1991-1995
I was out of pastoring for seven years after leaving the Newport Beach Vineyard church on July 1, 1991, and did not want to pastor again because I was licking my wounds—feeling like a failure because the Tustin Vineyard no longer existed. Feeling depressed about being a failure, during three months of unemployment after I left the staff of the Newport Beach Vineyard church, I went to four counseling sessions with a Christian psychotherapist. After one of the sessions that did not help me feel more positive, I felt downcast as I got into my car for the seven mile drive home. As I put the key in the ignition, I had a Eureka! moment when this thought crossed my mind: “Make a list of what you are thankful for.” I started by thanking the Lord for my marriage to Sharon, for her healing after our auto accident in 1981, and for our sons not being injured in that accident due to the protection of their car seats. I continued saying thanks for one blessing after another that God had given me, until I arrived home 15 minutes later—now in a positive, not a negative, state of mind. That experience jump-started my emotional battery, enabling me to process my emotional pain into hope for the future instead of the pessimism I had been feeling during those first three months of unemployment after I left the staff of the Vineyard church in Newport Beach. This positive thought came into my mind for the first time after I listed all the things I was thankful to God for as I drove 7 miles from from that pyschotherapy appointment: If God had helped me so much in the past, it was reasonable to expect that he would help me now and in the future. God had directed me to do the thanksgiving aspect of this prayer taught by the Apostle Paul: “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds, in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7) Sure enough, after stringing together my pearls of thanksgiving while driving home from the psychotherapist, my pessimism left me and I was able to begin a gradual process of working through my emotional pain. God subsequently blessed me with seven years in parachurch ministry (Christian counseling administration, hospital and hospice chaplaincy, and Promise Keepers mens’ ministry staff memership) as I gradually processed my emotional pain from what I thought was my failure as the pastor of the Tustin Vineyard. Today, thanking God is now at the top of that list I started while driving home from that psychotherapy session in 1991: “Thank you for your love and faithfulness to me!”
In 1993 I had a Eureka! moment related to my wife Sharon’s development. My friend Pastor Fred, who had brought me up to Pastor Rick, “What about Paul?” was now the lead pastor of a Vineyard church in Denver. He wanted to hire someone to run his church so he could spend more time in foreign missions, and he asked me to join him as his Executive Pastor. After a weekend at his church in 1993, we accepted his invitation and began preparing to move back to Colorado. I saw myself returning to Colorado to “launch Fred” in his missions endeavors.
When Sharon announced that she was leaving her job with New Life Treatment Centers (where she had worked for three years) because we were moving back to Colorado, she was offered a significant management promotion. It didn’t change her commitment to move back to her home state of Colorado. A few days later, during my early morning time in the Bible, a Eureka! thought crossed my mind:“You can go to Colorado and launch Fred, or you can stay here and launch Sharon.” I responded, “Really? Then we’ll stay here.” I waited two hours for Sharon to wake up. When she did, I told her what I thought the Lord had said to me. She cried tears of joy, out of thankfulness that God would do this for her. That day I informed Pastor Fred that we had changed our mind and wouldn’t be joining his staff. A year later, Sharon was honored as Employee of the Year by her company. That job led to another position for her when New Life started Women of Faith conferences in 1996. After completing its first year of conferences, using six large church venues around the country, New Life asked Sharon to leave her management position and to create a job for herself with Women of Faith, with the goal of filling 15 events scheduled in 1997 which would take place in basketball arenas around the country. She accepted that offer and flew 200,000 miles/year for the next five years, organizing and inspiring teams of volunteers in many cities to pray for the event and at the event, and to mobilize the women of their cities to attend Women of Faith conferences, with great results: most events were sold out, many thousands of Pre-Christian women came to know Christ through Women of Faith events, and hundreds of thousands of Christian women were encouraged and strengthened in their relationship with Christ.
In 1995, I was hired as the first chaplain of a new hospice in Orange County, Hospice Family Care. One of my first patients was a 95 year-old woman who was born in Scotland on Christmas day, 1900. She moved to the United States with her teenage daughter in 1947, after divorcing her alcoholic, physically abusive husband. Throughout her life, she faithfully attended Presbyterian churches. Whenever I visited her at her apartment, she asked me to end the visit by reading from the book of Acts and praying with her. Sometimes, as I walked out of her apartment, I heard her whisper to herself, “I need to try harder.” This statement was not directed to me and had no context from our conversation to help me interpret its meaning, so I didn’t think about it between visits.
Eventually, about eight months after this hospice patient turned 96, her health declined. She moved to a nearby skilled nursing facility. One day, as I approached the nursing home for my first visit with her there, I had a Eureka! moment when a surprising thought crossed my mind: “Make sure of ____’s salvation.” Up to that point, it had never crossed my mind that her salvation was in doubt. After all, she always welcomed my visits, and always wanted me to read from the book of Acts and pray for her. She had attended Presbyterian churches all her life.
During that visit, I asked her these two assessment questions created by a nationally-known Presbyterian pastor, Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge, Florida, for his evangelistic home visitation program he had named Evangelism Explosion, which I had started at the Loveland Evangelical Free Church before our 1981 auto accident that paralyzed Sharon:
- Do you know for certain that if you die today, you will go to heaven?
- Suppose you do die today, and find yourself standing before God and he asks you,‘Why should I let you into heaven?’ What would you say?
Her answers surprised me: After I asked her Question 1, she said No, she wasn’t certain she would go to heaven when she died. After I asked her question 2, she said she would say to God, “I tried my hardest to deserve it.” The second answer brought back to my mind her cryptic statements when I would leave her apartment, “I need to try harder.” I knew immediately that she had not understood the New Testament Gospel (which means “good news”) that God’s forgiveness and a place in heaven is a free gift made possible for us by the death of Jesus Christ for our sins through putting our faith in Christ. I said to her, “I have good news for you!” Then I shared two New Testament passages: Regarding the first question, which assesses a person’s confidence in their salvation: 1 John 5:13, “These things are written so that you may know that you have eternal life, you who believe in the name of the Son of God.” Regarding the second question, which assesses what someone thinks is required to qualify yourself to go to heaven: Ephesians 2:8-9: “By grace you are saved by faith. It is a gift from God, not by your own works.”
I expected that she would be glad to hear this good news, but she wasn’t. She balked and refused to believe it. I then probed to understand how it was she had attended Presbyterian churches all her life, yet was not aware of the New Testament teaching that for salvation she should trust Christ’s good work of dying on the cross for the sins of the world, including hers, instead of trusting her own good works to earn God’s forgiveness. I asked her to share about her experience in growing up Presbyterian in Scotland. After sharing several stories, she eventually told me that when she was 16 years old, she attended a Good Friday service in which the preacher described in excruciating detail the suffering inflicted on Jesus during the day of his crucifixion. She said that she was so moved during that sermon that she decided, “If Jesus loved me enough to go through that for me, I’m going to try my hardest to deserve it!” 80 years later, she still wasn’t confident that she had done enough to deserve God’s forgiveness, and was still trying her hardest to do so. According to the Bible, she was right that she hadn’t done enough to deserve forgiveness because nobody can erase their sins through doing enough good works to deserve God’s forgiveness.
That visit ended when she again refused to accept that heaven is a free gift of God’s grace. I sensed a need to pray for her, which I did until I returned a week later. During that week, it occurred to me that for this 96 year-old woman to accept God’s forgiveness as a gift to her, she would have to come to the difficult conclusion that her 80 years of effort to earn her salvation had been misguided. This insight enabled me to feel compassion for her resistance to the good news of God’s gift.
A week later, back on the patio of the nursing home with her, she remembered our conversation during the previous visit and again balked when I restated the biblical teaching on forgiveness as God’s gift of grace. I didn’t back away this time, but gently leaned into the conversation like the quarterback I was as a child, leaning into a wall of oncoming tacklers, trying to “find daylight,” break through, and run for a touchdown. After more resistance she suddenly said, “OK, I’ll accept it.” We then prayed together, and she received God’s forgiveness as a gift of grace. Touchdown!
I visited again one week later. She still remembered her decision a week earlier to accept God’s forgiveness by faith as a gift of his grace, due to the death of Christ for her sins. She reaffirmed this decision. We prayed together. I never saw her again, because she died three days later. Thanks to that Eureka! moment as I drove up to her nursing home, “Make sure about ___’s salvation,” my experience that God is real was deepened yet again, and I felt great personal fulfillment!