A Personal Testimony - Life

The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling.

My life has been devoted to helping people.  You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized.  In your mind you envision changing people lives, and because you are, you envision changing the world.  It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that.

But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you.  It’ll drain you.  At times it will drive you to despair.  You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all.  Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the world and the people in it are simply beyond hope.  Helping people will ask everything of you, and at times it will take everything from you.

As I sit with people day-in and day-out, I sit there with my own pain as well.  My own life has been marked by pain, by personal devastation, by losses that I thought impossible to survive, by abandonment that left me devastated, and by disappointments that crushed me to the point that I thought that recovery (of any kind) was simply a fantasy that was too painful to fantasize about. 

And so, I live the two sides of pain.  Those of the people that I’ve served for over forty years, and that of my own pain.  And there’s nothing heroic in that, as there are untold millions of people who set out each day to make the world a better place despite the wounds that they carry as they seek to heal the wounds that others carry.  And to all of you who are the walking wounded who have given their lives over to help those others who are wounded, whoever or wherever you may be, you have my deepest admiration.

But here’s the point in all of this.  Many people mock God as either someone who only exists in the feeble-minded or those who has to find security is some fabricated myth. Or if He does exist, he’s someone who’s incapable, or incompetent, or irrelevant, or out of touch, or outmoded, or inherently judgmental, or someone who’s failed us in entirely unacceptable ways…or however we’ve labeled Him.

But without hesitation, and without any sense of contrived religiosity, or syrupy idealism, or preachy verbiage, I can tell you that God is real.  I can also tell you that I would not be sitting here without Him.  And that’s not some cute or inspiring statement that’s supposed to trigger some emotion in you.  It’s my reality.  Life would have destroyed me without Him.  God is my rock in every sense of the word.  He is sturdy in the storm, both my own and those that I work with each and every day.  He is in the turmoil, but He is above it.  He is not the cause of our pain, but He is the solution to it.  He is not some idealized myth created by weak people who can’t face the realities of the world.  He is the greatest reality in all of the world.  He is what you need.  He is the everything in the middle of your nothing.

And I know this because I’ve lived it.  More than once.  In the pain.  In the darkness.  In the loss.  In the confusion.  In those moments of deep desperation.  When hope is something that I just can’t believe in any longer because life has left no place for it.  At those times in life when I can’t take the next step because I can’t get myself off of the ground so that I can try and take it.  I know that God is all of those things because I’ve watched Him do the impossible in my life, and I’ve sat next to tens of thousands of people, and I’ve watched Him do the impossible in lives whose situations were nothing but impossible.

Our culture would deny this.  In fact, it would ridicule it and do its level best to declare that all of this is the stuff of weakness, and foolishness, and stupidity, and ignorance.  And all I know is that I’ve watched it work too many times, in my own life, and in the lives of others to know that it’s far more real than the culture that would say that it is not.

If you’re lost today.  If your pain is deep beyond imagination.  If you’re standing alone in the darkness that is always a part of being alone.  If your dreams have died.  If your spouse has left, or your child has rejected you, or your finances have collapsed, or hope has eluded you, or if you’ve come to the point that you look in the mirror and you despise everything that you see looking back at you…whatever your situation might be, there is a God that’s big enough to heal you, lift you up, restore you, grant you hope, lay a new future in front of you and grant you the energy to achieve that future.  It is not impossible, for God is truly the God who pulls off the impossible. 

And how do that I know that?  How am I convinced of that?  Because He’s done that for me.  Because I’ve watched him do it for tens of thousands of people in over forty years of walking with wounded people.  It’s real, and regardless of who you are and what you’ve done, or where you’re at, or how deep you’ve fallen, or how dark your circumstances might be, it’s available to you.  Right here, right now.  Today, tomorrow, and forever.

Grab a Bible.  Find a church.  Call a pastor.  Get on your knees and pray.  It will work.  The road back might be long, but there’s a road.  And God will walk with you every step down that road.  Every step.  May God find you in your despair, in your confusion, in your desperation, in your darkness, in your hopelessness.  And may He create in you the life that you thought to be impossible, because that’s what He does.  That is my hope, and this is my prayer for you.