BOREDOM WASN'T ON MY BUCKET LIST

As a kid I wasn't much for church and was far less for preachers.  To me, both represented top-o-the-line boredom.  I wasn't sure about me as to what exactly life would unfold; but I knew boredom was not on my Bucket List.

So now I try to fill the very role I once despised.  And isn't that just like God?  Moses didn't want to go and Saul of Tarsus never dreamed he would one day go to prison in honor of the very name he once hated; Jesus.

So having been at this work now nearly forty years, I reach to young ministers with words of hopeful insight and support.

• IN THE BEGINNING do not be surprised that you haven't a clue who you are, what you are doing, or what you should be doing.  This is just all so weird.  Our deepest desire is to say all the right things to signal the church we are certainly their guy.  Yet, it is His guy that we are supposed to be and you must know that if you are going to stick with this the two will not always be seamless.
• IN THE BEGINNING you will tend to skip prayer to God for spending time cultivating praise for self.  Um...not good.  I dabbled in prayer and have grown in it a smidge.  Basically, we try to create life and harmony and success; all are God's role, not ours.
• IN THE BEGINNING you will gradually build in obligatory prayer time and still lack interactional prayer where you speak to God and He speaks to you.  Grow to anticipate a relationship with Him.
• IN THE BEGINNING you may encounter crud and crap thrown at you for men will despise you. Try as we may, we cannot please all men.  We have all of this coming.  We are supposed to be rejected. We are in ministry to follow Jesus, not Success Seminar speakers.  
• IN THE BEGINNING you will gradually discover that you are the least in the church.  You had hoped for better; but you are not.  We will hit our effective calling when we finally admit we are lost without Him.  Things, at that very point, change.  Weariness is transferred into wonder. Frustration and emptiness are translated into complete over-joy at what He is doing; not what you are doing.

• IN THE BEGINNING....you will want to know that forty years down the road IT IS STILL THE BEGINNING!!!!

Don't quit.  Don't give up.  No preacher you admire just happened to get the breaks you feel you never had. No.  The preachers you admire had all the right breaks--called brokenness--to learn to have a message that inspires you.

Now....as Jesus did....you go do....I Peter 2:21-25.