"A preacher's Struggle"
- James Smith
The VOICE of the OUTCAST
I am at this point in my ministry a vereran of the Holy War. This is my 13th year of ministry and I am 31 years old. And as I sit here and write this, my speaking date book starts to fill up and the prospects look good so far. And still I am restless. I actually loathe the thought of another speaking date. Don't get me wrong-good things seemingly happen. I will preach hard and to the point. I will not dodge issues and I will speak in the vernacular of my day. I will dress how I want and force people to see God beyond the exterior. I will play the role of a vovelty and try my best to make something positive happen. And it will not be enough.
Because even on those reare occasions when the sermon that God gives me is revolutionary in scope and substance, even when people flood the altar and repent, I still retire to whatever room I have and lament the entire event. Because no matter how well I may perform, no matter how strong the message seems to be, I know it is partly due to intellect, partly due to street smarts, part marketing and a part God's Spirit. How can that ever be enough?
The weight of the ministry is at times oppressive. I feel the wright of my speaking to these nameless, faceless people. I know that perhaps God wants to intervene in their lives and that so much may be riding on GOd's being able to use what I say and do as a catalyst for change. And I fear that I will fail in my task because of there being too much of me in the equation.
The phrase "Forever Change" is constantly with me after this last fast that I was on. Something has transpired in me over these past years that does not allow me to take the ministry in a cavalier way. I know that somewhere out there, just beyond my grasp is the light switch. In every event, every innocent meeting, the "forever change" potentially waits for the people that I come in contact with. That the possibility exists that somehow God could use this ugly vessel to produce a radical shift in someone's accustomed paradigm that could affect the rest of his or her life. And I know that it's not me. ANd it is nothing that I know, nor any skill I possess. My clevernedd cannot produce theis forever change. ANd I cannot afford to write it off as some soverign work of God that is simply beyond me, a divine comic lottery, if you will. There is a method to GOd's seeming madness at all times, even (or especially) when His will makes no clear sense to us.
I am terrified of speaking well and manipulating people's emotions in some way that I had predetermined that they should go. I am distressed at the thought that I am a factor in this ministry at all. I wish above all things that people would just say that God shows up at my meetings. I do not wish to be known for my intellect, my cutting style, my dress or my caustic sense of humor. I wish they would just see Jesus. But I am not equal to that task. And I wish more than anything that that fact were not so. I fall so short of the mark in so many areas; I am the perfect example of the wrong person for the job.
We are again in a dire straits as a family. I have a short time to produce something that I simply cannot by any actions of my own. But where we should be terrified, we are patiently determined. We are used to this place after all these years. I choose to live on the edge and so the position of the tenuous and slippery hold is almost commonplace. If I were like many of the preachers that I know, I would simply shut up, play the game and prosper. I see so many of them just do that. It regularly pains me to see my family go without when with just a small amount of what I would call compromise they would be just fine. But I seem to live my life along the lines of Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
I live a life of faith. It is one of the areas of my life that I am most attacked for. My heart was stirred at 19 when I first entered the ministry by a biography of the life of George Mueller. He managed to run an orphanage and carry on a ministry for sixty-six years through prayer. He believed God for every single thing he had. He took no salary and regularly, the children in his charge went to bed peacefully, never knowing there was no money to buy food for breakfast. But in the morning, the answer came. I too feel compelled to pray for the Lord to supply. And though we have very little, I am grateful for what this life of faith has done for me. There have been times when my life was threatened when the years of faith paid off. I have had people sit on the front row during sermons of mine and show me the gun they had hidden between their legs. I do not know much, but I know that the same person who did that was on their face outside of the church that night repenting in the pouring rain with their face in the grass. A part of my preparation for that moment happened during the times we prayed in dinner or rent. We live on the edge of disaster all of the time. People come and go in our lives. Promises are made and broken regularly. We sit on the verge of having nothing and losing what little we do have. But in all of that, one thing never changes, we know that God is faithful.
And this is why I continue despite everything that happens. We are not the right choice for the job; I know there is someone out there who can do what I do better then me. But GOd's LOVE compelles me. When I want to quit and start a business, when people desert us, and forget us, when disaster looms ahead and there is no hope in sight, I still cannot quit. Because I remember when, despite all of my faults, God showed mercy. I remember when the answer came when all hope was lost. And I remember the joy of rediscovering the faithfullness of God when all else had failed. And so, I continue to be God's fool. I do not try and clean up to speak at the big churches; I would rather hug the AIDS patient or befriend the run away teen that is forgotten. I would rather live with nothing and know the joy of God's provision in the midst of impossible odds then compromise and never experience him that way. It is just God and us alone most of the time. Funny how easily people turn away from you when you have nothing and they have nothing to gain from you. We have learned from vast experience that you can count on no one except God. I will fail you or offend you at some point. I will do wrong and you will walk away. But when that happens, I look around and find the Father smiling at me.
We have been asking local churches about the possibility of using their church for two hours Sunday afternoons. When I approached a local pastor with the question, he put the religious 20 questions to me earlier on this week. Before I could use his building for a two-hour slot on Sundays he had to know who I was, what credentials I carried, my education, my thoughts on everything from predestination to the Apostles Creed. I started off answering his questions politely but very quickly grew tired of them. Finally, I had to stop the inquisition and speak frankly. I said, "Pastor, you want to know who I am? Let me tell you. I am a failure. I have been a liar, a cheat, a conman, and criminal, and a violent racist. I am the epitome of wasted potential. I was locked up in juvenille hall for a large part of my teenage years. I have a verified I.Q. of 153...And yet the last full year I spent in school was the seventh grade. I taught myself everything that I know. I grew up as true white trash; my family lived in trailers my entire life. We were on welfare most of the time and I shopped for school clothes at the Salvation Army. I was a runaway and a vagrant. I could have been a great Dr. or Lawyer, perhaps. If the plan would have worked out differently maybe I would have had a Dad who cared and a family that helped me. But I lived on the streets from the time I was twelve. I saw a friend shot dead beside me and a girlfriend shot in the face in a drive-by shooting when I was a teenager. I had a seventeen-year-old friend die of AIDS as I watched. There have been at least 4 serious attempts on my life and I carry the scars to prove it. I have woken up in the middle of the night with a gang memeber's pistol shoved in my mouth. So, I am by all normal estimates a failure and a dreg. But when I was 19, Jesus intervened in my life during a suicide attempt. I crawled bloody out of a cold bathtub and sobbed naked on the floor asking Him for help. And He changed my life. I may not have a degree like you that will make you feel that I am qualified; I may not have the backing of a denomination that is well respected. I have noe of the qualities that people like you look for in a safe spiritual leader. I spent no time in Bible School because I was too busy being a street preacher, reaching out to those that no noe else cares for because there is no money in them. All that I have to qualilfy me is Christ in me. ANd that may not be much to someone like you, but for someone like me, it is everything."
The simple and clusive fact to many is that God loves the outcast. He loves the second-rate and the counted out. He seems to embrace those of us with nothing to show for years that we wasted on the world. When you look in the eyes of someone not worth your time, someone dying or poor, the obvious welfare mother at the store or the bum on the library steps, you are seeing Jesus stare back at you. When you stand next to the alcoholic who smells of urine and booze or the criminal Christian who has failed even after salvation, you stand shoulder to shoulder with the Messiah's heart. I am not the best man for the job and yet God chooses to use me. And that makes some people very angry. Because I leave them, who are way more qualified then I, without excuse. I live my life in joyful abandon because when the lights dim and the music is over, when the crowd is gone and the only sound is my own breathing, all that I have is God.
I can say with some pride that I am a fool and deserve to lose it all for foolishly trusting in God. But that trust that God will provide is my joy and that abandon is my identity. And He gave that to me, me the outcast, me the failure and the liar and cheat. He looked on me in my worst possible moments, during the times I am most ashamed of and still he loved me. And if he loved me then, at that place and that time how could he think less of me now? God can never love us more and he will never love us less. What a mighty and amazing God we serve! I feel His presence so strong even as I write this. Yes, you too are a failure and a hypocrite. Yes, you could be better than what you are. But God called you as you were. Not because you were the best or the brightest. he didn't call you because of your failings and your shortcomings, He chose you because you are a fool and He loves to make purses out of sow's ears. So many of us are deceived into thinking that it is what we don't do or what we overcome that gives us our testimony. But your weakness is your testimony, not your strengths.
I may very well be wrong in what I believe. The disaster that looms just days ahead, threatening our destruction as a family may very well do just that-destroy us and cast us adrift. The thing we believe for may not happen. I may never be a success in the church's eyes. I may not get a building here and those who hate me may get to laugh as I fail. But I am thrilled at the ride. I am addicted to my hero Jehovah Jireh. I know tha tlife is no fun without danger and a man or woman needs no savior when there is no threat. And I have a hero who exalts in the role. He lives for it, in fact. Because even though the one he rescues is dirty and discarded, used and abandoned, he is by nature the Savior.
-James Smith, South Dakota.
(I had permission to re write this, it has TOUCHED me deeply,I hope everyone who reads it is touched the same way)
God Bless-
B
- James Smith
The VOICE of the OUTCAST
I am at this point in my ministry a vereran of the Holy War. This is my 13th year of ministry and I am 31 years old. And as I sit here and write this, my speaking date book starts to fill up and the prospects look good so far. And still I am restless. I actually loathe the thought of another speaking date. Don't get me wrong-good things seemingly happen. I will preach hard and to the point. I will not dodge issues and I will speak in the vernacular of my day. I will dress how I want and force people to see God beyond the exterior. I will play the role of a vovelty and try my best to make something positive happen. And it will not be enough.
Because even on those reare occasions when the sermon that God gives me is revolutionary in scope and substance, even when people flood the altar and repent, I still retire to whatever room I have and lament the entire event. Because no matter how well I may perform, no matter how strong the message seems to be, I know it is partly due to intellect, partly due to street smarts, part marketing and a part God's Spirit. How can that ever be enough?
The weight of the ministry is at times oppressive. I feel the wright of my speaking to these nameless, faceless people. I know that perhaps God wants to intervene in their lives and that so much may be riding on GOd's being able to use what I say and do as a catalyst for change. And I fear that I will fail in my task because of there being too much of me in the equation.
The phrase "Forever Change" is constantly with me after this last fast that I was on. Something has transpired in me over these past years that does not allow me to take the ministry in a cavalier way. I know that somewhere out there, just beyond my grasp is the light switch. In every event, every innocent meeting, the "forever change" potentially waits for the people that I come in contact with. That the possibility exists that somehow God could use this ugly vessel to produce a radical shift in someone's accustomed paradigm that could affect the rest of his or her life. And I know that it's not me. ANd it is nothing that I know, nor any skill I possess. My clevernedd cannot produce theis forever change. ANd I cannot afford to write it off as some soverign work of God that is simply beyond me, a divine comic lottery, if you will. There is a method to GOd's seeming madness at all times, even (or especially) when His will makes no clear sense to us.
I am terrified of speaking well and manipulating people's emotions in some way that I had predetermined that they should go. I am distressed at the thought that I am a factor in this ministry at all. I wish above all things that people would just say that God shows up at my meetings. I do not wish to be known for my intellect, my cutting style, my dress or my caustic sense of humor. I wish they would just see Jesus. But I am not equal to that task. And I wish more than anything that that fact were not so. I fall so short of the mark in so many areas; I am the perfect example of the wrong person for the job.
We are again in a dire straits as a family. I have a short time to produce something that I simply cannot by any actions of my own. But where we should be terrified, we are patiently determined. We are used to this place after all these years. I choose to live on the edge and so the position of the tenuous and slippery hold is almost commonplace. If I were like many of the preachers that I know, I would simply shut up, play the game and prosper. I see so many of them just do that. It regularly pains me to see my family go without when with just a small amount of what I would call compromise they would be just fine. But I seem to live my life along the lines of Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
I live a life of faith. It is one of the areas of my life that I am most attacked for. My heart was stirred at 19 when I first entered the ministry by a biography of the life of George Mueller. He managed to run an orphanage and carry on a ministry for sixty-six years through prayer. He believed God for every single thing he had. He took no salary and regularly, the children in his charge went to bed peacefully, never knowing there was no money to buy food for breakfast. But in the morning, the answer came. I too feel compelled to pray for the Lord to supply. And though we have very little, I am grateful for what this life of faith has done for me. There have been times when my life was threatened when the years of faith paid off. I have had people sit on the front row during sermons of mine and show me the gun they had hidden between their legs. I do not know much, but I know that the same person who did that was on their face outside of the church that night repenting in the pouring rain with their face in the grass. A part of my preparation for that moment happened during the times we prayed in dinner or rent. We live on the edge of disaster all of the time. People come and go in our lives. Promises are made and broken regularly. We sit on the verge of having nothing and losing what little we do have. But in all of that, one thing never changes, we know that God is faithful.
And this is why I continue despite everything that happens. We are not the right choice for the job; I know there is someone out there who can do what I do better then me. But GOd's LOVE compelles me. When I want to quit and start a business, when people desert us, and forget us, when disaster looms ahead and there is no hope in sight, I still cannot quit. Because I remember when, despite all of my faults, God showed mercy. I remember when the answer came when all hope was lost. And I remember the joy of rediscovering the faithfullness of God when all else had failed. And so, I continue to be God's fool. I do not try and clean up to speak at the big churches; I would rather hug the AIDS patient or befriend the run away teen that is forgotten. I would rather live with nothing and know the joy of God's provision in the midst of impossible odds then compromise and never experience him that way. It is just God and us alone most of the time. Funny how easily people turn away from you when you have nothing and they have nothing to gain from you. We have learned from vast experience that you can count on no one except God. I will fail you or offend you at some point. I will do wrong and you will walk away. But when that happens, I look around and find the Father smiling at me.
We have been asking local churches about the possibility of using their church for two hours Sunday afternoons. When I approached a local pastor with the question, he put the religious 20 questions to me earlier on this week. Before I could use his building for a two-hour slot on Sundays he had to know who I was, what credentials I carried, my education, my thoughts on everything from predestination to the Apostles Creed. I started off answering his questions politely but very quickly grew tired of them. Finally, I had to stop the inquisition and speak frankly. I said, "Pastor, you want to know who I am? Let me tell you. I am a failure. I have been a liar, a cheat, a conman, and criminal, and a violent racist. I am the epitome of wasted potential. I was locked up in juvenille hall for a large part of my teenage years. I have a verified I.Q. of 153...And yet the last full year I spent in school was the seventh grade. I taught myself everything that I know. I grew up as true white trash; my family lived in trailers my entire life. We were on welfare most of the time and I shopped for school clothes at the Salvation Army. I was a runaway and a vagrant. I could have been a great Dr. or Lawyer, perhaps. If the plan would have worked out differently maybe I would have had a Dad who cared and a family that helped me. But I lived on the streets from the time I was twelve. I saw a friend shot dead beside me and a girlfriend shot in the face in a drive-by shooting when I was a teenager. I had a seventeen-year-old friend die of AIDS as I watched. There have been at least 4 serious attempts on my life and I carry the scars to prove it. I have woken up in the middle of the night with a gang memeber's pistol shoved in my mouth. So, I am by all normal estimates a failure and a dreg. But when I was 19, Jesus intervened in my life during a suicide attempt. I crawled bloody out of a cold bathtub and sobbed naked on the floor asking Him for help. And He changed my life. I may not have a degree like you that will make you feel that I am qualified; I may not have the backing of a denomination that is well respected. I have noe of the qualities that people like you look for in a safe spiritual leader. I spent no time in Bible School because I was too busy being a street preacher, reaching out to those that no noe else cares for because there is no money in them. All that I have to qualilfy me is Christ in me. ANd that may not be much to someone like you, but for someone like me, it is everything."
The simple and clusive fact to many is that God loves the outcast. He loves the second-rate and the counted out. He seems to embrace those of us with nothing to show for years that we wasted on the world. When you look in the eyes of someone not worth your time, someone dying or poor, the obvious welfare mother at the store or the bum on the library steps, you are seeing Jesus stare back at you. When you stand next to the alcoholic who smells of urine and booze or the criminal Christian who has failed even after salvation, you stand shoulder to shoulder with the Messiah's heart. I am not the best man for the job and yet God chooses to use me. And that makes some people very angry. Because I leave them, who are way more qualified then I, without excuse. I live my life in joyful abandon because when the lights dim and the music is over, when the crowd is gone and the only sound is my own breathing, all that I have is God.
I can say with some pride that I am a fool and deserve to lose it all for foolishly trusting in God. But that trust that God will provide is my joy and that abandon is my identity. And He gave that to me, me the outcast, me the failure and the liar and cheat. He looked on me in my worst possible moments, during the times I am most ashamed of and still he loved me. And if he loved me then, at that place and that time how could he think less of me now? God can never love us more and he will never love us less. What a mighty and amazing God we serve! I feel His presence so strong even as I write this. Yes, you too are a failure and a hypocrite. Yes, you could be better than what you are. But God called you as you were. Not because you were the best or the brightest. he didn't call you because of your failings and your shortcomings, He chose you because you are a fool and He loves to make purses out of sow's ears. So many of us are deceived into thinking that it is what we don't do or what we overcome that gives us our testimony. But your weakness is your testimony, not your strengths.
I may very well be wrong in what I believe. The disaster that looms just days ahead, threatening our destruction as a family may very well do just that-destroy us and cast us adrift. The thing we believe for may not happen. I may never be a success in the church's eyes. I may not get a building here and those who hate me may get to laugh as I fail. But I am thrilled at the ride. I am addicted to my hero Jehovah Jireh. I know tha tlife is no fun without danger and a man or woman needs no savior when there is no threat. And I have a hero who exalts in the role. He lives for it, in fact. Because even though the one he rescues is dirty and discarded, used and abandoned, he is by nature the Savior.
-James Smith, South Dakota.
(I had permission to re write this, it has TOUCHED me deeply,I hope everyone who reads it is touched the same way)
God Bless-
B
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