A couple weeks ago, I attended the funeral of the family member of one of my closest friends. We had walked this path together in many ways. The diagnosis had come to their family in the same season that we began to understand that my mom might not have much more time. We’ve both experienced plenty of loss in other ways over that same time, and so I think have been a uniquely vital friendship to one another.
I know some of his family’s stories. They are fun and funny. The service had plenty of those. There were incredibly moving moments and stories too, as you’d expect. The musicians led one of my favorite songs and I was glad to be at the back of the room to barely choke out the lyrics through tears.
But the thing that really stuck out to me was the faith of the one they were there to remember. Jesus had broken into his life in young adulthood and it just changed everything for him and for his family. It changed the trajectory of life, as well as the process of leaving this life.
My thought was that I want to be like him.
This season of life is, in so many ways, so different from anything I’ve ever experienced, and yet, simultaneously so very normal and mundane. The day to day tasks are not very different from other pastoring gigs. I meet with people for coffee. We talk about life and Jesus. I study Scripture and prepare to teach. I do a whole bunch of boring, behind the scenes stuff to just keep things rolling.
But it also feels totally foreign. I’m attempting to get an actual church going. It’s “new life” with new challenges in a way that I’ve never experienced before. And I’m doing it in the wake of a year and a half of profound and painful loss that has often felt like it knocked me upside the head in the middle of the day, or just paralyzed me for a while.
The juxtaposition of birth with death has been jarring at times. It has, by far, been the most difficult work I’ve ever done (including learning to be ok with my decreased capacity and trusting God in the midst of it). And it has perhaps opened my eyes uniquely to what I am observing here.
If you sit around in a circle and ask people how you can pray for them, you are bound to hear physical ailments. They weigh on us. They add stress onto our already busy and complex lives. They pull us toward being just a little less patient. They might frighten us, and lead us to contemplate our own mortality.
We all want healing.
Don’t let anyone fool you.
And we can all get a little turned around, no matter how many times we’ve heard it explained, about how faith interacts with healing.
“Oh God, if I just had a little more faith, a little stronger faith, a little more consistent faith, could I be healed?!”
The very idea of being healed by faith is just so attractive isn’t it? Just believe hard enough and all the pain could fade away. Who wouldn’t want that?1
But something feels pressed into my soul over the past year, that I began to feel able to articulate after the funeral. We might think that if we live by faith, we will be healed by faith. The reality is that if we live by faith, we will die by faith, and I think that’s actually far more hopeful!
I want to die by faith.
Faith means trust not merely in the Almighty having a plan, but trust in the good news of Jesus. It is trust in Jesus to take the penalty of my rebellion against God in his death and give me his righteousness and his life in his resurrection instead. It is trust that a God willing to suffer more than anyone is able, most certainly is not out to harm me or any of his people.
It is trust that the God who weeps is actually near to the broken hearted and the God who raises from the dead is actually causing all things to work together for good for those who love him… even my death. Easier said than lived, though, isn’t it? Nonetheless, it is who I want to be.
It is powerful. Even with a proper theological understanding, dying by faith is a more powerful story than healing by faith. The healed still die, after all. It is a display that the gospel is truth… is real… is reality itself.
It doesn’t even need to be a perfect faith. I can’t imagine facing death and not feeling some amount of fear. I don’t think anyone does. That’s not the point. It is the one in whom the faith resides, the one who is bringing us home, that is truly important here.
This is who and what I long to be.
I’ve seen it in my own family.
I’ve seen it in my friend’s family.
I see it in a family I know who are right now quietly yet faithfully dealing with multiple diagnoses that will end in death.
I see it in a mentor who suffered a stroke and lay on the floor with something that had fallen on top of him, praying to God “I’m ready, but I have a lot of people depending on me and a lot of ministry to do. I’d like to stay.”2
By God’s grace, my friends and family might see it in me, when the day comes. I pray it will be so.
UNION ATHENS NEWS
Speaking of new births, we have begun public worship!
The last few weeks have been really sweet, but of course not without some drama and anxiety! I think I am beginning to reckon with the reality that what we’re doing is “radical” on some level. I have walked with and helped so many friends in planting churches over the last twenty years that I may have lost a sense of what a wild calling it truly is.
There’s also the element of many movements these days beginning new congregations and campuses with large groups of people that are moving from one site to another of what is essentially the same thing, even though it may have a different name and Tax ID Number. Often the term “planting” is used for all of it, though these are really very different things.
When planting a church, the conventional wisdom is to find a niche. Find a “type” of person to target and then work on snowballing from there with those kinds of folks. That is a strange thing to contemplate when your entire vision is a church that cuts across the cultural divides of our day!
To put it mildly, that just ain’t gonna work for us. Instead, we are leaning on God to gather to himself those who are energized by this vision, and called to this mission, as well as those who are truly coming to know Jesus and his gospel.
If you find yourself on this blog, and you long to see a church that loves and serves cross-culturally, I challenge you to pray about joining us. Perhaps that is not what God has for you, and you might seek to help in another way.
But perhaps it is exactly what God has for you.
So would you pray?
I’ve heard from many of you outside of Athens who are talking about us to your friends here in town. Thank you so much (and please continue)! We will take all the help we can get in getting the word out about our name, vision, and mission!
I don’t know what the timeline looks like exactly, but over the course of this year, we need to grow toward a point of sustainability. So, please also be praying for us to connect with the right people to come along with us in the coming days and months!
For any reader who may actually be struggling with whether or not that is true, let me assure you that this is not what Jesus, or anything in Christian Scripture is teaching. What a profoundly cruel doctrine, particularly because it has no real grounding in the Bible. Friend, if you are not yet acquainted with the Bible enough to know that, please become deeply acquainted with it before attempting to teach anyone else and passing on such a detrimental thought.
Sometimes, particularly for those of us who may find ourselves dealing with depression severe enough that we want a way out of this life, to die by faith is actually to choose to live, and choose to fight to live.
Beautifully said Garrett🩷😭.