In 1990, my family and I moved to northern Virginia, where we joined Messiah UMC. It was a four thousand member church and one of the most spirit filled and spiritually fulfilling churches I have ever known.
In 1992, Cathy and I went on a weekend retreat called, “Marriage Encounter,” which teaches couples how to keep communication alive and effective. By the end of the weekend we learned that we each wanted two things. First was that we wanted a third child. I really wanted a daughter and by God’s grace Elizabeth was born a year later. The second thing was that we wanted to serve the church together, as a couple, as husband and wife.
That turned out to be more difficult than having a daughter. We went to see our pastor, Ken Whetzel, to seek guidance. As you may imagine, a four-thousand-member church has a lot of ministries going on, but the question stumped Ken. He explained that there were dozens of ministries we could do together but nothing distinctively needing husbands and wives. So we agreed to enter into a covenant of prayer about it.
Serious, probing prayer is a dangerous thing because God might actually answer. Though it took time, discerning God’s call to me become ordained was not very hard, but following it was very difficult. I did not want to do it and I fought it with all my strength. I had other plans, you see.
God won on Communion Sunday of March 1995. I had accepted the fact of God’s call by then but was determined to run from it. Maybe that’s why Jonah is one of my favorite books. Jonah is my soul mate, running away from God’s call. I had stopped praying, stopped serving in the church, and I really did not even want to go to church any more. God is at church, and the last guy I wanted to run into was God.
On that Communion Sunday, associate pastor Mark Miller preached. His text was from Revelation and was the letters from Christ to the churches. He read this passage, Revelation 2:1-5a:
1 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:
These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: 2 I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name and have not grown weary. 4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. 5 Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.”
Well, you could not have hit me with a two by four as hard as that passage hit me. I knew I had forsaken my first love. I was running away from Christ. I was immensely overwhelmed with sorrow, guilt, shame, and every awful emotion there is. I broke down right there in the pew and could hardly go up to take Communion. I’d rather have a root canal than spend another hour like that.
When the service was over, I asked Cathy to get Rev. Lucy Marsden to come help me. Lucy had been mentoring me in discerning my call. She came in, took one look, and said, “Uh, huh. Come with me.” She led me through a side hallway to her office, shut the door and gave me a box of Kleenex. “Listen,” she said, “I went through exactly what you are going through. Take it from me, you are going to be absolutely miserable until you know you are doing what God wants you to do.”
I knew she was right. I gave into God.
A few weeks later I had my retirement orders to leave the Army. I thought there was no way to go to seminary full time and support my family. We were renting a house in northern Virginia and the owner had sold it, so we needed a place to live. I had promising job prospects that had just fallen apart. One Friday night Cathy and I were talking this situation over and all at once it hit us: we were about to be homeless and unemployed with three small children. We had some difficult moments over that and then Cathy said, “We need to pray.”
She prayed first and it was very nice, though quite earnest. Then it was my turn, and I became quite angry at God. I prayed something (bitterly) like this:
“Lord, I am out of options. I have done everything I could to follow your call and got nothing. All you have given me is a greasy rope to slide down and you didn’t even put a knot at the end for me to hold on to. I’ve tried A, I have tried B, I have tried C, and nothing has worked. This was your idea, anyway, so you know what? I quit! I’m done. This is now your problem. Thanks for nothing. Goodbye!”
And the very next day . . . nothing happened.
But the day after that, Sunday afternoon, my father called me from Nashville. “You’ll never believe who I played golf with yesterday,” he said. Now this was screwy because my father was a very dedicated golfer and extremely skilled. He hated to play on Saturdays because that’s when all the duffers crowded the course. Dad’s foursome had elected to play first thing Saturday morning for some reason. But only three of them showed up, and the club was only letting foursomes onto the tee.
So Dad asked the starter whether there was a single player available. The starter looked up, saw a lone golfer driving a golf cart by and said, “Yeah, take that guy.” That guy was named Bob Armour. Dad got in Bob’s cart, and they joined the other two men.
Dad introduced himself and explained what he did for a living. Bob said, “I work down on 19th Avenue for the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church.”
“Really?” Dad said. “My son is trying to go to seminary, but he doesn’t have the money.”
Bob answered, “You tell your son to go to seminary, and we’ll get him the money.”
When my father told me that, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Everything became clear. My concerns of where to live and how to provide for my family were minor details, just small stuff. Let God worry about the small stuff. My problem was the big stuff, to do what God wanted me to do: go to seminary. So I did. And I found a home and a job fairly easily.
I had remembered my first love.
Tennessee Williams's 1931 story, "Something by Tolstoi," tells the story of Jacob Brodzky, a shy boy whose father had immigrated from Russia and owned a bookstore. The older Brodzky wanted his son to go to college. The boy, on the other hand, desired nothing but to marry Lila, his childhood sweetheart – a French girl as effusive, lively, and ambitious as he was contemplative and retiring. A couple of months after young Brodzky went to college, his father fell ill and died. The son returned home, buried his father, and married Lila. The couple moved into the apartment above the bookstore, and Brodzky took over its management.
The life of books fit him perfectly, but it cramped her. She wanted more adventure – and she found it when she met an agent who praised her beautiful singing voice and enticed her to tour Europe with a vaudeville company. Jacob was devastated. At their parting, he reached into his pocket and handed her the key to the front door of the bookstore.
"You keep this," he told her, "because you will want it someday. Your love is not so much less than mine that you can get away from it. You will come back sometime, and I will be waiting." She kissed him and left. To escape his pain, Brodzky withdrew deep into his bookstore and took to reading as someone else might have taken to drink. He spoke little, did little, and could most of the time be found at the large desk near the rear of the shop, immersed in his books while he waited for his love to return.
One year at Christmastime, fifteen years after they parted, Lila did return. But when Brodzky rose from the reading desk he saw only an ordinary customer. "Do you want a book?" he asked.
Lila was startled that he didn't recognize her. But she gained possession of herself and replied, "I want a book, but I've forgotten the name of it." Then she told him a story of childhood sweethearts. A story of a newly married couple who lived in an apartment above a bookstore. A story of a young, ambitious wife who left to seek a career, who enjoyed great success but could never relinquish the key her husband gave her when they parted. “Upon a stage in London she had a huge success” she described herself.
“She became a famous singer [she related] and traveled through all of the great countries of Europe. She lived a wild and a glamorous life, and for long periods she did not think at all of the [man] who had been her devoted husband, nor of the small, dusty bookshop where they had lived together. But the key to that bookshop, which her husband had given her the night that she left him, remained with her. She couldn't force herself, somehow, to relinquish it. The key seemed to cling to her, almost with a will of its own. It was an odd-looking key-old fashioned-heavy, and long and black. Her friends laughed at her for always carrying it with her and she laughed with them. But gradually she came to discover her reason for keeping it. The glamor of the new things with which she had filled her life began to fade and to thin, like a fog, and she could see-shining through them-the real and lasting beauty of the things she had left behind. The memory of her husband and of their life together in the small bookshop came to her mind more and more vividly and hauntingly. At last she knew she wanted to go back – she wanted to let herself into the bookshop with the key she had been keeping for fifteen years, and find her husband still waiting for her, as he had promised he would.”
But Jacob’s face showed no recognition. Gradually she realized that he had lost touch with his heart's desire, that he no longer knew the purpose of his waiting and grieving, that now all he remembered was the waiting and grieving itself. "You remember it; you must remember it," she pleaded, "the story of Lila and Jacob?"
After a long, bewildered pause, he said, "There is something familiar about the story. I think I have read it somewhere. It comes to me that it is something by Tolstoi." Dropping the key, Lila fled the shop in tears. And Brodzky returned to his desk, to his reading, unaware that the love he waited for had come and gone.
Have you forgotten your first love?
It’s easy to do, isn’t it, to forget our first love and not to recognize it when it returns. Either something so distracts us, or we have so completely lost who we are and what we care about that we no longer acknowledge our heart's deepest desire.
"You do not always have me," Jesus told Mary and his disciples, but that's not really our problem today, for Christ is risen and the Holy Spirit is always with us. Our problem is not whether we have Jesus, but whether he has us, because the disease of 21st-century Americans is that we love hardly anything more than being busy. We squeeze time out like a husk and in so doing we squeeze out time enough for love. We think that doing church work is the same as loving God when I can tell you from personal experience that doing church work is a great way to avoid loving God. Pastors are probably more liable to fall into this error than anyone.
But remember what Jesus said: “I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. ... Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.”
It’s time to fall in love with God again, is it not? God has never fallen out of love with us. And so, my parting words to you are simply this: Never forsake your first love. Always remember to love the Lord our God with all your heart and strength, and every day renew loving one another as yourselves.
It really is so simple as that.