Very often, I feel like a failure as a minister.

Not all the time, obviously. Much of the time I feel pretty good about the way that I do my job, and there are even some things that I almost always feel good about. I'm not fishing for compliments here; I wouldn't trade the past six years for anything, and I know that I'm not the worst minister on the planet. It's just that sometimes it really feels like it.

I feels like it days that people ask for things I simply can't give them, and on days when people come to me for advice and support and I have absolutely no idea what to say.

It feels like it on days that the Sunday morning attendance is particalurly dismal.

It feels like it on days I'm told that something I said is the reason that a family is looking for a new church, on days that someone complains about 'the church' with a long list of things that are really about me, and on days that I ask a question in bible study about something I say every week on Sundays and no one knows the answer.

It feels like it when I tell a story with eight jokes in it and no one laughs, and conversely, when I tell a story that's supposed to be serious and everyone laughs.

It feels like it when I spend a week beating my head against the way writing a sermon, only to preach on Sunday that 'I don't know.'

It feels like it when there are several weeks in a row where no one is baptized at ACC, and it feels like it when someone is baptized and we never see them again.

It feels like it when I have to bail on plans I've made, and it feels like it when there are no plans to bail on.

It feels like it whenever I see my minister-colleagues Facebook pages (that are always filled with bible verses and happy messages), and websites (which are always flashy and state of the art). I feel like it every time I see one of those minister-colleagues and I hear about how wonderful their ministry is going. And I especially feel like it whenever I read a book on ministry that has all the answers to why it is that I fail at my ministry.

The truth is, I feel like a failure quite a bit. But I think also that I'm not alone in this. After all, nobody's perfect, and frankly, nobody's close. And whether it has to do with their job or their parenting or their marriage or simply the way they view themselves, I've learned that most people are walking around with some level of insecurity. No matter how much good that we do in our lives, it's rare that we focus on the positive aspects of our lives more than the negative ones.

That's why it's so encouraging to see who exactly it is that God has used to impact this world. From Abraham to Jacob to David to Daniel to Moses to Samson, the Old Testament is littered with those who, frankly, sucked as human beings. And once Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of God through His disciples, they failed over and over again as well. It didn't matter if they were in the 'inner circle'or if they were simply the 'other guys'; at the end of the day, they all failed in all sorts of ways at following Jesus.

But amazingly, God understands. He gets that we will, very often, suck at being the people He made, and He understands that even when we try our absolute best that we won't be able to be perfect. That's why the beauty of the gospel is in God's grace, and why Jesus said that the true triumph of discipleship in not in our victory over evil, but in the day to day, consistent involvement in our lives of God.

I say each week at Ashland Christian Church that we aren't a perfect church, and that starts with me - someone who feels, more often than not, like a ministerial failure. But the truth is that with God's grace and God's involvement in our lives, perfection - or even us being adequate - isn't necessary. Where we fail, God succeeds. 

And in the end, that's all the success that we'll ever really need. 

The lesson, as always: I'm a moron.

I can't even count how many times I've cooked steak. It's at least in the triple digits in the 28 years I've lived on this earth, and it may even be in the quadruple digits. Steak is, literally, my favorite food, and it's a go-to, (semi)cheap option for two people, especially when Hyvee has a sale. So, with all of that said, I'm not sure why exactly I wanted to try something new. Maybe I've just done it so much that I didn't want to be bored; maybe I was too lazy to fire up a grill. Maybe, I was just trying to impress my wife with my culinary skills and the above picture is an aphrodisiac for any reasonable woman on the planet. I'm not sure why exactly I chose to do what I did, but I decided to follow this recipe to make dinner last night.

That particular recipe calls for a pan to be put in the oven while the broiler heats up. You know - heating the pan up so that you get a nice, crusty and delicious outside to your steak.

Of course, that also means that there's about a sixty second window when a pan, heated to roughly 500 degrees, is sitting on the stove. And of course, that means I grabbed it absentmindedly without using an oven mitt.

As soon as I touched the pan, my first reaction was to shout an obscenity that the entire neighborhood could hear (because, after all, I'm the world's greatest pastor and all). It was then to release my now partially cooked hand off the pan and put it under cold water. The momentary relief was great, but soon, the pain spread not just on my hand where the skin had immediately began to blister, but all the way up my arm. The rest of the evening was a real treat, as I tried anything and everything to try to get rid of the pain - burn creams and sprays, ice, water and aspirin were all helpless to help for more than a moment (at one point, I actually said the sentence, 'I've been hit by a car, but this pain is worse!'), and finally, I just had to take Aleve PM to knock me out. Apparently, yes - I am THAT big of a pansy, and the next time I watch the episode of The Office where Michael Scott burns his foot on the George Foreman grill, I won't be laughing.

(As an aside, the steak was excellent. Stephanie finished the recipe, and it came out a beautiful, perfect medium rare, tender and full of flavor. I suffered for that steak, but at least it was good.)

This morning, I awoke (groggily - I'm not used to taking night-time medicine) and looked at the damage on my hand. As badly as it hurt, I expected my entire left hand to be one giant blister. To my amazement, the blister is roughly only an inch long. Which I suppose makes sense - I only had my hand on the pan for a second or two. So, to review:

The amount of time I had my hand on the pan was small;

The wound on my hand as a result of the burn was small;

And yet, it completely ruined my evening.

Jesus understood that small things can have a big impact. That's why He warned His disciples to beware of the 'leaven' of the Pharisees. Leaven is a tiny part of the process of baking bread, an agent like yeast, but it causes the entire loaf to rise up. In other words, what Jesus was saying was that even a hint of a Pharisaical attitude could have a major impact on the lives of His followers. It didn't matter if they were full-fledged Pharisees; they could be tainted by a small part of what they taught.

The message for us is clear: it doesn't take a lot to derail your spiritual life. Just one habit, or one attitude or one conflict and soon, the whole situation can balloon into something that absolutely wrecks you. No one starts off being a bigot or judgmental or completely immoral - they ate that elephant one bite at a time. So, for us, it's vitally important that we avoid taking that first bite.

The good news is that it works the other way around too - it doesn't take a huge piece of God's kingdom to make a huge impact on your life. Just a little love or grace or compassion or mercy can go longer than you'd ever imagine, both in your life and the lives of those around you. And that's an elephant you definitely want to eat.

So often, we give ourselves a pass because, as I'm so often fond of saying - 'it's not that big of a deal.' And when we do that, we fail to realize that the small things that we think or do eventually turn into big - life-changing, course-altering - things. It's time then, that we look at every choice as a big one, and we choose to be faithful in the small, mundane, every day decisions - even the ones that seem small.

And that's especially true when you're a moron like me. 

It didn't help that I was eating lunch at the time. 

No matter what I had been doing, I can't imagine that I would have reacted all that well. But considering that I was eating a delicious lunch of nachos, made with both Doritos and the best pulled pork this side of the Mississippi, my reaction was particularly harsh. My beloved dog, Chara, curled up on my lap, just as she has somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,789,842 times over the last four years, when I caught a whiff of the worst foulness that I've ever smelled. This wasn't simply your run of the mill 'the dog rolled in something outside' stank, either - this was 'Andy Dufresne crawling out of Shawshank Prison' level awfulness, a noxious mixture of what smelled like sewage, the inside of a sick old woman, and vomit. Ever wonder what the zombie apocalypse smells like? I know now.

Now, you have to understand: I love my dogs. And I know everyone says that, but I promise you, I love my dogs more than you love your dogs. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep (in the same bed as them, I might add), Stephanie and I's world revolves around our puppy friends. And that's exactly what they are; they're not our pets. They're our friends.

With all that said, I simply couldn't take it. I completely rejected Chara, putting her on the floor and refusing to let her anywhere near me. And even when I was finished eating, it was the same thing - her funk was so bad, I simply couldn't take being the same air space as her. I don't know what she rolled in or why, but I do know this: I have never smelled anything so horrid.

When we human beings don't like something, we all react the same way - with rejection. Our rejection comes in a variety of forms, from the way we look or the way we talk or the time we spend (or don't spend) with whatever it is that offends us. And we in the church are no different - when it comes to those things that we disagree with, we spend our time attempting to belittle, disprove or shame the world around us. It's nothing unique to us, but it's certainly not something that we're immune to either.

And while there are countless reasons for the things we do (some good, and some not so), all I can really say is this: I'm glad that God is different. The cold, hard fact about sin is that there's nothing that anyone could do to offend us that's worse than what we've done to offend God. He is, after all, the perfect, holy, completely pure creator of the universe.

As for us? We're as clean as my dog after she's rolled in apocalyptic level filth in the yard. We sin in so many ways - in what we do and what we don't do, in our minds and with our hands and with our eyes. We do it when we don't defend those who need defending and when we defend those who we never should think about defending. We do it with our attitudes and our motives, in our ignorance and absolutely, positively on purpose. Whenever we fail to be the people God made us to be, we're guilty of sin, and no matter where you are - be it Ashland, Missouri or anywhere else - we're far from the Garden of Eden.

Unlike us, though, God doesn't treat us like we have the plague simply because we've sinned. In fact, He went to great lengths to embrace us and shower us with the love and adulation that we'd never be able to earn on our own, and He did so at the ultimate price - His Son, Jesus. 

Maybe it's time that we took a page from God's book and started treating the world around us a little less like Chara and a little more how Christ treats us. Maybe it's time that instead of pointing out the sins of others and living lives of judgment, anger and bitterness, we simply accepted others for how they are, and let the Holy Spirit do His job of conviction. And maybe it's time that we realized that we're not so different than those whose worldviews and actions so offend us, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.

Maybe it's time to start living out the love that God has so freely given us...

...even when we're eating lunch. 

 

You may think that a collection of comic books is hardly an appropriate gift for a man turning 28. You may think that comic books are juvenile wastes of time, a hobby for children and the immature of mind. And I suppose that very often, you might be correct.

But not this time.

Turning 28 for me was a strange thing. For one, I'm officially closer to 30 than I am to 25, and that's weird. It's not quite as weird as not being told by puzzled visitors to the church, 'wow - you're young for a pastor!' but it's close. And for two, I'm the youngest member of my family. I've always been the young one, looking up to everyone around me. And sure, being in a leadership position of an adult organization like a church has caused me to grow up fast, but for the majority of my six years in ministry, I haven't felt like I'm 'one of' the adults. That's been changing recently, and I'm not completely sure I'm okay with it. 

So maybe my mixed emotions concerning the aging process helps explain why I asked for this book for my birthday. It's a throwback to my childhood, as Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michaelangelo were my favorite heroes in a half-shell, one of the first obsessions of a life that would be filled with them. Reading the original comic books, however, was more than just a trip down memory lane; it was a reminder of the simple joy of life that is immersing yourself in a fantasy world, if only for a few moments.

As it turns out, though, I was stunned at just how true to life a story about mutant turtles that know martial arts can be. I was familiar with the shows and movies and toys of the turles, but I had never read the comics until I had the book in my hand, and that's when I learned the truth - all the kid-friendly versions of the Turtles left out a key component of the ninja turtle story:

The stone cold murder.

In the comics, the turtles aren't just fun loving teenagers who eat pizza and hang out with their friends; they're violent vigilantes who think nothing of separating thugs from their heads. From the first page on, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics are a rated 'R' version of the heroes I'd grown up loving, and it was frankly jarring to see the amount of blood and guts that was involved in the earliest incarnations of the kid's franchise.

That's the thing, though - the Turtles were never supposed to be for kids. It wasn't for the light-hearted; it wasn't originally meant to sell toys and T-shirts and lunchboxes and movies. It was supposed to be fun for adults who happened to read comics. It wasn't until much later, when the dollar bills got to be too many to refuse that the Turtles were edited, censored, and polished.

And it got me thinking - how often do we to do God what the world has done to the turtles? After all, the bible is filled with stuff that would undoubtedly receive an 'R' rating in a movie. There's murder and rape and sex and violence. There's war and genocide and racism and slavery and death. There's evil, darkness, and ruin. And those things exist in God's word because, unfortunately, those things exist in God's world.

If you're reading this, you're probably aware that it's been some time since I've written in this space - nearly three months, in fact. And before the unannounced hiatus, it's not like I had been consistently writing anyway. The reason for the break is complicated, but it comes down to what I noticed in the Ninja Turtle comics - the world is worse than we usually admit. The last several months have been, for me personally, taxing. Yes, I'm unbelievably blessed by God, and yes, the Holy Spirit is working in a powerful way at Ashland Christian Church, a fact that I'm incredibly grateful for. But 2012 hasn't been the easiest one for me, and in fact, has been one of the hardest years I've ever had. And because of that, I simply decided to follow the old matronly cliche - 'if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.'

But whether or not we say it out loud, the fact is that this life is hard. It's filled with adult content, even in places you wouldn't expect that content to be. And in those times, it's vitally important to have a pillar of strength to lean on. In fact, that's the design of the God of the rated 'R' bible. As one of the earliest Christians, a man who knew more hardship than I will ever understand, wrote, it's the times that we find that we have nothing else that we turn to God. And in those times, we find that we have everything we ever needed.

I may be getting older (and, hopefully, a bit wiser), but at the end of the day, I have very little answers to the difficulties that life offers. I have ideas and I have opinions, but every time I think I have something set in stone, it seems like everything blows up in my face. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's good to know your limits, to admit your own insecurity and immaturity from time to time.

And if that's true, then I think I'm probably doing fine. Because after all, I'm a 28 year old guy who still reads comic books.