MCC Podcasts
Rediscovering a Life of Adventure - part 4
He didn't give me a chance to give a plug, so I'll just do it now. How many of you have your smartphones today? Okay. If you go to the Covenant website at covechurch.org, it's a thing called CoveLink. You put it on your phone, put it on your iPad, your Android, and it will give you direct access to all of the news, all of the major events, great videos and resources. If you're out traveling and need to find a Covenant church, great map and locator. So a little bit of a plug for that little tool. It's really great to be here. I've looked forward to this as well. I had the privilege of working with your pastor in Chicago, and I will simply say that in Chicago, we feel very much that our loss was definitely your gain. And it's just been a joy to be here and share with not only Pastor Art, but with Pastor Jeff and some of the other team members, and I'm just really grateful to be here to share. We're talking about rediscovering a life of adventure, and I have to be honest, one of the things that pleased me greatly is walking in the front entrance to the church and seeing about as big of an adventure as you can possibly imagine with this $3 million campaign. I just am so excited on your behalf about that. And what I'd like you to do is think about, as I share today, it's not just about my story. My story, frankly, is just a way of sharing some greater truths, but you can put a lot of different adventures in life into what I wanna share today. So think of even your campaign as we do that. Now, rediscovering a life of adventure, I was thinking about this title, and I was thinking about the great work that pastors Jeff and Ben have done in building this foundation of biblical understanding. And my role really is to try and put some application maybe to that in a very real-life sense. So for me, I would re-title today's little piece that I'm doing, rather than rediscovering a life of adventure, I suggest that it's rediscovering God in the adventure. And so what I'm going to do is share with you today a little bit of my story, and then I'm going to share with you a life verse that has been very foundational for me. And I think as I unpack it, you'll see how it is played into the story. And then I'm going to share four takeaways that hopefully will help you and me as we continue in this journey. Now, I think about Exodus, I'm as a journalist, of course, you know, I'm always looking for story. It's all about story. So this is a great story. This is a great adventure novel. It doesn't get any better than this. And as I think about the Exodus account, I see three chapters in this fantastic novel. It's great, okay? First chapter is when we see the children of Israel in captivity, but they've been given the promise of deliverance. Something new is coming. God has something better for them. There's a place out there flowing with milk and honey. And I tried to picture what would it really be like to be that many years, 400 or so years in captivity? And to have somebody say, "We're going on this really great adventure." So I call that chapter of this novel the new adventure. But you know, think about this. How many of you can think back to a time when you had an adventure of your own? I certainly did. And while there's this sense of great excitement and great anticipation, it's also a little bit of a sense of uneasiness and anxiety. I mean, what is this place? I mean, I'm leaving a place I know. I'm leaving a place where it may not be the best, but at least it's food and it's shelter. And you're gonna take me out some place that I don't know. So I have to believe that the children of Israel felt a little bit of discomfort. So new adventure sometimes comes packaged with that tension of excitement and anticipation and this whole feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty. And that's okay. So we turned the page to chapter two. We find the children of Israel. They're out in the wilderness. They're doing this journey. They're on the way to the milk and the honey. And notice how quickly this whole thing unravels. I mean, it really just goes to pieces quick. And they go from this great joy and anticipation to complaining bitterly. And they got some pretty tough stuff they're dealing with. They got this big sea and the guys chasing them and what's that all about. And then they go into, gee, we're hungry. We haven't had meat for a long time and we're thirsty. We need water and on it goes. And so here we are out in the wilderness. They're wandering and they're saying, wait a minute. I thought we were going to the Promised Land. God's not behaving here like I expected him to. And so there's a sense probably of where is God in this? Okay? So like every good novel and I don't know if you're like me, but I usually like to peek ahead a few pages to see what's coming next. We go to the next chapter. And this next chapter is really kind of cool because what God really does is he takes all the messiness of the previous chapter and he starts to pull it together and put it together so that Joshua can lead the people into the promise that God has had for them. And so it's really a sense of a fresh start in a new beginning. So there's the three chapters as I see the novel. We got this great adventure launched. Kind of crash is pretty quick and we're in the wilderness period and then we have this whole opportunity for a fresh start and new life. Well, before I dig right into my story, I'll just give you a little bit of background. You need a little context to understand the first chapter that I had to face. Journalists as Pastor Arts had for 30 years, I started out as a newspaper reporter for the Chicago Tribune. And then I was recruited by a media company, Ogden Newspapers, and they were looking for young talent that showed promise that they could groom for eventual leadership. And that's exactly what I wanted. I was in control. I didn't mention this in the first service, but I was part of a group called the JACs. And one of the great things was leadership in action. They taught you how to short-term, intermediate, long-term goals. And I was all over that. So I was gonna be an editor someday by this age and I was gonna be a publisher by the, I had it all really mapped out pretty good. And so I'm moving around the country. I'm a city editor in Iowa and then I'm an editor of a daily newspaper in St. Louis. And then I'm transferred up into Western New York State where I'm the publisher of this really great newspaper in Jamestown, New York. And eventually I become senior publisher of all of the company's properties throughout New York State and a little bit of Pennsylvania. For me, I would say that I had achieved, for me, what I thought was really great success. I grew up in a very poor home. And so I thought this was really what it was all about. But something was going on I didn't understand and it was very confusing. I felt this sense of discontent deep within. And it sort of went like this. So if this is where God wants me to be, why don't I feel the joy that I think should come with it? I felt instead that I'm working all these hours and I'm expending all this energy to create profits for people. And yes, I was a Christian and my faith was important to me and I really believe God used me. I mean, the people in the community knew I was a person of faith. They knew I was a Christian. So I thought, well, this is my ministry. This is what I'm supposed to do. And yet it didn't feel that way. And then that discontent started to grow into something a little different, quite different. And it was this sense that God wanted to do something with my life that mattered more. But he wouldn't tell me what it was. And I was just getting so frustrated because I'm trying to be sincerely a good Christian and be obedient and yet I'm not getting any direction from him that I could see. And it led me to a point one day I'll never forget it. It's burned in my memory where I prayed a very arrogant prayer. And I said, God, if this is where you want me to be, you either need to put some joy in this situation or change the situation. I don't think I care which. I just want the sense of joy that I'm doing what you want and that I'm feeling that inside. Be careful when you pray that prayer. (congregation laughing) Because about a week to the day later, I get a contact from the Covenant Church. Now, this is the offices out there in Chicago. And they said, we need someone to come and help build a communications program here. We really don't have much of a program. And not just to build a program, but build a way that we can tell the story of what God is doing through our shared ministry and what he's doing through the lives of our churches more effectively so we can touch lives in a powerful way through communications. And I struggled with this because in my business, you don't fight hard and climb the ladder and move in the media business to where I had thought I had arrived. You don't just walk away from that to go do this Covenant thing. And then if it doesn't work out, you just kind of walk back in. Doesn't work that way. So there was a lot on the line here. It was my, literally, my career. And yet I felt that God was asking me to do it as illogical as that seems. And it reminds me of a quote from Henry Cloud. He's a noted Christian psychologist, author and speaker. He has a new book out called Necessary Endings. And I'll paraphrase in the front of the book. He says something like this. It is impossible to go where God wants you to be if you're unwilling to leave where you are. Let me say that again. It's impossible to go where God wants you to be unless you're willing to leave where you are. And I thought of that with the children of Israel. Pretty tough to walk out of that seemingly secure environment into the unknown, but they did it. And so for me, I said I need to be responsive, do what God wants, and so the great adventure begins. And so my chapter one is really looking pretty cool. If you asked me today to tell you of all the things I've done in 40 years of journalism now, what is the most fulfilling to me personally? It isn't all the great interviews I do with politicians and all that stuff. It's the last 10 or 15 years I spent with a covenant in this area of ministry, of using communications as a ministry. So God has really been rich to me. So I'm in this great adventure, and I'm really excited about it, but I'm also feeling this mixture of uncertainty and fear because I'm leaving a business. I know well to go to work in a church environment that I don't know at all. And it's frightening. And so I go. So I'm in Chicago, and about eight months into the chapter there because we've now turned the page, I'm moving into chapter two, I didn't know it, but life had turned the page for me. And eight months into that part of my journey, we get the news that my wife, Kathy, has cancer. Terrible disease. All of you who've been touched by it, my heart goes out to you, and breast cancer, and it was a valiant fight, you know? But I'm sitting there saying, God, where are you? Where are you? Because I was trying to be responsive, do what I thought you wanted. You got me here in the middle of the wilderness, and now this, familiar, no meat, no water, no nothing. Circumstances are different, but the pattern is quite familiar to me from our story. And so God spoke, we prayed, we said, we want healing, and he spoke, he answered the prayer, but the answer was no, and so we lost Kathy. There was a time of despair, God was silent. I felt a loneliness, a depth of loneliness that truly you could only describe as profound. And you know, I thought this has to be the worst thing that any human can experience. Little did I know that we hadn't turned the chapter again yet, I still had a few pages to read. In a 48 month period, I not only lost my wife, but I lost my oldest brother much too early, then I lost my father. And 120 days later, I lost my mother. And I'm just saying, God, when is enough enough? When does this wilderness end? I thought we were headed a different place. What's this? I had the good fortune to encounter a Christian psychologist who has become a good friend of mine in Chicago. Dear pastor friend of mine said, Don, if I had gone through what you've gone through, not that I think you're handling it poorly, but I think I'd seek someone out for a little counseling and guidance just to get some ideas. And I thought, well, that's pretty good idea. So I went and met with this wonderful Christian and didn't take him long to get to a core question that really troubled me deeply. He says, you know, Don, you're at a young age. And he said, man, you're wired for a relationship. And he said, I'm going to encourage you to think about, to be open to the idea. Could there be another relationship for you? What if God had something else in mind for you? And so my chapter turns and I find myself into yet another place in this adventure. And I'm sitting there and I'm saying to God, you know, God, if I need to be alone, that's the best way you can use me, is just to remain alone and you use me in some way, that's fine, but you're going to need to sustain me in that. I don't know how to do that. But if you have something for me, remember God. I'm German and I'm slow. And my big fear is that the voice all here is actually my own, that's scary. I really want to hear your voice. I can't make a mistake. Can you speak to me in a way that is so unique that even I can understand it? I'm on a visit back to Jamestown sometime later. Still had some family and other things to attend to out there. And I had a good friend because I was publisher, was very involved in the community. The president of the local community college was a friend of mine and I thought, you know, this would be cool. I'll go out to the college and see if he's free for lunch and we'll go lunch. Well, again, Germans don't always remember there are time zone changes. And so I think it's 11.30, but it's really 12.30 in New York. So I show up and, of course, my friend is gone. His administrative assistant, Wendy, is in the office. And I remembered Whitman friends for 20 years. And so we're catching up on stuff and so good to see again and all that good stuff. And in the course of the conversation, I learned that she, too, had experienced her own wilderness chapter. And that she also was, again, alone in life. And, you know, I may be German, but I'm not that slow. I said, well, I don't know. Would you like to have dinner? And we could maybe catch up on things. Well, to make a long story short, Wendy and I not only had dinner, but as we spent months and months ahead of prayer and discerning in conversation, we both felt that this was something God was calling us to come together. And we were married on Valentine's Day. That shows you I'm a romantic. [APPLAUSE] The truth is, I'm also quite frugal. And I realized that if you got married on Valentine's Day, you only have to buy one card in the future. Now, God often does things really cool because there's always a bonus sometimes in what God then expected. And the bonus for me is that I also inherited a wonderful daughter. And she was just cutting into those teenage years, you know? Of course, my son had to remind me, he said, Dad, how long has it been since you had a teenager in the house? He said, like 17 years? He said, I call that a learning curve. Well, let me tell you, I've found such a blessing. God has used our new home and our new relationship as a nurturing place, so that Olivia has also grown in her faith and has been able to deal with her own issues and her life as we all have together. And it's been just a marvelous experience. And I also got a cool little chihuahua, which we won't talk about. He's a really neat guy. Wendy and I will celebrate eight years of marriage this coming February. So we're very grateful to God. Now, let me just bring this into a little bit of perspective. The story is wonderful, but I want to put it in a context for us this morning. The life first that has meant so much to me is Proverbs 3, 5, and 6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make the path clear or make the path straight. What I want to do in these remaining minutes is to kind of unpack these four phrases for us because out of those, I have drawn four truths that I can apply in my own situation, not only to help me understand what's happened in the past. That's helpful, but more importantly, to help me as we write the next chapter in the journey. I don't know what's coming, but these things are going to be very important to me. And I hope to you as well as we think about them this morning. The first one is trust in the Lord with all your heart. The word trust is interesting. As you would imagine, I work with language. Words are my building blocks. And so the word trust, I realize, is often interchangeable for many people with words like hope, words like faith. Pretty much the same. It's something you can't see. You can't really touch and feel. But I trust this will work out for you. I hope everything goes okay. I have faith. I believe in heaven. I really do. There's a real heaven. I have faith in that promise that there's a heaven. And my hope is built on Jesus Christ as the source of that faith that will allow me to experience that someday. But friends, I can't see heaven nor can you. I can see evidences of God's creativity, but there's a lot of things about our faith journey that we can't see, we can't touch, we can't feel. We take them on faith and hope. Hebrews 11 one says, "Faith is the substance "of things hoped for." And here this word, the evidence of things not seen. You don't see the evidence necessarily. You take it on faith and hope. Trust is different. See, trust is built on something that we actually can see. I call trust the rear view mirror of my faith because in looking back is when I see all of those areas where God intersected in my life. He was there. He was faithful. It's real, it's doc, I can prove it. You see? And that's not something that's hoped for and kind of vague. It's there. And if you remember in the count of the children of Israel, how often were they called to look back? Not to yearn for the past, but to learn from it. To be encouraged by it. To say, remember the Red Sea, he opened it. Remember when you were hungry. He provided the manna and the meat. Remember when your thirsty in the water was there for you. And remember that wonderful entry into the promised land that he had for you. Remember. And so I think we find in this word, trust, this whole idea of remembering. There's a psalm that became very important to me when I was in chapter two in the wilderness. And so I'm reading Psalm 77. Hard to say what this writer was experiencing. It's such anguish. The first half of that chapter is just talking about this tremendous pain and anguish. And the writer asks questions like this. Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he withheld his compassion? That's a lot of grief when you feel that you're actually separated from God. Is that terrible? But there is an interesting thing that happens midway in that passage. And this is what gave me great encouragement. He says, then to this, I will appeal. I will remember the years when the most high stretched out his right hand. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. And in the depth of my wilderness, I was looking back and saying, yes, God, you were there. And so I have every reason to feel confident that you're going to be with me now. Trust, we have every reason we can document it, we can prove it, we can see it. Pastor Jeff spoke of being out of control. I listened to that opening sermon, Pastor Jeff. And I really like to hear a good preacher. But the out of control thing you've got to understand is a little bit of a push for guys like me. Because I like being in control. Because I think I really study and I analyze and I do all this great stuff. But that was a hard one for me. The danger that I realized is that when I was in the wilderness and I was so buried in the detail and the trauma, I couldn't see the big picture. I had no clue where that path was headed. But God did. And so, lean not on your understanding. It's not necessarily just saying, hey, remember God's smarter than we are. It's also saying, remember, God sees the big picture I don't right now and trust in that. So we trust in the Lord because he's proven he's trustworthy. And we lean on his understanding because pride gets in the way of us, gets in the way of me, being able to lean on understanding. And so, pride I recognized is an issue I have to deal with. And so what do I do with pride? I confess it and I say, God, you know what? This isn't about me. It's about you and it's about the journey that you've got me on. Forgive me for that. Help me to lean on you and be OK. That's called humility. It's called humility when we can confess that to God and say, I want to trust you and I want to be humble. But you know, knowing things in your head and actually acting on them are two different things. In all your ways, acknowledge him. I thought that this meant, be sure and give God the credit and the praise. Don't be selfish and be prideful. Well, that's true, but it goes further than that. God does give us a brain. He expects us to use it. He expects us to make great plans and all of that. But remember Proverbs 69. You know, the plans belong to the heart of man. But the steps are ordered by the Lord. It's good to have plans, but don't get ahead of God is what I take out of that. Put in my own language, here's the way I phrased this particular passage. It's not enough to have a religion of the head. Rather, it also must be a religion of the heart. Head knowledge is not going to do it. So we are told that we need to trust. That's our first word. And in all humility, second word, be submissive. We need to submit our ways to him. The promise then comes, and this is the exciting part. If we do those things, God has made a promise to us. He said, I'll make the path straight. Well, how does he do that? Now, some of you, I was interested after the first service that several people acknowledged they were in a class that I shared with here in this church a few years ago as an adult Sunday school. And the framing question we had on the board was, God does his best work with me when? And everyone was asked to fill in the blanks. And with me, it was when he gets me out of my comfort zone. And so by taking me out of Jamestown, New York, and into this culture of church, I didn't understand. He demanded he get me out of my comfort zone, for sure. But I was then put in a position of trusting him. But we've also then spent time in the class talking about how does God speak then? And how do we hear that voice? Well, I was so moved by that that I came back to Chicago and said, I'm going to do a story for the companion on how God speaks. And as a journalist, I already had this thing working, cooking in my brain. I said, I got this all figured out. I'm going to get a source, somebody that I think really knows the Bible well. And I picked Dr. John Weedboard, who is now retired from North Park Seminary. A wiser man, I've never met on this earth, and he certainly knows scripture. So here was my plan. He'll give me the eight or 10 bullet points, real crisp of how God spoke according to scripture. And then I'll build a story out of that as using that as a framework. I'm going to have a great story. This is going to be really good. So John and I agree to meet for breakfast or lunch at Trey Croner in Chicago. Some of you might have been to that place. And I frame my question. I'm ready to go. John looks at me with this look of just being incredulous. He says, you're asking the wrong question. Now, to a journalist who has spent literally weeks planning this thing, and he just blew it all off the table, right? He said, Don, it's in how God does not speak prescriptively that he speaks. He said, let me put it to you this way. He said, God promised that he's going to answer your prayer and speak to you. That I can assure you will happen. And you know something else? He's going to do it in a way that is unique to you so that when he speaks, you'll know it's him. He said, I just can't tell you what that's going to look like for you. You'll know it when it happens. Well, that's a beautiful picture. You know, it sort of helped pull some things together for me about this passage in Proverbs. If I can trust with full confidence because I know what I've seen in the past, and if in all humility I could submit to him my way to his, I can claim the promise that he's going to make that path straight and he's going to let me know in a way that's clear to me. And I want to close this morning with a word picture. I love word pictures. It's based on an experience I had-- [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [END PLAYBACK] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [END PLAYBACK] (keyboard clicking) (keyboard clicking) (keyboard clicking) (keyboard clicking) Here around and look, and there's something covering the entire wall. Now I'm standing about this close to it, and as I look at it, it's all kinds of pieces of glass, blue glass, clear glass, red glass, shards of pot, all these broken bits and pieces of stuff. And they've been pressed into some kind of cement thing to hold it together. And as I looked, I instinctively kind of looked and I started backing into the room, which I later realized is exactly what they had expected me to do, and that's why it was empty. And as I kept backing up, I saw this incredible mosaic take shape, beautiful, stunning landscape. And it was made up out of all these broken bits and pieces of glass. And what that said to me was, you know, there were probably some pretty vases at one time that held some flowers in somebody's house. They were lovely. There probably was a ceramic pot that was quite unusual. And for some reason, they were bumped to the floor, they were dropped, but they were shattered. You never could glue them back together. That beauty was gone forever. But in the hands of a master artist, a master artist like God, he can take those broken pieces of our lives and he puts them together. And as life moves forward and we start to get more perspective, we see what he's really doing is creating a thing of beauty that is beyond description. And that would be the way I would describe where I'm at in my novel right now. Now, as I look at a room like this, I'm mindful that not everybody is in the same place in our book. For some of you, you may still be in chapter one, and you're excited. You've got a new job, you've got a new community. Maybe you're new to this church. It's a brand new adventure, you're feeling the sense of excitement, and that's great. But I'm mindful that for some others, this may be chapter two. And you're facing maybe a health challenge, or you've lost a loved one someone dear to you, and it's painful and it's difficult. And yet for some of the rest of us share that chapter three experience where it's a new beginning, it's a fresh start, it's a new chance. God has been gracious and good. I don't know where you are. And even as possible, someone in this room today hasn't even started on the journey with Christ. And my invitation to you was it's a great journey, and I would encourage you to join in. So as we go in this journey, my prayer for us is simply this. That God would richly bless us as we learn what it means to fully trust God and humbly submit control of our lives to His care, confident in His promise that He'll make the direction of our lives clear and that He's going to walk beside us every step, every chapter as it continues to unfold. And that's my prayer for us today. Amen. (audience applauds)