Peter Chin - Blindsided by God: Disappointment, Suffering, and the Untamable Goodness of God

I s this it ? I thought to myself.

I sat in my front-row chair, elbows on my knees, pretending to be deep in thought and prayeran old pastors trick. In truth, I was resisting the urge to look behind me. After twenty seconds of courageous resistance, I finally succumbed and stole a glance backward at the congregation.

Oh, man, is this it ? Ten people?

I took out my phone to check the time: 10:35 a.m. Well, no point in telling our praise leader that she should start late, since we were already five minutes behind schedule. And so with resignation, I rose from my position of false piety to tell her to begin our service. Lets get this started, I wearily thought to myself. That way, we can just get it over with.

Yes, sometimes even pastors feel this way about Sunday mornings.

The songs we sang that June morning in 2010 testified to the joy and hope that we have with God: There is joy in the Lord.... There is hope in the knowledge of Him. These were words I had sung many times before with great conviction. But not that day. My lips moved, but my attention was focused on the reality just beyond my peripheral vision: Nearly a year after planting this church, we had only ten people in attendance.

Even though I should have been thinking about God, I found myself doing something far less edifying: comparing myself to my peers. Across the country, I had half a dozen friends who had started churches around the same time I had, and they had more than ten times the number of people attending on Sundays. Their church websites were an elegant ballet of Flash animation and vintage photo filters, replete with liberal use of Helvetica font. Ours looked like it had been created in the 1990s and best viewed with Netscape Navigator. To my coldly logical mind, all of this could mean only one thing: I had failed as a church planter, and as a pastor. Perhaps even as a human being.

As the final song concluded, I plodded to the front of the small ballroom we rented to share the sermon. It was taken from a passage in Luke 7 where Jesus cares for a widow who has just lost her only son. Unlike other miracles in the Gospels, there is no great act of faith by or on behalf of this widow; she doesnt press through the crowd to touch his cloak, nor is she lowered through the roof by faithful friends. Truthfully, she does not seem to even be aware of Jesus at all. Instead, it is Jesus who takes the initiative to comfort her, not with a grand sermon, but by simply saying, Dont cry. How comforting it is to know that in the moments we lack the strength to come to Jesus, Jesus instead comes to us.

As I shared this, I looked out at our own tiny congregation and saw that widow in many of us: a young woman who had bravely struggled with bipolar disorder since her teenage years and counted every year that she did not commit suicide as nothing short of a miracle; a refugee from Iraq raising her young son while violence consumed her home country; a couple struggling with the loss of a pregnancy, a diagnosis of cancer, and then another miscarriage.

And then my eyes fell on my wife, Carol. She held our squirming younger daughter, Katie, in her arms, while our older daughter, Sophia, sat patiently beside them. Carol was bald. We had shaved her head a few months prior, in anticipation of the chemotherapy treatments for her breast cancer. Even from across the room, I could clearly see the dark-purple circles under her eyes, signs of extreme fatigue caused by those treatments. The chemo devastated her red blood cell count and necessitated regular blood transfusions. She had scars all over: the faint one on her cheek that she had had ever since I had met her thirteen years ago, and one near her neck, from the port through which anti-cancer drugs were pumped into her jugular. And invisible to anyone else, the jagged scar from her mastectomy, a thin seam of pale and shiny flesh that ran half the width of her entire chest.