It seemed like everything that could go wrong went wrong. From the very beginning, every little detail that could be missed, every aspect that might be overlooked, every piece of technology that could mess up, all collaborated at the same time to create a harmony of chaos on a Sunday morning. I spent hours preparing an interactive Power Point presentation for the sermon (I normally don’t spend that long on Power Point, but it seemed to really fit), and for some reason I just couldn’t get it to send via email to the tech guys so they could send it. The ice machine was left off, and it was the Sunday we have our Sunday lunch together as a congregation. On top of that, somehow the water heater was turned off. A couple of key announcements had slipped my mind, so they didn’t make the bulletin, and when I went to make announcements (which I normally don’t do, but the guy who does them was out of town this particular Sunday) I promptly lost the bulletin I wrote the information down in, and then couldn’t remember what to say. One of our key leaders had his truck break down on the way to church. When the service started, the sound equipment never worked properly, the internet slowed way down, the modem was reset, and everything went haywire. As soon as the service was over, I had multiple people, one after another, to lead, counsel, and minister to.
And so, here I stood, looking into the empty room that once held a potluck dinner, completely exhausted, emotionally fried, and just feeling empty. “Seriously,” I thought, “what else could have gone wrong today?”
I feel pretty confident that every leader of any ministry (or business, for that matter) has this feeling, but sometimes I think that guys in church revitalization and replanting end up with a whole bunch of these days, especially early on. Too much work coupled with too few workers in an aging building with aging technology leads to spiritual warfare being firmly planted somewhere in the fried mother board of a decades-old computer that is being asked to do things that didn’t even exist when it was built. In those times my first temptation, just like it was yesterday, is to look at everything that went wrong and think “what next? What else can go wrong?”
And when I do that, I sin. Massively. Against both God and the folks I am called to lead. When I focus on the little things that went wrong (or even the big things that went wrong, for that matter), I somehow value these things as more important than the providence and sovereign plan of the God who designed the day, who ordained the life expectancy of my sound board, and who placed me right where He did, right when He did, so that I would exalt His name because of and through all these things. In order for me to get frustrated by the things that went wrong, I had to miss a few things during the day:
1. I had to miss that the entire day was started by one of our folks who was so excited to share with us how she shared her faith the night before with a non-believer.
2. I had to miss that we had four tables full of people spending a half-hour in prayer for God to work in His church, in the community, and around the world.
3. I had to miss that the Gospel was sung and preached, and that Christ was exalted by His church in a community that needs the Gospel desperately.
4. I had to miss that I had good, deep, thoughtful conversations with people of all ages about real struggles, real pain and real issues, and that those people trusted me and our church to point them to the God of all comfort.
5. I had to miss that I personally only dealt with about half of these little technical issues because God has raised up and surrounded me with leaders who took care of these things, and did it with joy.
6. I had to miss that God is doing huge work in people who just a year ago wouldn’t have come within 100 feet of a church building.
7. I had to miss that our community is changing, our church is making a difference, our people are rejoicing, and that none of that requires perfectly operating equipment.
When it’s all said and done, yesterday was a tremendous day. There are so many great things that are taking place, so many changes that we have waited and prayed for, so many people that are growing and now doing the work of making disciples. And in the heat of the moment, I let myself die a death of a thousand proverbial papercuts. The reality is that only real thing that went wrong yesterday didn’t involve equipment; it involved my own heart. When I let my desire for a perfect performance cloud my perspective on the work of the Gospel, I somehow slip into worshipping the creation rather than the Creator, and I let my desire for perfection outstrip my belief in the sovereignty of God. And so, I sat this morning, and repented of my own desire to be God, to control the little happenings, to have what other wealthier churches have. And over a cup of coffee and a Bible, I was reminded that while I was thinking that everything was going wrong, God was orchestrating a ton of right things that I may not see for a long time.
I bet many of us are tempted to do this, aren’t we? We tend to look at and be distracted by meaningless things, and then let those meaningless things completely dictate the outcomes of our days. We major on the minors and try to manipulate the outcomes. And in the midst of that self-induced frustration, God gently speaks to our weary souls and reminds us that we would do a very poor job of managing the universe, and that we will find our greatest joy when we rest in Him.
And in that rest, we find that God uses all the little things that could go wrong, and He makes something greater than we could ever imagine out of them.
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