We’d just started the process of planting a church when we got a phone call that changed our lives. We didn’t know it then, but we’d just begun the hardest year of our lives.
I thought that I’d start a new church from a position of strength. I’d accumulated a couple of decades of ministry experience. I had big plans and strong convictions, as well as a strong network of support. I knew we needed God’s help, and that the task before us was bigger than I could accomplish on my own, but I was determined to begin with a strong start.
Instead, within 10 days of beginning to work on this new church, our lives collapsed. My wife and I would just sit together in the morning quietly, unable to speak. I clung to the truth of Romans 8:26-27: that the Spirit helps us in our weakness when we don’t know how to pray. I trusted that God heard our prayers even when we couldn’t voice them.
Our season lasted some time. One day, over a year after our crisis began, I attended a support group for people who were going through the same thing. I was amazed to enter a room and find so many others. How could the world go on when so many of us lived on the brink of disaster? I listened to the story of a man, expecting to find hope, but his story ended in heartbreak.
I went home and wrote these words the next day:
It’s not a secret that the past few years have been among the most difficult in our lives. Right now it seems that we’re entering another tough season, facing some health struggles that are very serious. It’s hard when there aren’t any easy answers, and when the suffering seems more than one can handle.
I’ve pastored people through every kind of suffering you can imagine: all kinds of sicknesses, death, marriage breakups, mental illnesses, addictions, anxieties, job losses, immigration issues, and more. There’s a cost to this. In suffering alongside someone, you take on some of that suffering. It’s like taking an audit course: you’re there, and you hear the lesson, but you don’t do much of the homework, even if you want to, even as you watch them carry the full load and try your best to help.
It’s another thing altogether to enroll in the school of affliction. I sat in a room last night with others who are going through what we are, and realized that I am one of them. I’m not ministering to them; I am them. I would never choose this, but here I am, and there’s no turning back.1
I still remember how hopeless, how raw I felt.
Years have passed since that difficult period in our lives. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anybody. I am grateful, though, for the lessons that God taught us in that difficult year.
First, we learned something about the complexity of life and the reality of suffering. I’d known a little bit about suffering, of course. But I’d never been flattened by it. I grew to understand what Ray Ortlund once said: “I used to think that the book of Job is in the Bible because this story of suffering is so extreme, so rare and improbable and unusual. I thought the message of the book is, ‘Look at this worst case scenario. Now, come on. Surely in your comparatively small problems, you can find your way.’ I don’t think that anymore. Now I think that the book of Job is in the Bible because this story is so common.”
Second, we learned to pray together. I’d always struggled to pray with my wife. That year it became a matter of survival. Our routine of praying together every morning continues to this day.
Third, we learned about serving God in weakness. One day, my wife asked a question that reframed everything: “What if our weakness isn’t a distraction from planting this church, but is how God wants us to plant this church?” I thought we’d come into our community in a position of strength; learning to plant in weakness and dependence changed the shape of our fledgling church.
I wouldn’t wish that season on anyone. I don’t want to repeat it. I still can’t explain why we went through this struggle, but I know God taught us lessons we wouldn’t have learned otherwise that have sunk deep into my soul. For that, I’m grateful.
