The Morning After

It's a funny thing, preaching. Sometimes you hit a home run. Your words and phrases and everything are perfect. Your delivery is flawless. You leave the pulpit feeling like you really accomplished something. Then you find out nobody else felt the same way. There are other times when you feel like you flied out to first base on a 3-0 pitch. Afterwards you're almost despondent and then you find out that it was used by God to transform someone's life.

Then there are times where God uses the act of preaching itself as a sanctifying moment for you, the preacher. You're laid bare. You know your words are meaningless. You know that the handful of minutes of failure were time for God to do work in your life. As you are speaking, you just want it to end. You feel exposed and helpless.

You go to sleep. You arise the next morning hoping that it was all a bad dream. It was not.

When these experiences happen, like it did for me yesterday, the morning after is brutal. Self doubt, self condemnation, self hatred, all of it. You don't even want to get out of bed. But the alarm goes off and you have to wake up your son for school. You have to get out of bed. You have to enter back in to real life.

So, now what? Do you linger in the mess and brokenness? Do you let the brutality of the morning after take over? Or do you listen and seek to hear what it is that the Father wants to say to you in this moment of failure?

The morning after can be sanctifying and life-giving or it can be destructive and ruinous.

Thankfully, I have an amazing grace filled community who love me in my failure and speak words of grace to me. I am also learning that my identity is not wrapped up in the moment of preaching.

The Father is speaking in this moment and he is teaching me. Pruning is painful because stuff gets cut off. But, in the process new growth occurs and makes you healthier. But it hurts nonetheless.

This sermon that I preached was about practicing resurrection. Living life resurrected and not dwelling in death. I get to live that out now, in this moment. I am so grateful for the resurrection. I am thankful that I am united with Jesus in his death and his resurrection.

Some days, that's all I have to hold on to.

And that's enough.