he who has eyes...

Story shared at the Greenhouse service of the Evanston Vineyard on November 8, 2009. In-line audio of the sermon. iTunes link to the podcast. (My story is the middle one of three shared, going from 15:10 to 24:25.)

So, there I was. I was staring at this computer. I had logged in to my fiancée’s e-mail because I suspected that she was not being very faithful. And, it was right there in front of me, it was telling me everything I needed to know. I just had to get out of there. I had this pit in my stomach, my arms were shaking, I was hyperventilating, my limbs were completely numb. She was in bed in the other room because we were actually living together. So, you can kind of see where this story started. I just had to go. I got out of there.

I went to my friend’s house. I was in college then, so I went to campus. My friend was a resident assistant. I was just talking to her and talking to her about all these things. I was just a complete and utter wreck, as you might imagine. We had been dating for three and a half years, pretty much all of college. We got engaged, and as you can see, we didn’t get married.

To her, a relationship is something that she needs to be in. So when she moved to college she found that with me, and I found with her this perfect person because she realized how to be a perfect person with me. She realized who she had to be to be with me and to make me happy. And she was that person.

She was so perfect that, there were times that I would be at church with her or I’d be at InterVarsity with her on campus, and she was just so uncomfortable. She said she was a Christian, but we never really talked about things. And the fact that she was uncomfortable made me uncomfortable. And this fact made me stop going. So I was just never there. I just completely fell away. She was considerably and unquestionably more important to me than God.

We moved in together, and that obviously didn’t work out so well. We went and saw a movie called Lost in Translation. In that movie, Scarlett Johannson’s character is confused about what she’s doing in life because she’s just following her husband around — they’re in Tokyo and he’s got this job, but she has nothing to do.

My fiancée and I talked about this afterwards. I thought the movie was good, and she thought it was heart-breaking because this character was just following her husband around not knowing what she wanted to do with her life. This started this series of conversations between us that I realized that who she was with me wasn’t who she really was. She checked out of the relationship and eventually just cheated on me. We broke up, and actually lived together for a good month and a half afterwards — which is awkward if you’ve been in that situation.

But, out of this, I realized really soon after, “What are you doing, Drew? This woman is God to you, and she’s not worthy of that sort of praise. No person is.” It just broke this idolatry in me (it’s a process, and it’s still happening — not just in this instance but in my life as a whole). It wasn’t a month after this that I just decided that no matter what happened from this point on that God was going to be the center of what I was doing. I got baptized the day before graduation in Des Moines.

I decided to come out to Chicago for grad school basically to be close to family. As soon as I moved here, I was looking for a church. I had been to the Vineyard Church (now the Vine Community Church) in Carbondale, Illinois before. It was a great church, and I loved it so I wanted to find a Vineyard here. So I looked it up online, and it turns out that the Hyde Park Vineyard was across the street from me. I just started going there.

Within a year, Rand, the pastor there and Insoo, the associate pastor who’s now out at the Columbus Vineyard, were just seeing all of this leadership stuff in me and calling it out of me and putting me into positions that I didn’t have any right being in. Within a year, I was actually the singles’ ministry overseer at the Hyde Park Vineyard. Through that I was able to have a house group, I was able to share this story with other people, and they were able to heal of different wounds they had and make connections with my story and where I went from this place where I couldn’t eat for weeks (I couldn’t keep food down, and I lost 15 pounds) to a place where I was the overseer of a ministry at church talking about what it means to be single and what it means to have a marriage that is godly, in my theoretical mind.

And, all this makes me think of a passage in 2 Corinthians 1.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. [2 Corinthians 1:3-7]

Out of this, we see the following four things that help us move from a place of desolation to a place of hope.

1. God comforts us in our troubles. When you are feeling hopeless, God can be there as a comfort. Think of a loving father. If his child falls of her bike and scrapes her knee and starts crying, does he tell her to get back up and shake it off? No! He goes to her and holds her in her tears. He kisses the wounds to make them better. If this is how an earthly father loves his daughter, how much more will God the Father love you when you scrape your knee?

2. God uses us to comfort others. For whatever reason, God does most of His works in this world through a chosen people. Sure, God in His sovereign rule could just swoop in and change everything, but He chooses to use us, His children, to change things. So when we are comforted through our troubles, we have learned all the more how to comfort those around us in the same distresses. He empowers us to bring about the beautiful change and restoration that we ourselves have gone through. And this increases our comfort all the more — it makes me think of teaching physics to undergraduates. Sure, I took the classes in college and understood things, but I didn’t truly understand them until I was used to teach these principles to other. It’s like our being used to share what we have learned seals knowledge on our hearts and minds.

3. Our character grows. We see in James 1 that we should “Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance” [James 1:2-3]. Our comfort during times of trouble produces patient endurance in ourselves when we face similar trials, but also in other people when they see the same thing happen to them. We see that there is a good in our suffering and comfort because it helps others to see the other side of hopelessness.

4. We become part of a community when we share in each others lives. When we share what we’re going through and what we have gone through, we not only share each others burdens, but we share each others comforts. And, let me tell you, nothing will bring a group of people together more than shared life, both sufferings and comfort.