Christian Living

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Most Sunday School veterans can tell you how Moses died. In case you're not familiar with his story, after leading the Israelites out of Egypt and spending 40+ years wandering around in the wilderness, Moses finally has enough of his people’s endless whining and complaining and in a fit of anger he disobeys God. (I can relate very well to this portion of Moses' tale.)

God’s response to his tantrum is to forbid him from entering the Promised Land. He would get a bird’s eye view of the land of promise and as a bonus he would know who his successor would be. But he would not live to see his successor succeed. Moses would die in the wilderness along with nearly all of the Jews of his generation. Not the way most of us would choose to end our service to God, I’m sure.

Elijah’s departure would be the preferred method. Despite his pity party under the juniper tree, Elijah gets his second wind (literally) and finishes his ministry with an unprecedented bang. I mean, how awesome would it be to be able to pass the torch to your successor and then race off to eternity on a divinely provided chariot of fire? Yeah Lord, put me down for one of those…

Then there’s Jonah. Of all the people the Lord chose to tell us about in the Bible the one I wonder the most about is Jonah. Most people know Jonah by his experience with the whale but I’m not sure how many are familiar with the rest of his story. His whale of a tale comes fairly early in the book that bears his name (chapter 2) but his story doesn't end until chapter 4. What really got my attention about Jonah wasn’t the brevity of the book but the way it ends.

The book of Jonah just stops. No moral, no blurb about Jonah living to an old age and resting in peace. Jonah's story just ends with him sitting on a hillside overlooking Nineveh throwing a pity party that made Elijah's look like a home bible study. As a matter of fact, the very last verse in the book of Jonah is a rhetorical question asked by none other than God himself. That’s it. For all we know, Jonah died on that hillside and his carcass fed the buzzards. That’s definitely not the way I want to go.

Of these three servants of God, I'm came to realize I resembled Jonah the most. But that revelation wasn't as hard to swallow as the next one...

The first question that I am asked whenever my previous vocation comes up in conversation is “What happened?” People always want to know if there’s some juicy tidbit of gossip attached to my departure. I can only imagine what people must think when I share my story with them; in some cases I don’t have to imagine. Thanks to the very public shenanigans of some equally public ministers over the years it’s almost a foregone conclusion that if a pastor steps away from the pulpit there must be a scandal involved. After all, only a crazy man would voluntarily walk away from a job that only requires you to work one day a week, right?

Well, the truth of my departure is much less dramatic and far more humiliating. You see, I believed with all of my heart that the only reason I left the pulpit was I was sick in my soul with being a victim of politics, power struggles and just plain old selfishness.

The truth is I left because of my own unrepentant selfishness...

(To Be Continued...)

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