From New Orleans, Bittersweetly

Part of our team with John, our tour guide through Arabi and St. Bernard's Parish

Our whole team plus some of our fellow Habitat volunteers from the "other" Washington

To those of you following this blog during United Life's trip to New Orleans last week, thank you for your support and prayer. We arrived safely back at SeaTac on Saturday night, where we were picked up by three kind United Lifers willing to give up their late weekend evening to help us finish finding our way home.

Our return to Seattle, I have to admit, was bittersweet, though perhaps for unexpected reasons. The trip went pretty well: Habitat for Humanity, the organization that we partnered with, did a great job of both providing meaningful work for us all week long, as well as giving us the opportunity to get to know the neighborhoods of the homes we were helping to build. Yet despite our successes, I returned feeling somewhat a failure.

I've always judged myself. I suppose I've believed that being able to criticize myself before anyone else had a chance to helped me to stay on people's good sides. But I wonder whether this was ever really the case. Yes, judging yourself can at times keep you from offending others. But no one can spend their whole life trying not to do something. We're built for things, not to avoid things, and anytime I try to make everyone happy it seems that no one ends up happy, including myself.

During our team's time in New Orleans, I started to have this sense that my leadership was not adequate. I didn't feel like I did a good job leading, which is a depressing thought when that's what you've been hired to do. I wondered if I said enough. I wondered if I said too much. By the time I returned to Seattle this feeling started spreading into other areas of my life as well. If I couldn't lead a trip, I questioned just how well I was doing leading a church. I wondered if my sermons were having any real impact. I wondered if our drive for more of our people to serve and for our ministry to become more missional was just more spinning of wheels in mud. I wondered I was ever going to see anybody's life really change. I had the feeling this Sunday that our congregation was falling away, member by member, at first in spirit, but then, inevitably, physically as well. Nobody was following, and I had myself to blame.

Since then I've had a couple of good conversations, one with the United Life board who prayed for me during our monthly prayer meeting, the second with a mission team member who shared what happened for him spiritually during the trip. Both of those helped me to see that my perception of reality was off: that things were happening, even if I felt otherwise. God was moving. Period.

With that said, this isn't to say that I don't need to be sharpened, that there isn't something to learn from whatever mistakes I may have made. But mistakes should never lead a follower of Christ to despair, because that's not where he's leading us. If anything, his love for us is so strong that no failure of ours can ever break it, and that means that there is always a real hope for tomorrow.

So where do I go from here? I know I can't just will myself to hope. For this, I'll draw a lesson from the hammer. On our last day in New Orleans, our team put in a half-day of work on a house that was in need of a roof. While another team worked on installing the roof, part of our United Life team worked on the ceiling, effectively squeezing us between the two. This sometimes meant we only had an inch or two to lift the hammer off of the nail and bring it back down. Anyone's who's hammered a real three inch nail into a real piece of solid lumber knows how long that sort of hammering takes. But even though many of my strikes felt as if they weren't moving the nail even a millimeter, the truth was it was moving. Even if I couldn't see it, I was driving the nail slowly deeper.

How often in life does it feel like nothing is moving, not even a millimeter? I think that's what started to drag me down as I questioned my leadership and the progress of United Life under my pastorate. But I had to keep swinging the hammer, even if I could only lift it an inch. That meant little things like hanging out with people when I just felt like going home. That meant showing up when I felt like disappearing. That meant letting myself into situations where I wasn't going to present myself as "the perfect pastor", and having enough faith that God would still be able to do something.

Sometimes the finish line is pretty far away and we're tempted to stop taking any steps forward. This is understandable, but foolishness. Let's keep each other from falling into that.