Interactions with God #54

The job with 786 Services was not going well.  It was extremely difficult to find the time to expand the business contracts, while being required to build bikes all the time.  To make matters worse, Martha showed up at a store where I was building bikes to tell me she was pregnant.  Don’t get me wrong, it was great news to me, though my man genes kicked in…”How would be we able to afford this?”  We had no health insurance, and very little money was coming in. 

Martha was also beginning to have problems with the pastor of our church.  On a particularly difficult event, she got blamed for an error in either accounting or scheduling.  Martha is good at what she does.  She also has absolutely no problem admitting a mistake, so when she was wrongly accused by the pastor in a rather angry way, she stood her ground.  He didn’t like that at all.  She did not make the mistake.  The pastor did.  After a rough day or two, this little tidbit of info finally came out, though an apology never did.  He did buy her a plant, though… 

At the time, I was technically the youth pastor, though I was never titled as such.  I was called the youth guy.  Yea, the pastor didn’t like me much.  Yes, he did make me the “youth guy”, but that was under the pressure of several of the elders.  They didn’t have the same problem with me that he did.  Their reasoning, was that I was already doing the job.  He just refused to let me be called pastor.

We had regular meetings where the pastor beat me up on how the youth group was going.  He would say things like. “I don’t like how the youth group is going.”  I would ask him what he didn’t like.  “He would say, I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”

I had never even been in a youth group before.  The only information I had on how to do this thing was the youth group books that he bought.  Yet he didn’t like anything I did that the books recommended.  The meetings went on like this, every week or so, for quite a while.  Finally after asking him again what bothered him, he confessed, “These kids don’t know who I am.”  At the time, this was not as disturbing to me as it should have been.  I guess you learn the warning signs later, after you realize what the warning sign signifies.  I told him “Of course they know who you are.”  “If it will help, you can always come and teach or run the group any night you want.”  He didn’t want to do that.  No, the problem wasn’t that they didn’t know him, but it was that they didn’t give him the looks of respect that he now craved.  They were teens for heaven’s sake!  They don’t look at ANYONE with respect!

All that just to say, the total amount of trouble and stress was getting to me.  Though I understood as pathetically as I did that God was using all this to work on me, the hurt of it had reached a boiling point.

I got mad at God.  While praying in that little two family apartment house, I began to yell at the God of the universe.  “I get the feeling that you are trying to get rid of me.  I get the feeling that you want me to give up!  Well, let me tell you something…I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE!!!  YOU THROW EVERYTHING YOU GOT AT ME!! GO AHEAD!  GIVE IT YOUR BEST SHOT!! I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE!!!!” 

I fully expected a cosmic backhand.  I really did. I also think that is what I wanted Him to do. Some reaction, just to know He still cared and noticed me.  I didn’t get that.  What I got instead, just blew me away.

He smiled at me.

I can’t really explain it. I didn’t see His face, but yet I did.  I KNEW He was smiling.  With finger still pointed at the ceiling, I became totally silent.  A wee bit confused at first, it took me only a few seconds to realize, that the determination and heart, I just expressed, was exactly what He wanted. 

I have seen Him smile quite a few times since, though not while losing my cool like I did that day. 

The only thing I have to say about that smile, is that it is definitely something I would live or die for.  It is the most wonderful sight in all the world.