1979-84
Two months after that Bible Quiz championship in June, 1979, I became the senior pastor of the Evangelical Free church of Loveland, Colorado, 50 miles north of Denver, until 1984. I found being a senior pastor to be a frustrating experience. Every 18 months or so I had an identity crisis that left me wanting to quit the ministry and go back to my lifelong aspiration to become a lawyer like my paternal grandfather. I had been named after him. Because we lived in the same Chicago suburb, I grew up cutting his grass, shoveling his snow, and picking his weeds. At the age of 16 he got me a job in the mail room where he worked at Kiwanis International in downtown Chicago. We rode the train to and from work together that summer of 1967. I grew up wanting to be like him. He was the Legal Counsel for Kiwanis International. So when I had my identity crises as a young senior pastor, I wanted to return to my lawyer career path. During that second identity crisis at the Loveland church, I had a Eureka! moment one 1982 day when this thought crossed my mind: “I’m teaching you.” This thought was accompanied by grace and peace, and it changed my understanding of what is involved in following Christ: On August 2, 1971, I had committed myself to Christ after hearing the message “Jesus gives fulfillment to life,” but I didn’t know that the Jesus also had said, “Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Anyone who finds his life will lose it, and anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:38-39). God showed me that being a pastor required me to lose my life (take up my cross), which involved enduring frustrations. This is not what I had committed myself for in 1971: I had signed up for personal fulfillment. Eleven years later, God was teaching me what had been the fine print of the message, “Jesus gives fulfillment to life.” After this Eureka! moment, “I’m teaching you,” I never again wanted to leave the ministry to become a lawyer. Though I wasn’t yet experiencing personal fulfillment as a senior pastor, God had made himself real to me and gave me his grace, enabling me to be a pastor for the next 19 years without periodic identity crisis.
During July of 1980, two years before God said to me, “I’m teaching you,” I experienced God teaching me non-verbally about his faithfulness to his promise that he will meet our physical needs when we make seeking him and his kingdom our highest priority. Sharon and I, and our two young sons were driving back to Loveland from Grand Junction, Colorado after visiting her parents. Our car broke down on Interstate 70 in the mountains, near Frisco, Colorado. We spent three days at a motel in Frisco, waiting for the car repairs to be completed. Driving home from there, I felt concern that our house rent in Loveland was due within a week, and we had just spent our next month’s rent on the car. Upon arriving home, I retrieved the accumulated mail and had a bad feeling when I noticed a letter from the Internal Revenue Service, thinking it would be a letter stating I had miscalculated our taxes three months earlier, and owed the IRS money. Upon opening the letter, I was shocked: It indeed said that I had miscalculated our taxes for the previous year, adding that we had actually overpayed. A refund check was enclosed. It amounted almost identically to what we had just spent in Frisco! Once more, God had demonstrated that if we give him charge of our lives, he gives us fulfillment!
Sixteen months later, on November 25, 1981, our family was involved in an auto accident in the mountains on Interstate 70–again near Frisco, Colorado during a snowstorm as we traveled “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house” for Thanksgiving. Sharon was paralyzed from the neck down due to a dislocated vertebra in her neck. The first person who came upon the scene of the accident was an off-duty EMT from an emergency clinic in Frisco, who happened to be driving by (in God’s providence). He had a two-way radio that enabled him to call his emergency clinic for an ambulance and to receive instruction on how to stabilize Sharon’s neck in order to give her the best chance of not being permanently paralyzed. First, she and I and our young sons (near their 3rd and 5th birthdays) were taken 5 miles by ambulance to the Frisco emergency clinic for assessment. As Sharon and I were being assessed, a nurse informed us that our young sons were singing songs to Jesus as they sat watching television in the waiting area. After our assessment–Sharon’s paralysis and my mildly wounded shoulder–Sharon was transported 60 miles by ambulance to a hospital in Denver instead of flying by a helicopter due to the snow storm still going on. My sons and I rode with a friend who had driven to us from Denver to support us. Upon arriving at St. Anthony’s Hospital in downtown Denver, where our sons had been born, we followed the EMTs as they pushed Sharon through a large ER waiting room area. I was shocked to find about 50 members of Southern Gables Evangelical Free Church (our former church where I had been the Youth Pastor), including our former senior pastor, Dr. James Means, lined up on both sides as we went through the ER waiting room in the middle of the afternoon before Thanksgiving Day. To this day, whenever I remember that reception by our former church in the ER, I happily recall the love we experienced from God’s people as we arrived at St. Anthony’s hospital that traumatic day.
Sharon was paralyzed in bed for almost six weeks at that hospital. To the surprise of the doctors, nearly six weeks later she gradually regained partial use of her arms and legs. They had initially thought she would be paralyzed for the rest of her life. Six weeks later, because her neck was still unstable, she went home wearing a mobile traction “halo” screwed into her head, in the doctors’ hope it would stabilize her neck over the next four months. It didn’t. So she was scheduled for surgery in Denver to fuse her neck. The week of her surgery, we invited some of our community’s pastors, with whom I volunteered as a local police chaplain, to come to our home in order to anoint Sharon with oil and to pray for her because of this New Testament promise: “Is any one of you sick? He should call for the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up.” (James 5:14-15) (Sharon and I have always believed that, as in the New Testament, there is one Church in every city, the Body of Christ, and that the pastors of the many local churches are the Elders of the One Church in that city.) After surgery that week, Sharon awoke in the Recovery Room and was immediately aware that feeling had returned throughout her body, including her fingertips. This enabled her, after difficult physical therapy, to eventually play the piano again and to return as our church’s pianist. Her complete healing after that traumatic event deepened my conviction that God is real!
I recently became the husband of a published author: Sharon is one of fourteen women who wrote their stories of going through seasons of suffering with God’s help. The book is called Sacred Suffering. It is available from Amazon.com. Sharon wrote her chapter on her season of suffering that began with this auto accident in 1981, and ended with her healing after surgery and therapy in 1982.