Dear 47 year old Me
Dear Gary,
Wow, look at you. You’re 47 — with a wife and a one year old daughter. I know you never expected that to happen. It looks like you’re finally growing up. Good for you! I could go on about all the growth you’ve made and the stuff you’ve overcome, but we don’t have much time, so I’ll just get to the point.
Things are going really well right now. You’ve been able to create your dream job and raise up a spiritual community that is making a difference. You have an awesome group of people around you — they love you and your family, and they would go to Hell with you if you asked. Lives are being changed and you are a part of something significant and special. This is the way church should be done.
Sadly, it’s all about to crash in on you.
- Hang on.
- — — -Get ready.
Actually, you are ready — there’s nothing really you can do to prepare for the next few years. Next year, you will have a son and it will be amazing, but you will also start a long process of evisceration. All of this good stuff is taking a toll on you and you are about to crash and burn out.
You knew you were supposed to take care of yourself — emotionally, physically, socially, and spiritually — and you’ve done pretty well, considering. However, though you’re in your late 40s, you still seem to think you can bounce back like a 20something. You can’t. I wish you’d better prepared yourself for what is about to happen. (10 years after this — you’ll really see how little resilience you have — Ha!)
The burnout is slowly creeping in. It feels like anxiety right now — and you’re starting to fall back on old behaviors like perfectionism, control, and even some addictive behavior (food, TV, isolation, etc). That’s understandable, but those self-medicating activities are not going to save you. In a few months, this will turn into depression and you’ll be struggling to keep it together.
Sadly, your employer doesn’t have anything in their toolbox to deal with pastoral burnout. The Church itself is overly focused on behavior and they tend to expect their pastors to be perfect models of charisma and sanguine people-pleasers. This is where being a depressed introvert is going to really start to suck.
Just before your favorite son is born, your employer is going to pull the plug on your awesome project. 20 people have given their lives to raise up this church community. 40 more have finally found a place where they can be real, authentic, relevant, and experiential. And another 100 are putting their collective toes in the water and finding God in ways they never thought possible. Amazingly, there are another 100 who have a loose connection with a faith community, even though some of them are addicts, prostitutes, LGBTQ, atheists, and/or very broken. All of this will soon be over.
Hang on buddy — it gets worse.
If this wasn’t already disappointing, you’re going to lose your friends, your serenity, and come very close to losing the love of your life.
On the scale of stressors, moving, birth, and job change all rate right up near the top of the list. Between August and November of 2007, you’re going to experience all of these — and this is piled on top of being burned out and depressed. It will be masked with the joy of moving back to Oregon and the birth of your son, but let me be very clear, you’re about to be walloped upside the head and virtually no one will understand what you’re going through.
First of all, you’re dear wife is going through all of this too. She has been at your side through all of this. She is no less the leader of Common Ground than you were. She too is losing her friends, her spiritual community, and her job is changing. She too is burned out — but you won’t recognize it until it’s almost too late. Now add the post-partum depression on top of all this and we all start entering a perfect storm designed in Hell.
In addition to losing your amazing church family in Colorado, you will walk into a bunch of unwritten, unstated expectations at your new church. It will take years until you are accepted at the new church. Not only did you have a real community at Common Ground, which was far above the bar set by most churches, you will have no community in Oregon.
You will go through the hardest time in your life, and they expect you to be the best pastor they’ve ever had. Plus, they won’t want you to operate within your giftedness — which is to empower and grow churches in authentic and creative way. You will be alone and constrained. You will feel like you’re operating with handcuffs.
No one will want to stand beside you during this storm. Even long-time friends will abandoned you. Eventually, the politics will play out and you will be unemployed, just as the economy crashes.
Now here’s the real advice part.
Up until now you’re probably thinking this is just an awful prophecy. Great, God is going to take your world apart, now what? Actually you’ve been praying this prayer for sometime. You’ve asked Him to do whatever it takes — and He’s about to do it. Are you ready?
Of course you’re not ready, which is why I’m writing this letter to you. So, here’s what you need to know. Just one thing. I know this now, but you didn’t know it then.
It’s going to be alright.
Seriously, it will be Hell — perfect storms from Hell always are. What did you expect? Don’t be surprised. But don’t just sit there in your recliner feeling sorry for yourself, hating the system and people that didn’t understand. Don’t be disappointed, don’t be depressed, don’t be angry, don’t wallow in the pit of despair. It’s going to be alright.
Sure, grieve. Take some time. And do what you did, regain that paramedic license, get unemployment benefits, food stamps, and medicaid, and stop making house payments. Those were really smart moves. Hunker down. Do all that.
But you’ll need one fundamental attitude adjustment.
Hope.
As the political pressure became unbearable, you will remember key Bible texts to give you courage. You will be reminded that God is your salvation and promises of victory over your enemies. You will believe that these people can’t hurt you. But then, it will all come crashing down and you’ll be left confused and disoriented. You’ll have to figure out those Bible texts on your own though — I can’t do all the heavy lifting from the future. Some of this will just require you to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
As the Man of the household you will believe you’ve failed and that your “family is going to die under a bridge in a ball of flame.” Now that you’re unemployed, with a mortgage and a newborn, you will believe it’s all up to you to save the day. It isn’t. You will soon enough learn that God is the provider of your family, not you — but it will be a painful journey until you do — it will take almost three years for you to get this.
In the meantime, can you do one thing for me?
Can you just have a little faith that it will all work out? Can you trust in your Creator God to bring you through this? Can you quit wallowing in your grief, despair, pain, and fear?
Fear is what’s killing you. Lot was stupefied by fear. The angel had to grab him by the hand and drag him out of Sodom. He too lost everything and he too dealt with that poorly. Can you learn from him, trust in God, and just leave it all behind?
No. Of course not. If you could do that, you wouldn’t need my advice — right?
So, that’s why you’re getting this letter from your future self. I want to let you know that you and your family will survive this. But you can’t lose hope. Just act “as if” and keep doing your regular stuff.
You will learn this three years after you are unfairly fired from the pastoring job, and you surrender it all. You will accept that you are homeless, unemployed, and that you will lose everything of material value. But here’s the funny thing — that’s what you were afraid of when you left Colorado Springs in 2007, and that’s what you were afraid of when you found yourself unemployed in 2009.
If you knew you would later lose everything, you could have stayed in The Springs and remained a self-supporting pastor. Even if you lost everything, you wouldn’t have had to move and you would still have a faith family to embrace you. Plus — you wouldn’t have gotten all controlling, intense, and anxious during that last year of the church plant.
What are you thinking?
Oh — I remember. You weren’t, because it hasn’t happened to yourself yet. You are afraid you will lose your salary and health insurance. You are afraid you won’t be able to provide for your wife and kids. You are afraid of the political push-back from the denomination because you might take the church off-the-grid. And that’s exactly why they will push you to take a transfer out of state. That’s why they closed the doors on Common Ground — one of the most successful church plants in the denomination.
So, with low level fear, and a serious case of burnout, you will allow them to transfer you. You should just stay in Colorado, but that’s a judgement call — I’ll leave that up to you. This letter is really just to help you let go and be confident in the Lord’s provision. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, BTW.
So, now, after you move to Oregon, and the sledgehammer of destruction comes down on you, take it. It will crush you, and nearly kill you. I know — it will be the hardest thing you’ve ever witnessed — and you will feel like your life and your family’s life is in serious danger. It will be. You have good reason to be afraid.
Your marriage will be tested. Your survival will be tested. You will have days where you can’t get out of bed and you can’t be civil to your wife. But know this — and hear this loud and clear, you need to know:
God’s got this.
You will survive.
Your family will survive.
And you will come out on the other side doing better in many ways — spiritually, emotionally, and maritally.
In fact, one day, about six years after this all comes down, you will say to your skeptical wife:
“I’d go through all of this again just to come to the place I am today.”
She won’t agree with you — if you do it the way I did it. But if you go through this with curiosity, faith, openness, expectation, and relaxed contentment, it won’t be so hard on her and you’ll do even better on the other side.
I’ve just started reading a book by Laura Story. It’s called When God Doesn’t Fix It. On the opening page she writes:
“In that moment , we think life as we know it is over.
The truth is, life as we know it has just begun.”
This is true for you too. Will you accept it and keep moving? Or will you resist and fear it with every fiber of your being until you can do nothing but give up? Will you do this the easy way, or the hard way?
In the Fall of 2012, after losing everything, we moved to Valentine, Nebraska and we coasted. We let God heal us, we didn’t worry about food or shelter or medical care, and we just waited on God to heal us. It was awesome!
Let it be.
Let it go.
Be still and know that He is God.
Besides, you remember that prayer we used to say back in 1995? It was in the form of a song and we would sing it at the top of our mutual lungs as we drove into life’s adventures.
From the first Jars of Clay album, the song Worlds Apart, we prayed:
“Take my world apart.”
He answered that prayer. And here we are.
Don’t make this hard — just roll with it. You might even get to keep some of those friends I lost.
(and most likely it won’t take till now to get full healing)
Dashed dreams can create huge disappointments.
