My Calling

I mentioned an experience in passing on a recent Sunday and realized that many don’t know that story. So, humor this longer blog; perhaps something will also resonate with you. But this is my story.

I was about to start high school when something overwhelming began to happen in my heart. Already, I had developed a deep sense of personal shame. I will not detail my mistakes, but suffice it to say that I had a reason for that shame. I had known the Gospel as well as any 9-year-old could, but I had virtually no tools for understanding what Jesus wanted to do in my life. But that summer, I was invited to participate in a Friday night gathering where I learned from older students how to pray. It was significant, but more significant was what it ignited in my soul.

I moved just a few months later to a small town in North Texas and made an intense, fresh commitment to Christ. All through high school, that relationship with Jesus shaped everything. As I started my sophomore year of high school, I had a catastrophic knee injury that would sideline me from my sport and passion, and I was at a loss for what to do with myself. I was a musician, so I wrote a lot of music during those days of disappointment. But starting her teaching tenure at that school was a speech teacher who had been very successful with competitive arts. She was searching for students who would be willing to try these competitive events. That’s when I met that teacher, Sandra Harper.

Following that football season in which I was no longer a factor, Sandra Harper enlisted me to try competitive speaking. I began to place or win in tournaments, then won district, placed in regional, and competed in the state tournament in Austin. I would repeat that run for the final 3 years of high school. My small church knew me as a disciple, musician, and competitive speaker. It’s not surprising that the adults of that church began to ask about a calling to pastoring. (SIDE NOTE: NO 16-year-old male wants to hear about being called “Brother” anything!) That said, the questions began gnawing at my heart. But so did my own faith questions, and my pastor was condemnatory about questions. So, by the time I left for college, I was secretly angry.

Into my life walked a roommate who wasn’t intimidated by my questions. At the same time, I met two ministry leaders who were very healthy people and who possessed healthy ministry attitudes. These three were medicine for my mind and my soul. As much as I was running from what was becoming a “call,” God’s Spirit was actively creating a burden of the best sort. Again, my phase of life kept that at bay, but I knew what was coming. I embraced it, albeit with plenty of immaturity that would allow several of my peers to raise questions about its validity. One such peer confronted me so forcefully that I finally came to “the end of myself.” It was overpowering but so very needed! I was all in from that point on, convinced that God had whispered the calling on my life that I would no longer be able to deny.

During my 2nd year of seminary, I was working a graveyard shift job, living so simply that groceries were a challenge, and I was engaged to my wife, driving every weekend to see her and my sister in Waco. Sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, and too much pride all came together one day while I was out on a job. I had finally shifted to a day job, but I was noticing something very troubling: my speech was deteriorating. I was stuttering and having word blocks. I was tongue-tied when I tried to speak, and it TERRIFIED me. I delivered industrial chemicals to an old horse meat processing plant in Fort Worth on my new day job. I saw a trailer full of horses back up to the “entry” on one side of the building, and I could see a conveyor belt on the other side of the building where bare carcasses were being ejected into a waiting trailer. At that moment, I broke.

“That’s what my gifts are like! I came into this calling with speaking skills, but I feel like they have been stripped to the bone, and I can’t string three sentences together anymore!” I sat in that delivery truck with grief, fear, and confusion. I didn’t understand it then, but I am GRATEFUL for it now.

Paul once wrote that God had given him a “thorn in his flesh” to keep him from being arrogant. He begged God to remove it. I followed suit in my own struggle. God said to Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul didn’t want to be weak initially. I certainly didn’t want that for myself. And I felt abandoned in my deteriorating gifts. Ironically, very few people in my world were aware of that. For me, it was constantly in my face, so, those years focused on using music as my outlet. Kelly and I sang together frequently, and in each church we served we leaned into those gifts and we started our marriage in those roles.

But the gnawing calling on my life was different from that. The Lord brought an energetic young pastor into my life, and his encouragement began to heal my heart. Over the next few years, that healing led me to a collegiate job where I would preach and teach weekly, where few, if any, of the people I served knew of that struggle. Since those days, I have pastored two churches, and few have been aware of my “affected” speech. But I am aware. Every Sunday. And it did for me what Paul’s thorn did for him.

The opportunity to preach and teach is a privilege of grace. Someone asked, “Do you get nervous?” My answer surprised him. “Every time. There’s this moment when I’m walking up the steps after a prayer, and a bumper is playing to set the tone for what’s coming, and I frequently say, “Lord, I hope I remember how to do this. Help me, please.” When I go back to review the streamed service, I can still hear it–the misshapen consonants and vowels, the blocks on words, the “covering” for missteps. Gracefully, few in the congregation hear it. But something has happened in my heart because of that experience: what I once considered a curse, I now count as a blessing. It has made me more dependent and more aware that pastoring was never MY idea or dream. It was God’s call on my life. The gift is not mine; it’s His, and I am just a steward of it, holding the calling that was entrusted to me for reasons only HE knows.

Every time I get to stand before our church, I’m still a little bit amazed. “Why did you choose this for me?” I often ask that question. His answer is the same answer you could apply to Paul, Peter, Abraham, or the most famous speech-inhibited character of the Old Testament (Moses). “I was going to use SOMEBODY!”

Today it makes me chuckle. . . and so thankful.