I have three pretty contrasting things going on in my life: ministry, mortgages, & music (alliteration unintended I promise).
For the first half of the year I wrestled with how they all fit together, or if they even did at all. Am I meant to keep them separate? Am I trying to live three different lives? Am I meant to choose one?
The big question: How do I not lose myself in it all?
Self-preservation knocked me out of the game for a month.
But something has shifted recently.
I pastored a mortgage client who was picking up the pieces of a broken life, taught some guitar to someone who’s joined my church, gave mortgage advice to a security guard at a pub, & at the end of a gig shared with a table of punters about how awesome Jesus is.
Somewhere along the line I stopped trying to segregate the different parts of my life. Suddenly they’re all flourishing.
I’ve realised they weren’t competing things at all, but complementary things.
God doesn’t make mistakes when he “knits us together in the womb” (Psalm 139). There’s not some parts of me for making money or for enjoyment and other parts for serving God. It’s ALL in service to God and for loving others and to enjoy myself. My whole self. I now feel more like myself than I ever have before.
How did this change? I can’t say for sure, but I’ve got some thoughts and I’ve probably already overshared so I might as well share them with you too.
1) I pivoted…from trying to nut it all out and make sense of it, to simply embracing it as one big crazy ride. Maybe that’s too self-aggrandising, maybe it just got so busy that it all blurred together into one, I don’t know.
2) Those who know me know I’ve suffered much loss this past year, but this has taught me to hold things loosely. WAY more loosely than I ever have before. Again, not my own smarts, it was either learn to let go or be crushed by it. I very nearly was crushed by it. I had no choice but to let things go. There’s no mistake the Bible translates the same word as “forgive” and “release”.
3) The main reason, I suspect, is that I’ve been blessed with a praying wife—an incredibly Godly, beautiful women who has stood by my side through this season, watched me fall apart more than once or twice, & simply continued to pray faithfully and to wait it out. Then, I suspect at least, she prayed some more. And some more.
Again, nothing I’ve done. Oh I marched through the forest a few times and hollered and squallered at the dead trees and the roos and the unyielding stillness of it all but that didn’t achieve much besides a sore ankle and a parched throat.
So, the only conclusion I’ve come to really, which is something that I will say not only UNTIL but also WITH my final breath, is that “God is good”. It is seems overly simple, but the irony is I reckon you gotta truly suffer to truly know it. Curse him if you want to, but he’ll love you anyway, and pull you through, and show you what’s important. He never leaves nor forsakes you. He doesn’t give up on you, even when things get dark.
Pain lingers. Sure. My heart hurts some days, more than I show. The enemy still shoots fiery darts, and I don’t always get that damn shield of faith up in time. What can I say; my arms have grown weary of the thing. But then God keeps sending random people my way who get it, and who pray for me, and who pester me with questions of how I’m doing.
The thing I can’t deny is that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1) Has not. Cannot. Will not. Ever.
God is relentless.
But hey. just my two-bob’s worth.
Picture: top left—preaching at a church in Malaysia, bottom left—preaching at a church planters’ conference in India, top right—playing original rock/blues songs at a brewery in Dunsborough, bottom right—working in mortgages in Perth with one of the most Godly men I’ve ever met.
