Redemption Draweth Nigh

The New Year is always an interesting time to stop, reflect, and assess your life. I do not believe that the specific date is significant, but remembering to change the number at the end of the date is so memorable, that we recognize the changing of a season in our lives. Maybe it is Dick Clark (or one of the many Dick Clark clones), or maybe it is the giant lit orb transcending down a crowded New York shopping district; perhaps it is staying up past midnight and smooching your sweetie. For some reason, we emotionally honor the changing of the Roman calendar year. We cherish it. Every year, it is typically something like this, "Wow, last year was hard... but I am going to accomplish all the things I plan to in the New Year. This year will be different." The Jewish religion has a set of holy days that they honor called Yom Kippur. For them, Yom Kippur is a time to look inward, take inventory of your life, and then look outward to those in your life.

Whether the end of the year or some other holiday, reassessing our lives is critical. Marking the close of one season and the beginning of the next is essential to maintaining sanity. We have to lay down all our old "shoulds" and "oughts", catch our breath, decide that there is still something worth fighting for in life, and get up. We have to brush the dirt off our face, stop hiding in the bunker, and force ourselves to take ground again. I know for many, it is much easier to stay hidden under the passage of time, watching the years pass, and cursing the wasted opportunities. Somewhere along the way, hope was sacrificed at the hands of unmet expectations. It was easier to let it die than believe that life could be better, different.... redeemable.

For years now, I have counseled friends, as they walked through personal destruction and pain, that they cannot sacrifice their hope. Rather, the only safe option is to place one's life in the hands of God, trusting that He alone can redeem it. There is no loss so great that redemption is no longer a possibility. There is nothing so broken that God cannot reform it into something more beautiful than its original state, if we will trust it to Him. We do not get to dictate the personal choices of others. Nor do we get to erase the consequences of destructive choices or return those long separated from our lives. However, the end of our individual stories is not yet written. There is always hope for redemption, for new life out of the ashes.

Having shared this repeatedly with others, I did not fully anticipate that my own words would be tested beyond what I had thought possible in my own life. As this year closes and I take inventory, my story is rewriting itself. What I share here I do not share to honor pain, glorify my struggles, or make myself look entirely innocent in my own story. Rather, I share it for those of you who let your own unmet expectations crucify your tender hope. I hope that you too, lay it all in the hands of God, and trust Him to author the story of your life. I pray that you take the pen out of the greasy hands of past pain and place your faith in the author of redemption to finish the story for you.

The past decade of my life went like this. Being a rather highly motivated firstborn child, I fought to succeed. My own natural abilities allowed me to rely heavily on myself for most of the progress in my life. In high school, during the summers I traveled around the globe working with orphanages, tribal villages, and inner-city communities. My associate's degree was pursued at a Bible School in Florida. The zeal fostered by the school only added to my performance predicament, and I left fully expecting to save a city for Jesus within a few years of graduating. Looking back, the innocence of my passion was beautiful, but my character has been tempered and tested in recent years. I wish I could combine my now wisdom with my then zeal.

Following Bible School, I married my high school girlfriend, fully believing that we would live as missionaries and grow old together. After a summer of working and saving, we moved to Kansas City to partner with an inner-city church-planting organization, that is an organization whose chief missional strategy is to create new churches in different communities. Together, we worked with this organization mentoring youth, leading worship services, preaching, teaching, helping with a food pantry, and hosting mission teams to the inner-city. During our time working with the organization, we accrued significant debt as we did not take a salary from the organization, but trusted in the donations of friends to pay the bills. At this point, we were forced to renegotiate our role within the organization, and take regular jobs during the week to pay the bills.

During the 5 years that we worked with the organization, it struggled with burning out its volunteers and support leadership. Point leadership was controlled by a single man. He was well-intentioned, intelligent, and possessed a charismatic charm. Although he was a gifted visionary, he struggled to build the organization. He could see what he wanted, but struggled to utilize his resources to establish something that would last. The answer to most issues within the organization was to recast the vision. If people were struggling and portions of the work were failing, it was assumed to be due to the lack of people embracing the vision. My experiences there taught me a great deal about the need for humility, accountability, and shared leadership within a church. Today the organization is still struggling to develop momentum and create something lasting. For what it is worth, there are a number of deeply precious people in the organization. It is not the quality of the people, rather how they are connected and how they attempt to accomplish their goals that has hindered them. For better or worse, this time was the greatest period of personal education in my life. Seeing efforts succeed, efforts fail, and the ups and downs of the lives of those I loved was deeply impactful and educational - albeit humbling and painful.

During this same period, my wife found a veritable feeding ground of broken people who "needed" her. Moving from one needy relationship to next, my marriage became a cohabitating friendship. From her perspective, my role was to alleviate the responsibilities of house maintenance, life management, and financial management while also meeting a specific list of emotional needs. Her expectations of me were great. When I failed to meet these expectations, she threw herself all the more into ministry, worship leading, and need-to-be-needed relationships. Due to her way of coping with disappointment, she appeared to those in our church to "buy-in" at a much greater level than I. She was applauded and praised for her sacrifices and time commitment to meeting the needs of others, all while I lived very much alone in the marriage.

After five years of marriage, with the support of the head leader, she chose to separate herself from me and move to Colorado. One of her newer influential friends, who had recently completed an extended separation and divorce, moved to Colorado with her. During the seven months of separation, I paid both sets of bills, attended weekly marriage counseling, and tried my best to lay some ground to rebuild a marriage. I was met with bitter judgment, accusation, and a list of demands greater than I could ever rationally or personally agree to. During this time the leadership of the organization supported her stand and demands, saying the failure in any marriage is always 100% the responsibility of the husband. I was told by the man who had been a father and a mentor to me, that if I did not take 100% responsibility for the breakdown in the relationship, that the death of the marriage would be my fault.

The separation and what it meant to me seemed to swallow my life. I spent about two hours a day weeping and praying. I stopped eating, sleeping, and felt very much on the verge of losing my mind. The organization I had given five years of my life to, turned their back on me. My previous mentor said to a faithful friend of mine that I was a hopeless case. Any attempt at communication with my estranged wife was met with threats of extended separation and divorce. I was given a list of required behaviors from her and told that if I complied with them for 6 months and did not attempt to speak to her, that she would attend a single marriage counseling session with me. I found myself instantly cut off from 95% off all the people who I would have wanted to depend on. My support came from my family in North Carolina and three friends in Kansas City (thank you... you know who you are). In the midst of this, my car was totaled, my back was injured, and I was laid off as a result of corporate restructuring within a single week. I will not linger on this any longer, but the only word I can use to describe this period in my life is devastation.

On a side note, one of the greatest moments of freedom for me came when I accepted that my wife and those who had been in my life had a right to make their own choices. I accepted that it was not my responsibility to try to convince them to make other choices or pursuade them to believe differently about me. I accepted that it was not my responsibility to defend myself or my reputation. This was tremendously freeing, as the battle to find some place of influence was one of the greatest sources of frustration and confusion.

Finally, I began to accept and release this experience and the choices of these people to God. I chose to forgive those who had betrayed me. I stood up, caught my breath, and laid my hope in His hands. It was my only way out of the confusion and pain. I could have spent a lifetime trying to alter the situation, rethinking what I could have done differently, and dwelling on my sense of injustice.

About 13 months ago today, I indirectly found out that my estranged wife had filed for divorce. I found this out through a friend of a friend. This announcement was met with one more email sent from the head leader of the organization implicating my fault and guilt in the situation. Despite my detailed confession of my failures to my estranged wife, my counselor, and over 20 other people, my financial support throughout this period, my regular attendance to marriage counseling, and my near constant effort to try to correct this situation... this was in his estimation, due to my lack of embracing responsibility rightly.

Around that time period, I began attending a church in the area with a consistent history in the community, began exercising and attending to my body, worked diligently to rediscover who I was, and decided to not give up on my life. I reassessed my life, allowed God to revive my hope, and chose to believe what I had counseled to several others - that redemption had to be my reality... my life could be redeemed.

I write today, roughly a year later, as a very different man. I am happily married to a marvelous woman. I do not know that I could properly express my joy and gratitude for the gift Sarah has been in my life. She is daily a source of support and friendship. While our relationship has not been without its own bumps and bruises, our conflict resolutions skills and commitment to voluntarily and mutually contribute to the relationship has been admirable. I am deeply proud to call her my wife and friend.

From a physical perspective, I have lost just at 80 pounds. I weigh less than I did in high school. I went from wearing size 40 pants and a XXL to wearing size 34 pants and a medium shirt. While this may not seem emotionally significant, for me this was an area that I had given up hope in changing. I believed it was futile to try to change my body, as my many attempts to diet bore only spurious results. It was an outward sign of an inward change for me. While, I may not look like a model, I feel a great deal of joy in my transformation. For those of you wondering how this was accomplished: I ate right, ate less, and exercised several times a week ...the stuff that we all hate to do.

From an occupational perspective, I have received two promotions and three raises since I was laid off in May of 2005. I am currently earning double what I was a year and a half ago. While I am not one to preach financial prosperity, I believe that this could bring hope to those of you buried in debt. Also during this time, I completed my bachelor's degree in business management, and began my Master's degree.

Today, I am happy, healthy, humble, and tremendously grateful for the redemption I have seen and tasted. I do not want to lead anyone to believe that I attained a state of perfection in my previous relationship, nor do I want to imply that today's struggles are not still present. Rather, if there was a solitary message I would want to pour into the hearts and minds of others, it would be that there is always hope for redemption if you entrust your life into the hands of God. I cannot attribute my transformation to anything other than His supernatural grace and total commitment to love me. I cannot say that I was cutoff from His grace and love in my season of devastation. What He orchestrated to enter my story was allowed in love, not in abandonment or rejection of me. He was ever-present, though hard for me to see in the midst of my pain. Today, I am a different, reformed, and more whole man because of the experience. Each moment of past pain can be redeemed to be a source of strength and life today. This is my hope. This is my experience. This is my message.

While I could never justly compare my experience to that of anyone else, I believe that we have all had moments of personal devastation that were tailor-made to expose our deepest expectations and hidden fears. Either hope is crushed, or it is placed by faith in the hands of the one whom we can always trust to redeem, whether in this life or eternity. For me, this two-year experience was my deepest fear fleshed out in living color. Had I had stayed licking my wounds, storing up bitterness, and accusing God - I fear that I would have either killed myself or would be a monster of a man today.

Humility, confession, forgiveness, and faith are the only ways out of deep personal devastation. There are no easy answers, as I still have unanswered questions. But I decided that I would not let my pain, the past, or the piercing words and actions of others tell me who I was or whom I could become. There is only one who has ever had a consistent voice of love in my life - and only He has the right to tell me what I am worth and who I could become.

So today, I live by faith. I cannot foresee if today will bring pain or pleasure - or a mix of both. But whatever it brings, neither have the right to sway my identity. It is not up for argument based on the inconsistencies of life. I am loved, forgiven, adopted, redeemed, and brought in to build a Kingdom for a King.

I hope as this year ends, that all who read this find redemption drawing near to the damaged places in your own past. I hope that you find the courage to lay your life wholly, unabashedly, and vulnerably before God, no matter what comes. I hope that you discover that your story is not fully written and that the close your own journey can be radiant.

I wish you all a renewing new year, hope for tomorrow, peace for yesterday, and grace for today.