Redemption's Quest

Redemption's Quest:

          Every story has a beginning and an end. As a youngster my religious understanding was one of wanting to know who this God was anyway. I would lay up in bed trying to figure out what was before God. There had to be something or someone. It was a very private and introspective place where I was the only one in attendance. I sought answers through children’s books and television shows like Davey and Goliath. I was determined to figure out what this was all about without even knowing why. My life depended on it. After all there were so many songs about Jesus loving me and God's love for the world. If I could figure it out maybe I could use the knowledge to feel better about me and the world that was forever growing.
          Church did not have important role until I was in my teens. Up until that time it was a place my parents sent me to learn the difference between right and wrong. I was Christened in a Protestant church and wondered why church was there. I listened to the bible stories in hopes that maybe I could belong with these happy people who liked to sing and shake hands. At the same I hated the white bucks and dressing up in clothes that would only get dirty once I went outside to play. Church was a scary kind of place. If you messed up you got in a whole lot of trouble you were headed for hell. Who want to know that kind of God?
          My relationship with my parents taught me a lot about what to expect from God. Mom was always talking about how we needed to go to church. Dad did not seem nearly as interested. He would just as soon stay home and peel potatoes. Mom kept telling us that she loved the burgeoning flock that would swell to eight children. I hated when she yelled. I would rather be good than be subjected to that yelling. Dad was forever at work. When home it seemed like we either got prizes for being good or a whipping if we were bad.

          As I was approaching adolescence I was deciding Church had its limits. With so many of my siblings coming and various family crises much of the time church was put on the back burner. In its place were the religious television shows like Rex Humbard, Billy Graham and Oral Roberts. They were forever telling me to pray to let Jesus into my life. I kept doing this and nothing seem to happen. So I went about my business trying to figure out what this God business was all about. I memorized bible verses and sang songs in children's choir. One of my favorites was about Jacob's ladder. The only thing for sure was that I did not want to go to hell, a place where bad people went.
          My understanding of who I was in relationship to God changed when I got lost out in the woods as I searched for the family well in the mountains of New Hampshire. I was about twelve at the time and had a couple friends with me. Eventually these friends would leave me when they could see how lost I was. I found myself screaming for my mom and then my dad. There was no answer. I then called out to God. I grew quiet and found myself heading in the opposite direction that I had been headed. I heard cars and tractors in the distance. I had once been lost and now was found.
          My thinking about God gravitated between trying to understand the God of church and wondering if there was a God bigger than that. A lot of my friends were Catholics and I found out people went to different churches than I did and some did not go at all. One of my early memory verses was about how God so loved the world. That has been a favorite verse even to this day. How big is the World God loved? For that matter how big was God in relationship to the story of redemption in other people’s lives. I would much rather believe in a God that does not wish that any perish. One of my favorite movies that illustrates this is Star Wars the last part of the trilogy, where Darth Vader is revealed to be Luke’s father. I am of the opinion that anyone can be saved by God with relationships the key to sorting out what this means.

          I found myself wondering what God wanted me to do with my knowledge of what I was discovering salvation to be. I did not have a clue when I began asking the question. Then in my freshman year of high school, I heard someone share about how they were going to be a pastor. I felt deep inside that I wanted that same experience for myself. I began a time of praying to God on a consistent basis, mainly the "Lord's Prayer" and "Now I Lay me Down to Sleep". Over time Prayer has meant words that dance; God being the lead dancer. They were the only prayers I knew at the time and they saw me through any number of family and personal crises. Maybe there was a God out there. I was more determined than ever to find out and began a personal search for what I believed in my junior year of High school.
          I did research about whether God existed; using words from Thomas Aquinas and various scientists who were asking the same question. I determined that God worked and that I wanted to work with God. Not long after that I became a Christian, which meant that I was ready to serve. I no longer wanted to be hidden, which had been my tendency up until that day. My journey to see God at work had been a lonely one. I am indebted to various deacons like Charles Tabeek, Warren Corliss and Jesse Brown, the Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Whitman. They did not give up on me when I felt like giving up on myself. I saw church as a family and I longed to be the good son. I might have messed up in my family. I was determined to not let it happen in my church life.
          This meant God was at work constantly having to rescue me and in response to this I was constantly trying to rescue/fix others. I learned over a considerable time that trying to rescue other lead me to be either persecuted or in some way victimized. This is an ongoing struggle. How do I help others help themselves without getting in the way? I long for more dialogue on this question. The biblical story of David illustrates this for me. He is allowed to mess up and God still sees a man after God’s own heart. My ongoing struggle to help my brother Kurt who has the illness of Paranoid Schizophrenia has dogged me. I long to let him go to be who God created him to be and yet fear that if I do not help him be more “human”, the disease that happened to him might happen in some form in me or the one’s I love. My relationship with Kurt has helped define who I want to be as a minister-someone who works with God to redeem others who for one reason or another do not know how to redeem themselves. God sees in others what they do not necessarily see in themselves.
          My experiences in serving various churches, in hospital ministry and presently in hospice; share about my passion to see the “Word” of God in the flesh. Books by Mike Mason, “Practicing the Presence of People” and others like it have helped me sort this out. I see myself as tending to be codependent and a loner and at the same time am willing to risk seeing that there is more to me than that. While at Eldred, a rural church, I learned that seminary training was no guarantee of being respected as a pastor. I discovered in visitation ministry an antidote to high expectations of parishioners to Wow others into coming into church with my sermons. Church identity moved into an understanding of what it meant to be a part of the body of Christ. Eventually the same people I came to rescue let me go.
          Moline was my opportunity to redeem myself. I did okay for the first three years. I enjoyed visiting with people who seemed to be on the outside looking in. During my time there I enjoyed my time with a group of ministers looking a Jungian understanding in Christian perception using a writing tool called “Center point”. My desire to help a troubled family was my undoing. I used the word “bitch” in a sermon to describe how not to treat fellow Christians. I was excommunicated from ever speaking from that Church pulpit and ostracized, sentenced to Career Assessment by my denomination to determine for myself whether I would ever minister again.
          I would pastor as a resident in various hospitals, which climaxed into a supervisor in training position at Osawatomie State Hospital. In my own mind I saw my time there as opportunity to learn how to share with pastors how to work with mentally ill, having been mentally ill myself at one time. I underestimated the toll of my over inflated expectation. I wanted to be a supervisor and hoped God had similar opinions. I flunked committee and got the message to give up whatever aspirations that I had of supervisory bliss. My greatest lesson from all this was that I could not help others until I helped myself. I got back on medicines that I had shirked in hopes that not taking them would make me well. After all I was told by a doctor’s panel that I did not need the meds. Maybe I was no closer to being a chaplain. At the same time doctors were no longer seen as my saviors. With the help of therapists and other caring persons I would have to sort this one out for myself. I feel forever indebted to persons like Carol Nash, Frank Brown, Ed Outlaw and other supervisors who aided me in developing an understanding of a caring presence. That was for sure the only thing I longed to unpackage. My Dad had shared in various crises I had what it meant to be a caring presence and now I wanted to understand what this meant for me.
          Ruby Avenue Baptist Church was my Camelot. I was there for ten years and the experience could not have come at a better time. I could imagine Dorothy with the ruby slippers clicking them and saying there was no place like home. The experience that informed my call to Ruby was my own experience of having been adopted by the church when I was a youth. There were burgeoning numbers of children around the church. I was convinced that if God could redeem me, it could happen for others. I went with the youth to Jamborees, church camp and was always looking for new ways to make church fun, to share with them a healthy image of God. God worked with me and scads of other persons through a music and arts program, tutoring program, bus ministry, recreational opportunity and whatever else could attract youth and families to connect with God. What I like most was that faith was the vehicle that kept me going on a daily basis. I was learning to trust that people in my own church; people like Erma Jones and Ruth Henness and numerous people from other churches; people like the Cooks and Darrows could give feet to the prayers and financial support of others. It was a time of networking with many other churches and using various trips to Green Lake, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington DC to work with others in understanding how God was at work in the various ministries represented.
          Over time people in the main church pillars got worn out and it was decided by them to close the doors. It was a painful time for all. In the midst Cindy and I divorced, many family members were dying, including my faithful dog Conner. I was faced with how God could work in a mess that raging out of control. I went through what I describe as a time of exile. I was a minister in a secular work place for what has been over ten years. I continue to learn that God is a lot bigger than dreams and aspirations to be a good Christian pastor. From that perspective I felt like a total failure. I needed to pay child support and wanted to be close to my kids, so that God at work needed to take on new meaning. It did not take long to discover that being a worker to pay bills was not necessarily filled with pastoral opportunities. I determined to be a good person (worker) and help others to become the best persons they could be. God was at work through relationships and I needed to decide which relationships might lead to mutual respect and blessing. My latest venture with a coworker illustrates the point to some degree. He was a dyed in the wool atheist ever since he was eight years old and added the subtitle Satanist to stir me up further. I reflected with him on reasons not to believe in God and after gaining trust shared my own reasons for being a minister. We respected each other and were glad we could get through a long shift, without a need to prove that either of us was right or wrong. With this being said, I am a work in progress. I believe that the bible is the word of God and at the same time am convinced that if it cannot be used in to share God’s love, it has failed to represent God at God’s best.

          With this in mind I find myself sorting out what my legacy will be. How will I be remembered? If my quest to know salvation is one of learning to be justified; my work focus looked at as sanctification; my work of legacy is my attempt to understand what it means that one is glorified. This issue has been sorted out in my evolving sense of what it means to be a part of a family. I celebrate that I have been married twice. I have three children by my first marriage and have experienced family in myriad persons in church and outside the church. I look at the issue of legacy in relation to the ongoing church rite of communion. At communion we often see inscribed “This do in Remembrance of Me”. To be part of family is to be a part of this “re-membering” process.
          This conceptualization came to me after doing a funeral on a beloved member of a community who died before I could serve him communion. The opposite of remembering is forgetting. It is remembering that we learn the essence of learning what it means to forgive. My legacy arises out of my passion to have an attitude of determining to give as opposed to get, which is the difference between forgiving and forgetting. I am learning to be ever thankful each and every day for each breath I take and hope to inspire others to love as God loved them. My life is a quest to understand what it means to love and as Romans says how it is that nothing can separate from the love of God in Jesus Christ. My vision of legacy is to enter with others into the mystery of redemption’s story. As it is said in movies like “Places in the Heart” and “the Hiding Place” God’s love grows greater with every day.