I find myself in the unenviable position of having to close down a church, not an easy thing to do in any situation.
But even more unfortunately, this is the church I planted myself, and tried to pastor through the most difficult moments of my entire life. The deepest experiences of my entire life are inextricably tied to this community, and so it is an especially heart-wrenching thing to see those ties severed.
For better or worse, the story of the past three years of my life have involved two major things: cancer, and Riverside. My family survived my wife’s cancer, but unfortunately, our church did not.
I think in some way, I was hoping the survival of our church would be a form of redemption for everything our people had suffered together.
If we could make it as a church, and eventually flourish, that would make all of our struggles worth it: cancer, miscarriages, loss, depression … it would be the sweet epilogue of our church’s story, our moment of great redemption. We could look back at our hardships and see God had actually accomplished something good and important through that season.
Things would make sense. God’s great plan and purposes would be revealed. Joyful memoirs would be written and sold by the millions.
But it was not to be.
The continuation of our church could not help us make sense of our past struggles, for it would succumb to the weight of all the burdens on its shoulders, like a running back being pulled to the ground by tacklers, inches away from the goal line. And that has been a terribly difficult realization for me.
I prayed and hoped our survival would help it all make sense, for the sake of all of my friends who have suffered so deeply, and for my own sake as well.
But in no way is this dynamic limited to my own situation or to church.
Many dating couples make countless mistakes together, hurting themselves and others for years. But their hope is that once they get married, all of this heartache and struggle will be worth it. Our marriage will redeem the mistakes we made, make everything better! And then … they break up, never to get back together again. Or they get married and their poisonous past catches up with them. But whatever the case, marriage was not the panacea they hoped it would be.
We do the same with our careers.
We work countless hours trying to climb this ladder or another, to attain this position or the other, knowing full well we do so at the expense of other priorities in life: God, spouse, children, self. But we do it because our hope is that when we make it, when we become associates, or chiefs, or superintendents, it will make it all worth it. Our families will understand why we spent so much time away from them, as will God. But they don’t. Or else we realize those things were not waiting for us to realize they were there and important. Or else we realize the ladder continues to extend upwards, far beyond what we had ever planned for ourselves. But we had hoped our success would make the sacrifices all worthwhile.
In these situations, we hope for an ending like Job’s.
