Where Was God When…? Blog Tour

When’s the last time someone didn’t meet the expectations you had for them? Like 5 minutes ago, right? We expect to get our burger in the drive-thru without ketchup just like we ordered it. Three blocks later our expectation of burger goodness is shattered by no ketchup. We want our money back…or a chance to explain to the dude that made the mistake just how big a moron he is. And then there’s the really big expectation with big disappointments. Sometimes the blown expectations of others wreck our reality and our big expectations explode right along with theirs. It’s those kind of expectations that are loaded with emotional pain and trauma.

In a new book called Where Was God When…? Ric Garland tells his story of shattered expectations:

“When I was in college, I loved spending time with people, and especially dating girls. I never got serious with any of them—what guy does when he’s young? One day my mother wanted me to meet this girl. Right, I thought, I’m going to meet a girl that my mom wants to introduce me to. It was New Year’s Eve and I was home. We went to the church and she introduced me. Well, I hate to admit it but, uh…she was pretty. She was smart, witty, challenging, engaging, and we just hit it right off. I fell in love with Karen, and my life changed, with this amazing girl becoming a big part of it.

Our relationship went up and down. We got close and then she backed away. We got close and she backed away. I was still in college, and she was teaching at a Christian school. When she decided she was going to go to Japan and teach some missionary kids for a couple of years, I thought it was great, but once she was gone, my heart broke. I had to tell her the truth. So, I wrote her a letter and told her I loved her. Right at that time she came up with some physical problems that complicated some things emotionally and spiritually, and she had to come home.

At the same time, I was a missionary and was attending a missions conference an hour and half from home. After it was over, my dad and a friend met me in the back. My dad took me down to an office and told me that Karen had put a noose around her neck, kicked a chair out from underneath herself, and hung herself that morning.

Have you ever had that knot in your stomach that you couldn’t get rid of? Did you ever feel the pain so hard that you couldn’t explain it to anybody? I felt that. I felt that rejection.

I remember for weeks afterward driving down the road and literally seeing her hanging from a noose, calling out my name.

Where was God? I was supposed to marry her. I loved her. Why did God let that happen?”

Ric’s expectations of love and marriage were obliterated. He felt like God had let him down. From Ric’s perspective God had dropped the ball. God “allowed” someone to slip through a cosmic crack in our imperfect world. How could a perfect God allow that to happen? Where was God, exactly?

God was there the whole time. His love for Karen and Ric never wavered. It was rock solid. Still is. So why doesn’t God in all of His perfection make our life perfect, too? We want God to intervene and make our lives into what we think is a perfect reality. Our expectation is that we want God in all of His perfection and flawless character to adopt our flawed view of what perfect is. We want God to craft and control the circumstances of the world into our design of how we think things should be.

God isn’t going to make changes that aren’t in line with His character. The Perfect Being doesn’t need to exchange perfection for imperfection. And for us to think that He’s going to change the results of things to what we want would be asking Him to do something imperfect.

Okay, so God’s nature and character never change. But we humans, on the other hand, tend to react to the pain in life with inconsistent spiritual and emotional responses. We set our expectations of other people in a concrete mix of “must” and “should” and react with disbelief because the world we live in is made up of “maybe” and “I’m not sure.”  In other words, life isn’t neat and clean all the time. It’s pretty unpredictable and messy. When we demand things must go a certain way and they don’t, we set ourselves up for disappointment, anxiety and anger.

People are going to disappoint us because they’re imperfect. To expect perfect or near perfect responses from imperfect humans isn’t realistic. We tend to forget that, though. That means that disappointment, anxiety and anger aren’t going to go away soon. The good news is, we can have a lot less emotional pain by changing how we think (Romans 12:1-2; Philippians 4:1-8).

It’s really helped me to reflect on the true, right, lovely and pure things in situations that are less than perfect. How do you think you would deal with a death like Karen’s?

What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do – book review

What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: 8 Principles for Finding God’s Way is a short-but not-so-short book designed to help people who are overwhelmed by life. It speaks to addiction and to life situations, especially relationship issues. The book has eight short chapters and some very good bonus material. Cloud and Townsend give solid, clear advice on how to cut through the emotional fog of addiction and relationship problems. That’s the short part.

The not-so-short-part is that the authors’ clear, solid advice comes in eight overarching principles, nine qualities and characteristics of good company to keep, six tips for leaving the past behind, seven areas to take charge of one’s life, nine facets of life that God should lead, and three principles to begin one’s journey (with a subset of “ten key reminders” in how to get it all done). I just got overwhelmed. Again.

To be fair, everything Cloud and Townsend say is good. Really good. Their real life illustrations are compelling. Their advice is theologically and psychologically sound. The layout and design of the book are inviting and bring clarity to the overall message. But the eight principles turn into, if I’ve counted correctly, fifty-four things a person needs to do to gain clarity in their dire situation.

I need a Xanax to finish the review.

Should you buy this book? If you’re a counselor and want a good overview of the counseling process in a 134 short pages, you should buy the book. If you’re a person who’s facing a personal crisis that’s overwhelmed by life, start with a good counselor.

When Money is Tight it’s All About “We”

This Christmas, the Miller family will have less financial-driven stress than we’ve had in recent memory. That’s right less financial stress. That’s because we had our own personal recession four years ago. We’ve (I’ve) learned a lot and know what it takes to get by on less. But first a little background…

Four years ago I lost my job as a pastor and my income fell to 40% of what I had been making. It had been way too long since I had left my Fortune 100 job. Skill sets for the new marketplace had changed, so I worked as many as three jobs at a time to  keep income coming in.

There were plenty of times when we had to go to Kroger to exchange coins to get a few dollars for gas because there was less than $10 in the checking account…with three days left until payday. This gave us a whole new insight to disposable income. A big part of the problem is that we had incurred an unhealthy amount of unsecured debt. The personal lending bubble burst for us before we even knew who Bernie Madoff was or thought the U.S. government would have to bail out General Motors.

I normally hate lists, but I’m communicating information here. It’s your job to do the transformation. So here goes. Here’s some lessons we learned that may help you.

- We. Not me. Not her. Not them. We. Ken and Michelle. A unit. A team. A couple.

We.          Us.         We.       One.

- We learned to communicate more efficiently. We learned to fight fair. You’re going to fight as a couple. For those with self-righteous leanings, I’m sure that you guys dialogue vigorously or something retarded like that. We fought about money. But we learned to fight fairly. OK, we got better at it. We’re still honing our skills at communicating information rather than emotion. Why? When money is tight, you wanna fight. To fight fairly, you can read this post for better technique.

- We learned to communicate often. We talked constantly about our situation. If you don’t have much money, you better know who’s spending what, when they’re going to spend it, and when more money is coming in. Since communicating often about money is hard for us humans to do, this one will take the most effort. It’s just plain uncomfortable to talk about money when there’s seems to be no money to talk about.

- We learned humility. We had stellar credit. Had. It’s rebounded dramatically in the last 18 months, but it tanked because some of our debtors were more important than others. We learned our self-worth wasn’t tied up in our FICO score.

- We learned to tweak our personal financial systems. We averted financial “disaster” because we had a good personal financial system in place. We had and still have a budget, but we went from a budget that was updated every couple of months to a budget that was updated every few days. We issued purchase orders. Yep, verbal purchase orders for anything over a predetermined amount. We spent our money together. We also used more cash and less debit card. Dave Ramsey is no fool.

- We learned that kind and generous people actually exist in the local church. It’s not exactly a financial lesson but it may be even more important. Pain and suffering is best experienced in a community of faith.

Anybody want to weigh in and let everyone else know what you do to get by when money is tight?

Cadillacs and Church Planting Movements

The first mission trip I remember going on was with my parents when they went to Mexico when I was three.  The only things I remembered from that trip is that I let one of my new Mexican friends play with my six-shooter cap gun and that I really liked sitting on the backseat armrest to see of out my dad’s ’61 Sedan DeVille.

Some things have changed since then.  The ’61 Cadillac has been replaced by an Airbus A330 22, worn out buses, and bora boras.  Handwritten letters and land line phone calls have given way to email, texting, and surfing the Interwebs via BGAN.  Some things haven’t changed since I was taken on my first mission trip…like being involved in a church planting movement, medical clinic, construction, orphan care, pastor training and cultural tourism.  This trip, thirty people from six different churches in the United States and Germany spent six days on the ground getting an incredible amount of things accomplished.

Our church partners with Helping Hands in Uganda primarily to be involved with a church planting movement but also because they are doing some great work with orphans.  Grace Calvary Christian Ministries is an indigenous church planting movement that is aggressive and is looking to plant churches where there isn’t an evangelical presence. Plans are to plant at least six churches on the banks of Lake Victoria where there’s no churches. Our team helped support that this time with survey work in some of the newer churches and I met with 21 pastors to get information for some marriage enrichment material they’ve requested. I thought their request for marriage material in a culture that still embraces polygamy was interesting.

We attended a baptismal service for 61 people.  You may say, “baptism, schmab-tism” but it was really incredible.  The people getting baptized were from multiple churches, mostly adult and they had all started their relationship with Christ within the last 30 days.  There was even one guy that told us that God had spoke to him while the baptismal procession was going by and told him that he “needed what they have.”  Oh yeah, and there hadn’t been a big evangelistic push or crusade.  This was the Church doing what the Church was designed to do.  You don’t see that happening in the average American or European church.

Just had a thought.  Maybe Satan deceptively nurtures the inherent materialism in humans in order to get us to buy into the false belief that if we have stuff that faith is unnecessary.  Most Ugandans don’t have that problem. They’re poor as dirt.  They live without air conditioning, raise their own food, drink their beer from a common pot through reed straws and still have unsanitary water and sewage conditions.  When you don’t have much you tend to be more open to spiritual things.

The “mother” church of the church planting movement, Busia Calvary Church, is responsible for starting an influential orphan ministry in Busia.  Their philosophy is that they can help more kids by providing a free school for the orphans to attend.  They provide over 600 kids uniforms and shoes, a meal (usually porridge and the side of the day like beans, rice, or greens) and a government recognized education. When a team comes in, a medical clinic for the kids is led by Dr. Brenda Kowalske.  The cool part of partnering with a smaller organization is that you have access to the child you sponsor.  The picture on the right is of me and our family’s sponsored child Irene.  One of the most eye opening things was when Dr. Richard Kowalske was going to get construction supplies and brought 11 drug addicted street kids back with him.  His offer: If they get off drugs they’ll get two meals for 30 days, new clothes, and a place to sleep on the condition that they attend class every day.  I did the intake on all of the kids since the headmaster was in training with his teachers and I was the only one free to do it.  Four of the kids (average age of nine) were straight up stoned on inhalants when they got there.  Five of the other kids weren’t high but they used.  One 16 year old boy was just orphaned and homeless.  I cried the next morning when 9 of the 11 boys were back.  I don’t have a rep for crying about stuff like that.  Just sayin…

The construction part of the team got a lot done by prepping and pouring a floor for the wash room in the kitchen at the school. They also poured concrete pillars for the Busia Calvary Church building that had been destroyed by an unusually strong thunderstorm. I have to give credit where credit’s due…a group of 7th grade Ugandan boys made sure that we always had concrete ready. They mixed it by hand on the ground for two days straight.  They are strong and hard working young men.  It proved to me that a lot of American 7th grade boys (and men) are soft.

The lessons I learned on this trip:

• You should be able to get along with anyone at some level. Thirty people worked like a well oiled machine on this trip. “Accept each other just like you have been accepted in Christ Jesus” (Romans 15:7).
• Each church should do foreign missions in a way that matches the culture of their church. Not every church is wired to do 10/40 missions.  Not every church is designed to do construction. Every church should equip its members in how to share their faith story.
• Find a missions organization that’s smaller and more personal. It doesn’t sound as cool when someone asks “So who do you partner with in missions?” but the personal connection factor is huge.

Tell me some of your stories. How your church does mission work?