Choose Your Own Adventure

“You know I ran across an old box of letters while I was bagging up some clothes for Goodwill”

So begins the song “Thankful” by Caedmon’s Call.  While the song speaks about realizing that past sins often persist into the present, my realization this morning was somewhat different: never in my past could I have predicted my present. 

            Recently I’ve been rearranging the rooms in my house with one of the biggest projects being a move of my bookshelves.  In the process, I’ve looked through books and evaluated which should be on the shelf, which should be in a box, and which should be taken to Half Price Books.  To be thorough, I’ve even brought books from the studio and the attic into play.  While in the attic I discovered a box full of youth ministry books.  Now I don’t think I’ve ever consciously stated it, but I think I’ve kept them for all these years with the dim hope that one day I might somehow return to full-time ministry.  Similarly, although I don’t articulate it, I feel that—aside from whether or not I would want to return—I am no longer qualified to be a pastor, and therefore that option is closed for me.  But these conflicting ideas met forcefully this morning as I contemplated either donating the books to a pastor who could use them or simply selling them for whatever I could get. 

            I didn’t expect to become sad when weighing these options, but I did.  I felt a sadness that I couldn’t go back and an uncertainty when it comes to what is ahead.  If I thought fifteen years ago that I would always be a pastor, and I think now that I will simply work as a teacher until I retire…how wrong might that thought be?  My recent divorce factors in mightily as well: what will the future hold, relationally?

            There is a scene near the end of “That Thing You Do” in which Lenny says to Guy “Skitch” Patterson, “Hey Skitch—how did we get here?”  That quote comes into my mind a lot these days.  How did I get here?  I’ve often thought of life as a book with God as the author, outside the constraints of the story, perfectly orchestrating the events and leading me to a harmonious ending through a fairly stable, linear timeline.  Pampered and selfish as that may sound, I must confess that I always thought that I would be in ministry, be married, raise kids, grow old and die.  Nice and simple.  But now my life feels like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, like the ones I loved to read when I was a child.  The best part of the story for me was that if you made a choice that led to, say, falling off the top of the Statue of Liberty, well you just flip back to where you made the errant decision, choose a different course, and proceed to a happier ending.  But as Andrew Osenga says, “This is  not a ball game, it’s not a school play, it’s not a book that lets you bend the page.  This is the one life, these are the passing days.  I don’t want to look back and see I’ve wasted.”  How did I get here?  Answer: the choices I’ve made.  Where do I go from here?  Answer: anywhere but back.  I don’t get a “do-over.”  I can’t unchoose what was chosen.  I don’t get to escape the pain and uncertainty by reading an alternate course.  In some ways that’s okay.  The Avett Brothers sing, “But I can’t go back, and I don’t want to, ‘cause all my mistakes brought me to you.”  I’m pretty pleased with my life now: I love teaching and having the summers off, I love the people in my life, I’m happy to (occasionally) pursue the dream of being a painter.  But the Avett Brother’s also sing, “The weight of lies will bring you down and follow you to every town ‘cause nothing happens here that doesn’t happen there.  So when you run make sure you run to something and not away from ‘cause lies don’t need an aeroplane to chase you anywhere.”  And it is with regret that I must recall that I left the ministry…and began my marriage...with ignoble circumstances.  I’ve run from some of my bad decisions.  I’ve hoped that going to a better place might make me a better man, but the recovery movement is correct: “Wherever you go, there you are.” 

            The greatest sadness is not a result of any vocation or relationship I have lost.  “There are dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot weather.”  The only days I really want to return to are those in which I felt close to Jesus.  As a teenager in the Berean youth group I was passionately on fire to do anything Jesus would have me do.  I was devoted to serving him as a youth pastor.  Even in the early days of teaching my heart still felt that, even though I wasn’t vocationally a minister, my whole goal was to serve Jesus and impact lives for him.  After this past year I just don’t know.  I feel dead.  He feels far (from my movement, not His).  And if I could change anything, all I would ask is to go back to the days when I loved Him well and knew He loved me.