in Jesus our Lord

“The Call” by Anointed

In Conclusion: My Conviction

Ok, I know this post is already long, but this part means the world to me. So, I hope that you bear with me for just two more sections.

My mother loved this song, and I never asked why, but I think it’s because these lyrics were dear to her heart. She was not a perfect woman, but she sought, with every fiber of her being, to live a life that expressed God’s love for humanity in every space he entrusted her to be in.

Some time ago, I was being led in worship, and I found myself distracted by a million technicalities. Though I’m not some crazy talented virtuoso (and frankly, there are people with zero training who can out-sing or outplay me), I’m a musician and producer with a very strict gospel upbringing. And as such, every missed harmony, every example of poor vocal placement, every subpar blend, and so on distracted me deeply. As an audio engineer, every imbalance in the mix, every time the instrumentation overwhelmed the vocals, every odd-sounding EQ … distracted me deeply.

Now, obviously, this is a problem. But it’s a problem that reveals two truths, and the church tends to stop shy of the second.

First Truth

The first is that worshipping God is a choice, and in that choice, you must decide to engage with God and block out all the outside noise.

I don’t disagree with this. But the problem with this truth is that it counters the actual definition of ministry. You can find plenty of definitions, but the consistency in just about all of them is the word serve or service. It’s everywhere. Serve. Serve. Serve. And it’s not particularly service-oriented, and it doesn’t serve the people we aim to minister to well when we add expectations to an already potentially burdened people.

To ask the person we claim to be ministering to, then, to ignore every imperfection of ours is incredibly pompous and, frankly, a lackadaisical expression of worship.

Second Truth

So that leads me to the second truth: The job of a minister, in whatever field of ministry, is to craft a hospitable space that both welcomes and compels people to come in … a space that makes people eager to join and convinced of whatever truths we preach.

I think of a story Jesus told in which he compared the kingdom of heaven to a man preparing a large banquet.

In the story, the man sent his servant to inform everyone who was invited that everything was ready. And every person invited made excuses as to why they couldn’t come.

The master angrily instructed his servant to go into the city and extend the invite to more people. After the servant did this, he reported that there’s still more room. Determined to fill his banquet, the master says (and pay attention because this is the point I’m trying to make):

“Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled” (Luke 14:23 ESV). Another translation says, “Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full” (NLT). And another, “Go out into the highways and hedges and make them come in, so that my house may be filled” (CSB).

Listen to the strong language used here: urge them, make them, compel them to come in! If THIS is what the kingdom of God is like, and we recognize that God, our master, is preparing a large banquet, that we are his servants, and that he wants us to fill his house, then every time we minister, we OUGHT to make EVERY detail and EVERY nuance of our ministry — our service — compelling, and that requires us to stop doing lazy ministry.

Dictionary.com defines lazy as “tending to avoid work, activity, or exertion.” Lazy is stopping anywhere shy of what’s possible.

My Soapbox

I must admit, that I’ve been on a massive soapbox lately: this is not particular to any one organization, and I’m not trying to blast any organization that I am proudly a part of; however, I believe the global Christian church has consistently become outpaced by the secular world because we do lazy ministry, we make excuses, we act as if the work we do should not require that much, and the secular world is consistently far more successful at reaching and impacting people, in part, because they do not make these cop out excuses; in fact, they care enough to make every minute detail matter.

Success Is in the Details

I love studying successful people who have managed to obtain noteworthy influence in their career-field, and Chef Gordon Ramsay has been one of those people for a very long time. So, naturally, when he released his docu-series, Being Gordon Ramsay, in which he detailed aspects of his family and personal life amidst launching a self-funded $27 million collection of restaurants atop London’s tallest highrise, I had to see it.

In one of the scenes, Gordon is doing a tasting led by the executive head chef he’d hired to run one of the upcoming restaurants. And while he’d concluded their conversation with how well he’d done, the tasting itself was full of harsh critique and challenge with one of his statements during the interview portion being, “My feedback gets firmer when I see them dropping beneath the line — when I know there’s more to come. And I’ll recognize what’s in their tank before they know how far they can go. … Unless it blows me away, I’m not going to entertain it.”

If you watch any of his shows, you can tell he means this. In his effort to create the greatest restaurant concepts possible and the greatest guest-experiences possible with absolute consistency, and in his effort to compete with and even surpass some of the greatest restaurants in the world, he made every minute detail matter down to the color of the napkins. 

What’s been eating me alive lately, then, is that the church would claim that we have the greatest mission known to man. We have the greatest God. We have the greatest conviction to reach a world that is absolutely dying without our message. However, we don’t care about the color of the napkins — in fact, there are mounds and mounds of small things that we don’t care about making matter, then we wonder why we’re ineffective and why our message can’t compete with the world (and we even have the nerve to blame it on God’s will). 

Another saying of mine that will eventually go in that aforementioned book: “Success is in the details.”

Gordon Ramsay understood this when he went through every detail of the food, decor, and operations of his restaurants with a fine-tooth comb. Walt Disney understood this when he built “the happiest place on Earth” and made every effort to block out all sights of Anaheim from the inside of the park because people don’t come to Disneyland to see Anaheim; they come to escape to a fictional world. Elon Musk understood this when Tesla finally went to market, and he said, such a new product can’t be slightly better than the competition; it has to be significantly better; otherwise, people won’t find it worth buying. Steve Jobs understood this when he released the iPhone — a piece of tech that would eventually become subpar when compared to the technical abilities of every other high-end phone brand but would maximize user experience to such a high degree that people would sell their souls to the brand and spend over $1,000 on that outpaced, unoriginal piece of tech every time a new release comes out. Your favorite singer or producer understands this when they labor through the details of their performance, asking a BGV to sing one note differently or to emote differently or to add a harmony or to get their pitch together or to communicate to the crowd or to focus on stage presence….

Here’s the thing, when we allow mediocrity to exist in our churches — better yet, when we entertain things that do not blow us away, we spit in the face of our message, and we scoff at Jesus’s command to compel the world to come into his kingdom because we’ve presented nothing compelling for them to come into. 

My divine burden is to utilize every ounce of giftedness and passion I have to see overlooked people come to know, love, and serve God with absolutely all they’ve got, using, primarily, the giftings and callings God’s given them. Our lack of effort to make this happen negatively influences the world, and that’s why it pisses me off so much. That’s why I hold this gripe with the church … because my heart is broken as I continue to see uncompelling packaging make us less and less effective in our mission.

One Final Pivot (For Real, This Is the Actual End)

Now, here’s the apex of this long post. I’ve had tons of conversations with my therapist about this heavy frustration of mine with the church and its comfortability with mediocrity, lazy ministry, and a refusal to do the hard work of going the extra mile, and during one of our sessions, she said something that really presented this entire issue in a new light.

If success is in the details, then success is actually a culmination of all the small things. So if an organization, or a person for that matter, struggles to be impactful, it usually boils down to a number of small things they’re missing.

Remember when I mentioned the challenge in Proverbs to not let myself off the hook? Well, as I sat there listening to my therapist challenge me and ask very thought-provoking questions, I realized something: I AM that organization … that person. Everything that’s frustrating me about the church is a direct reflection of myself. All of the big blocks are in order (I do ministry fairly well, and my faith is strong), but I am consistently letting myself off the hook when it comes to the small things in my personal daily walk, and these things, though small, will be the very seeds that sprout into full grown weeds that tear down the entire garden I’ve spent my life building unless I stop letting myself off the hook, stop entertaining the things that don’t “blow me away,” and realize that I cannot enter my thirties a new man committed to this conviction to become all I’ve been created to become while allowing small seeds to run rampant. 

This does not negate the validity of my frustration with the church I’ve given my life to serve; however, I now realize that my challenge to God’s church must start with a challenge to myself to honor this massive calling to fill God’s house by developing a relentless, unwavering commitment — not just devotion, but an UNDISTRACTED devotion — to excel in every small thing in such a way that serves the people I’m called to minister to well so they will be compelled to join this beautiful, life-changing banquet.

It really sucks to say that life has gone on following my mother’s passing, but I’ve realized that to be true quite some time ago. And it sucks to say that I feel wounded and limited without a partner, but it’s time I stop allowing those limits to taint my devotion to God and my calling as I let myself off the hook over and over again. At some point, I have to make the small things matter and stop doing lazy ministry with my life.

It’s difficult to write this, but the pain is teaching me. As I revisit that hospital room in my mind (the place where this post began), I realize that it symbolized, for both my mother and me, a place of transition. For mom, it’s where everything quickly began to crumble. It’s the place where she initially began to lose her life. After leaving that hospital room, she was never the same. But as sad as that is, and as much as it traumatizes me to remember, it was also the place where she began to transition into new life. For her, that was heaven — the most glorious transition anyone could ever hope for.

The question I’m now asking myself is: What if that hospital room was supposed to mean the exact same thing for me? Transition. The place where I was meant to begin the process of dying — dying to the man I was. And what if it was also the place that was meant to transition me into new life? A new life that enables me to become who I was always meant to become, to do the good things God’s always meant for me to do, to push beyond all disturbances and friction by pursuing wisdom in my dumbest hour, and to allow my hatred for lazy ministry to reveal a deep hatred for a lazy life that lets me off the hook?