Whenever something dramatic happens to you, some freaky
thing that you can’t explain, you should examine it for a postmark from the heavens.
Maybe somebody’s trying to get your attention. Even though I stopped traffic in
Northampton two weeks ago, something just as meaningful happened to me thirty
years ago: I signed up for a para-church campus ministry job, one in which I
would have to raise all my own funds, and something happened on the way to
almost quitting that job. The signing up is the fun part: the glory of
para-church ministry is similar to that of the para-military: it’s not the
officious arm of the church that does everything by the book and looks good in
uniform. No, para-church ministry is the sexier black-ops side of the church –
blending in with the locals and then targeting enemy facilities like MIT and
Harvard. So, raising money for what you do comes from folks in the church who
are tired of the blah blah blah of normal church life, looking to invest in
something more exciting, something fresh. Again, something sexy. The signing up
part is fun, but then came the fund-raising
side of things: the tough task of raising money changed my life but it was one
special incident that kept me in the game.
When I was new staff with Campus Crusade for Christ – now
known simply as Cru – the methodology we were supposed to follow was what I
adhered to faithfully: meet with church friends, ask them to be involved, and
then ask them if you can talk to their friends too. My first meeting was with two
of my favorite friends and fellow church members, Don & Laurel. It was the
first week in August and I went to Don & Laurel’s in my new navy blazer and
refused to take it off. Why? I wanted to prove that I was cool as a cucumber
and that the heat and humidity of a hot August night was nothing. Up to that
point, what I thought was supposed to be the “difficult” part of support
raising: keeping a smile through your sweat, wasn’t difficult at all.
Six weeks later, it was the lack of action that was eating
my lunch. Only a few donors were on board and I had so many miles to go that I
was losing the vision and ready to cash in my chips. My wife was working so we
had a little money coming in, but it wasn’t the money – it was the not seeing
any light at the end of the tunnel. The often talked about assurance that support
development would only be a hard thing at first and then would slip away and
never be that hard again was not happening. One morning, after my wife went off
to work, I decided to walk to the church and tell Pastor Rayner that I was
going to quit. He was the nicest guy on earth, full of empathy and
understanding. If anyone could make my quitting easier for me to swallow, it
was Ken Rayner. After walking to the church, I found out he wasn’t there. The
whole church was locked up. Now what? I’ll walk back home. Oops. I locked
myself out. Now I had to spend the rest of the day with my own
down-in-the-dumps thoughts. I decided to walk down to the train station to wait
for my lovely bride to come home. I had no wallet, no money, what else was I
going to do? It was going to mean several hours of waiting with my dark
thoughts.
However, here’s how God worked in a way that only I could
have ever understood. I sat on the bank of a creek and from a meaningful
distance I tossed a pebble into the very narrow creek’s water. But before I
made that one toss, I took great stock in the mental game of whether or not I
should even attempt the toss. I never hit things I’m aiming at, so why make
myself more miserable than I am now? After a few minutes of over-thinking it, well,
I threw – and hit the creek dead-center. Not in ten or twenty tosses would I
ever expect that to happen. Without thinking too much about it, not 10 seconds
later I threw a second pebble: dead-center again.
To you, this is just dumb luck or coincidence or pretty
decent skill. But to me, what I’ve just done is the impossible upon the impossible.
You know what I’m thinking: if God wants me to keep me in that crazy fund
raising, I’m going to have to hit this creek a third time, a kind of thing I
could never do once - but I’ve just done
twice. Y’know, no one else is present. No one can say whether I’m lying or
telling the truth. Thoughts lingered in my head between my ears for a good
while. Mind you I do not look for miracles behind every bush, I just do not go
there and think that if you do there’s something wrong with you. And I
seriously do NOT want to hit the creek, because I do NOT want to go back to
fund raising, but now I also do NOT want to face the nicest pastor in the world
with quitting. Before I can think my way into or out of anything else I fling
that third pebble, and it goes in again, dead-center.
Thirty years later, I have a theory. God Himself knows that
some of us are our own worst enemies and that we shouldn’t pray. We’d drive Him
crazy and other people crazy too, because we’re too determined to tell everyone
everything and not listen to anything. So, to protect God and man, whom we would
only mow down with our mental machine guns, God sends ridiculous events into
our lives that only we would understand. And it’s then that the praying and the
sharing can commence in clarity.
I gently stood up and stepped away from that creek bank like
it was a minefield. My poor wife got off the train several hours later and heard
about the miracle over and over as we walked all the way back to the house. She
was the one person with whom I achieved closure with over this incident, and it
brought us closer together as a result. Did she know how miserable I felt
before the pebble incident? No, until then, no one knew. I’m the guy who won’t
take off his blazer in a 90 degree kitchen, I’m too cool to let you see me
sweat. Anyway, we agreed together to give the fund raising three more days.
And, things turned out okay. How much did the pebble incident mean? Did I wizz
through support raising in record time? Not even close.
Over the years, while other gorilla movement mercenaries like
me with Campus Crusade were enjoying their campus ministry experience, I was out
raising support a lot of the time. Literally half the time. By the time I
passed through a five-year assignment at Penn, and then come back to Boston to
be at MIT, I’d spent four years of my first eight years in ministry raising support.
If you told me that would be my destiny eight years earlier, I wonder if I’d
ever made it. But, that’s what three in a row after a lifetime of missing can
do for you. There is an old saying in the Bible: you reap what you sow. After
those first eight years of sowing, the next twenty were some pretty good years
of reaping, or good enough: I just had to put in the first eight. Incidences like
those need sharing with someone for the sake of your own personal closure, for
bonds to be made, and for lessons to be learned. Two weeks ago, closure with
the farmer who knocked me over in Northampton reminded me of similar lessons. You
may not know how to pray – but that’s okay. God will get your attention somehow.
Dave Thom, Chaplain,
The Leadership Connection
