Jonathan Martin - Help is on the Way: And Love is Already Here

ZONDERVAN

Help Is on the Way

Copyright 2016 by Jonathan Martin

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

ePub Edition May 2016: ISBN 978-0-310-34664-7

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

All of the text in this booklet is taken from How to Survive a Shipwreck. Copyright 2016 by Jonathan Martin.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published in association with the literary agency of D. C. Jacobson and Associates LLC, an Author Management Company. www.dcjacobson.com.

Cover design: Curt Diepenhorst

Cover photography: Shutterstock

Interior design: Kait Lamphere

First Printing April 2016

Foreword by Shauna Niequist

Chapter Two: How Not to Survive a Shipwreck

Chapter Five: God Loves Monsters

Chapter Six: Choose Your Own Adventure

Chapter Seven: Dont Fight the Wind

Chapter Eight: Starting to See

Chapter Nine: The City beneath the Sea

Acknowledgments

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls;

all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

Psalm 42.7

the tempest
the darkness
the waves that you sent
just the saltwater taste
of these songs of descent

still sinking
still losing
the waves wont relent
I wont go down quiet
this is a song of dissent.

no flailing
no swimming
Im not innocent
water fills my lungs
This is my song of descent.

Only those who are lost will find the promised land.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

G. K. Chesterton

T he experience of drowning, through the lens of faith, is what Christians call baptism. But no matter what you call it, the sensation of going under is entirely the same.

It was Easter Sunday at the church I founded in my hometown. I had preached on the first words of Jesus when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection: Do not be afraid. I said you could sum up the whole of Gods message to humans throughout Scripture and throughout history in those four wordsDo not be afraid. I told our people these are words that are spoken when it would seem to us we have every reason in the world to be afraid. That God speaks them when he is about to do something new. And in the midst of this sermon on death and resurrection, I announced I was leaving.

I felt like I was the pastor who stole Easter.

Of course, there was a part of me that felt ridiculous announcing my departure on the Sunday with the biggest attendance of the year, when everybody has dressed up and brought their friends. But I was not going to keep grabbing every rung of the ladder on the way down, trying to salvage the unsalvageable. I was not going to stay plugged into the ventilator. The only message I could preach was the only message my life could be at that point, and it was the message of death and resurrection.

Painful as it was, I knew this had to be my last sermon. I could not drag the ending out any further. I was over. I told my congregation I would be there the next Sunday for a transition service, but I would not preach again. The message of death and resurrection had finally grabbed hold of me, not in the way it grabs hold of a preacher but in the way it grabs hold of a man. I had no idea what I was walking into. I was stepping into a starless night. I only knew it was time to cash in all my chips on the hope that resurrection could be a better existence than the one I was sort of maintaining.

At the conclusion of both services, I baptized people for the last time at this church I had founded and given my life to. I felt the holiness of each of them as I gently lowered their bodies into the water, the tour guide for their own descent. I was almost done baptizing people when Heather came out of her pew with lips quivering, her face contorted in anguish. We had just buried her father, Herman, a few weeks before, and everything about his early departure was filled with ambiguity. It had been a torturous ride for herthe ordeal of her fathers fall, the many hours in the hospital, the celebration that he was better and resuming normal life, the second tragic turn that led to serious decline, the weight of the decision to pull the plug.

Heather kicked off her flip-flops when she got down front and practically threw her cell phone onto the stage. As she took off her glasses and I helped her into the pool, it was not the cherubic look of a new convert on her face, excited about new faith in Jesus. It was a mix of resignation, heartbreak, an almost angry determination, and yet a kind of hope too that if she could jump into the river that carries us toward death, there could be new life for her too. Already, my nerves were jangled and my heart tender, the day being what it was. But baptizing Heather that day was something other entirelyI cant bear to not capitalize that. It was something Other.

It was my last opportunity to perform one of the sacraments I most held dear, to wash my hands in the holiness of Gods sons and daughters. Heaven was skidding into the ground, and the people just kept coming and coming.

By the time I finally got done baptizing people at the second service, I looked to my right at Teddy Hart, my friend and staff pastor. He had been with me since year one, transitioning from a life of more or less biding his time in Cleveland, Tennessee, to becoming an extraordinary preacher, pastor, and friend. A sensitive soul, Teddys eyes were already red from all the tears he had shed that morning.

Teddy... do we have time for one more?

Since it was Easter, I was wearing a suit and tie. I did not bother to change; I only took off my shoes. And I joined my people in the abyss. I loved them, and I didnt want to miss my one and only remaining opportunity to jump into the pool with them. I didnt have anybody else to baptize. My last official act as a pastor was already done. I was going to the pool, not as anybodys priest, but as one of them.

The water was cold. My heart was hot. Baptism has a celebratory aspect, but I had no delusions that those moments were anything less than my own funeral. I did not yet know what kind of man I would become when I got out of the water. I had no idea what my life would become. Like the lame man at the pool of Bethesda in the gospels, I only knew angels had been in this water, and I wanted my broken-down body in the pool, in the wake of them.

The life I had built was over. Everything I had been, I was no longer. I had no sense that the water of baptism would magic me into something more, like Clark Kent-suddenly-turned-Superman. But could the water make me, somehow, more human? I wanted to go to the pool because I wanted to embrace my full humanity in the company of my friends, vaguely aware that becoming more human is to have the image of God in us renewed.