ministry

Opti­cal illu­sions are some­times fun. The pic­ture with a thou­sand dots that at first seem to form noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar until you stare through the pic­ture and not at it, or per­haps at a par­tic­u­lar point on the pic­ture. Your eyes glaze over, and then anoth­er image is evi­dent, one you did not read­i­ly see before but now can­not seem to shake. Visu­al phe­nom­e­na that oppos­es real­i­­ty- or from anoth­er point of view- con­firms it, the orig­i­nal image just a holo­gram, a kind of false real­i­ty that con­ceals what’s real­ly there. My vision dur­ing the first half of my life thus far was like glanc­ing at an orig­i­nal image, an array of mean­ing­less shapes or dots, bla­tant pro­files of faces, stair­cas­es that very sim­ply led to anoth­er floor, or con­cen­tric cir­cles that were no more than just that. What was pre­sent­ed to me, what I saw, was tak­en as truth and my actions and reac­tions sprung from this truth I swal­lowed whole. In mag­ic, an illu­sion­ist rarely divulges his secret. But in the times that he does, a trick that seemed before so com­plex, so enchant­i­ng, becomes sim­ple and much less thrilling. When we learn what we were miss­ing before, we now see in a sec­ond per­for­mance very clear­ly. “How could I have missed that? It is very well evi­dent. The rab­bit was in the hat before the trick began, the hid­den door is in the floor, and I was much too focused on his right hand when it was his left hand that was deceiv­ing me.” I entered col­lege with a sol­id plan for my life that quick­ly went awry halfway through my senior year when I found myself, and it was very much as if I had wok­en up one morn­ing and stum­bled upon myself, preg­nant. Still some time lat­er, I got what I believed was my dream job and my life should have been set up the way I want­ed it. But some­thing was miss­ing. Some­thing was always miss­ing. “Maybe if I had a bet­ter job…” I’d say to myself until 3 jobs lat­er I ran out of things I want­ed to be. “What is it you real­ly want to do?” I could say this was a ques­tion pro­posed by a men­tor or a friend but real­ly it was me ques­tion­ing myself in the late night hours when I tried my hard­est to visu­al­ize my path to hap­pi­ness. “Write books. Maybe teach cre­ative writ­ing.”  “But what do you want to do that’s prac­ti­cal?” the ques­tion­ing con­tin­ued. “Umm… Noth­ing.” And it was true. Noth­ing else seemed to suf­fice. It all just seemed so point­less and I found myself sid­ing with the writer of Eccle­si­astes count­ing it all fol­ly. Tru­ly I enjoy help­ing peo­ple but even if I could cure can­cer, what’s all the years of work and research for if the patient will die any­way, a few years or decades lat­er. I could make a mil­lion dol­lars but still the rich man meets his grave just like the poor one. Knowl­edge of the stock mar­ket, writ­ing self help books, mak­ing a liv­ing in edu­ca­tion. It all brought me back to a sin­gle ques­tion. Is this all there is? Have I glimpsed all of my options? Do I real­ly live in a “what you see is what you get” kind of world? Did the infi­nite God, the one who cre­at­ed heav­en and earth stop here and go no fur­ther? Am I sen­tenced to this kind of an exis­tence for the rest of my days? I was­n’t sad. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly depressed but sim­ply unmoved. Life had become a has­sle. I’d sit in church and lis­ten to the saints thank God for anoth­er day above ground when I was­n’t sure what the big deal was. Being under­ground seemed much…easier. If we were all REALLY Chris­tians, and we all REALLY believed the Bible and its claims about heav­en, why is it that we pre­fer to be here than there? Sure­ly I was miss­ing some­thing; I just did­n’t know what it was. It was the opti­cal illu­sion before the reveal. I was look­ing at life…and not through it. God admon­ish­es us to keep our minds and hearts cen­tered on Him. Look at me, he says. Focus every­thing in you on me, and then you will be able to see quite clear­ly every­thing else. In an inti­mate con­ver­sa­tion one night, I lament­ed to a dear friend that I had become dis­il­lu­sioned with life. I need­ed more mon­ey, or more excite­ment, or more… some­thing. He said calm­ly, “God is all you need.” I said, “That’s not enough,” through tear stained cheeks. He said, “Then you need more God.” And at the moment, I did­n’t know what that meant, but in the months after, it stayed with me. You need more God. If God was real­ly the answer to my feel­ings of bore­dom, then I need­ed to talk with him and find out what in the world I was sup­posed to be doing with my life. I did­n’t want sim­ply anoth­er prayer lying on my back in the moments before I drift­ed off to sleep. This con­ver­sa­tion required a face to face meet­ing. In a board room behind closed doors. I ate God for break­fast, lunch, and din­ner. I learned to find delight in sit­ting still with him, in the hours after the chil­dren were in bed. I peti­tioned him for more of his time. I need­ed God to put me on his cal­en­dar. When he did, which I imag­ined took some time because he only takes these kinds of meet­ings from those tru­ly about his busi­ness, he direct­ed me to The Great Com­mis­sion in the lat­ter vers­es of Matthew 28, and the same in Mark 16, Luke 24, and again in John 21. Four times, God had iden­ti­fied my pur­pose as a dis­ci­ple of Christ. The gospel is a mys­tery but this part was no puz­zle, not a series of hid­den sen­tences writ­ten in small print at the bot­tom of a mag­a­zine ad. He says loud and clear, “Fol­low me, and make dis­ci­ples of all