Testimony.

My assignment for this Sunday:





The topic for your testimony is "God's goodness and what it means to the life of our church and how the new sanctuary will be of value to our church."  I was told to limit people to 5 minutes for these testimonies. 




Here's the text of what I'm saying today:

Good morning, friends.  One year ago, on this very day, I wasn't sure I would see Halloween, let alone another Christmas or another school year.  I have struggled with what the psychologists call "Major Depressive Disorder" my whole life, but last year was a whole new circle of hell.  It literally almost killed me.  Every day for about three months, I ended journal entries with a prayer:  God, please let me die. 

You will note that God has not yet obliged. [more after the break]

He and I have had plenty of conversations about it.  Most of them have been unpleasant, and even heated on my part.  I was sure, in some ways still am sure, that God had simply decided to let me flounder--to be the sovereign God whose will is inscrutable, whose notion of mercy and kindness looks nothing like mine.  I still don't know how to interpret all the things that happened--not to mention the parts I don't remember because the despair and the pharmaceuticals made a couple of months a blur.  I especially don't know how to interpret God's apparent silence during what was the worst year of my life. 

But, here's what I can say:  it is very much a sign of grace that I am still here for Weslee, the Big Brother, and Little Red, still here to do the work God gave me to do in the first place.   And I'll tell you that one of the means by which that grace was granted to me was through the weekly ritual of coming here, to this building.  Did I always come with a smile on my face?  Hahaaaaa--not usually, as I'm sure some of you can attest.  But even so, David Stephan would greet me with one of his cheerful booms.  Wendell Cates stopped me in the hall one Sunday to see how I was, even though I'd done the uniquely Baptist sin of bailing on the church committee he was chairing.  Tom Payne was his cheerful self Sunday after Sunday, as was Coytt Phillips.  Brian Smith, Brent Nethery, Pam Sliger, Jeremy Maddux, and many others--all helped me put one foot in front of the other, even without realizing how badly their help was needed. 

To me, the extent to which any facility--whether this room with its flat awesome ceiling, or an ultramodern amphitheater, or a multipurpose room, or an open-sided hut--allows us to be means by which God grants us grace is its goodness, its usefulness.    In 1633, a book called The Temple was published.  Its author was a recently-deceased Anglican priest at a tiny hamlet near Salisbury, England.  His name is George Herbert, and he wrote some of the finest religious lyric poetry in English history.  I want to end by quoting from the first stanza of one of his poems, called "The Windows":

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace.

May that grace keep shining brightly, church--we do not know whose life God may be saving through us. 

(photo of Herbert's parish church in Bemerton courtesy of the estimable J & W Adrian)