Job 3:23-26 finds Job complaining to God about what’s happening in his life. He’s started to feel the attack that has come against him and he’s experiencing all the effects of it – the loss of his health, his wealth, his farm, and the support of others in his life. Job cries out to God in this passage saying, “Why is life given to those with no future, those God has surrounded with difficulties? I cannot eat for sighing; my groans pour out like water. What I always feared has happened to me. What I dreaded has come true. I have no peace, no quietness. I have no rest; only trouble comes.”
As the attack comes to Job, and Job starts comparing himself to other people – and by the way, comparison will never make you feel better about your situation. That’s why Instagram can be such an awful companion. It’s fun to stay in touch and keep up, but it’s an absolute tyrant as a measuring stick in your life.
Job is saying that the things he feared most in life – all of them have now happened to him. All of them. What I dreaded has come true… Job is hitting rock bottom, and here’s the painful life-lesson he’s learning, as well as part of the reason I started a new church: Reason #2: Everybody’s FIRST STORY comes to an end. Everybody’s.
I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when my first story came to an end.
I was out for a jog on a spring day in 2013. I was listening to my usual assortment of 80’s hair-bands at full volume because I can’t run unless I feel like the devil is chasing me, and the lake we lived near was coming into view over a rise in the dirt road we lived on – I was feeling as good as my 40-year old self could feel… and then it hit.
As I approached the lake, I noticed that my body began to feel uneasy and unsure of itself. My legs went wobbly and weak. My throat began to tighten up. I pulled the headphones out of my ears mid-guitar solo and slowed myself to a walk. My eyes slowly swelled and flooded with tears, and out of nowhere, and I mean NO-WHERE, I began to cry.
And listen – when I tell you I began to cry – It wasn’t a polite, sniffly, boo-hoo kind of cry. It was an ugly, sobbing kind of cry. It was a deep weeping. I dropped to my knees with the lake in front of me, feeling like the wind had been stolen from my lungs. For a solid 15-minutes I heaved, I wailed, and I tried to catch my breath. I had no idea what was happening to me. I slapped the ground repeatedly like a wrestler taps out of a wrestling match. I had no idea where it came from, and I had no idea how to make it stop.
Like a lot of people, especially pastors, I had tied my worth and identity to my work. In my case, that meant my church. And when the church crashed… I crashed. I had a full on anxiety attack on the side of the road – a total and complete breakdown.
I walked back to my house slowly, and shaken. I sat down on the steps of the front porch and I called my dad. I told him, “I don’t know what’s happening to me – but I don’t think I’m ok.” And I wasn’t.
In the coming months, I would see the closing of my church, the short sale of my house, a major career transition from ministry into teaching (which meant an even deeper identity crisis), the loss of virtually my entire friend/social network, and eventually, the end of my 22-year marriage.
That day on the side of the dirt road was the end of my first story. And it sucked.
But in the days between that one and this one, I’ve learned that I’m not the only one who’s experienced the end of my first story. Almost everyone does. Maybe not in quite as dramatic a fashion. But almost everyone experiences it in some way, shape, or form.
If you live long enough, at some point you’re going to come up against questions, problems, or situations that you never saw coming. Something is going to throw you. Something is going to buck you. Something is gonna get you into that Job frame of mind where everything I’ve ever feared is all coming true. This stuff happens to everybody. It might not be your fault. It might not have been something you wanted or caused – or maybe you did. Either way, you can’t stop it from hitting you. And when it does, you have some big decisions to make about the kind of life you’re going to live and the kind of person you’re going to be.
For a lot of people, life stops right here. This is where we quit. We opt out. This is the part of the story where a lot of people harden up and give up on faith, give up on relationships, give in to temptations, seek unhealthy means of escape, and develop addictions. They resign themselves to what life has become and just say, “This is as far as I’m going to go in my life. I tried…” When my first story came to an end, it took me a minute, but eventually (with help!), I realized I have some big decisions to make.
This is part of the reason I started Second Story. At the churches I went to as I was rebuilding my life, the message was consistently one of two things: It was either: 1. “Yes, God loves you… But you’re really stupid and your problems are all your fault…” OR, it was 2. “Let’s dwell on our wounds and our problems, glorify them, worship our feelings, and tell each other how we’re fine just as we are – nothing needs to change, and no one needs to heal or get better.”
I had been a pastor for over 20-years, and I had begun to notice that when people struggle in the church, we tend to either club people over the head with a theology book, or we get stuck and convince ourselves that what we’re going through is a good/normal thing. My experience, and Job’s experience, was that neither one of these approaches are helpful.
So, what if we started a church where we understood that when first stories end, there’s a Second Story waiting to be lived out, and that shaming and blaming people who already feel terrible about themselves never does anybody any good? Instead of normalizing our wounds, hurts, habits, and broken feelings, what if we could learn to surrender to Jesus, heal, and forgive? What if we could learn what Paul meant when he said that Christians should not be people who grieve as those who have no hope? We can grieve. And we can have hope.
When your first story comes to an end, somebody has to stand in the gap between your head and your heart to try and hold these two things together. Your head and your heart are not enemies. But when your first story ends, man alive, it can feel like they are. What if we could work them into each other so that big, foundational spiritual truth was expressed with emotional and relational intelligence? My experience in my journey to healing had been that the more I understood God’s love, the more deeply I felt it. And the more deeply I felt it, the more I understood it. So what if we didn’t have to choose between feeling it and understanding it in the church?
What if we could start a church that addresses deep longing, grief, hopelessness, lack of purpose, isolation, and REAL PROBLEMS with tenderness, compassion, and love? It might be messy. The black and white “truth people” might be frustrated by the gray that creates. And those more committed to what they want to feel will not always enjoy having their version of “truth” challenged. But what if we could live in the tension and find a different approach to church that would help us change what people believe is possible? Would that change anything for someone who, like me, found the end of themselves on the side of the road?
If we could start a church like that, it might help some people understand that the death of your first story isn’t the death of YOU. The future in front of you might not be the future you had always imagined you’d have, but it’s still a future held in God’s hand. You can’t control the ending of your first story. It comes for everybody. But you can control where the story goes from here. A church that believes that and lives it out in practice… that might be a place filled with an awful lot of hope.