‘Can these bones live?’
Ezekiel 37:3
When I was just getting
started in ministry, serving as a youth pastor in Alberton, I attended a conference
at a small Baptist church one town down from ours. It was led by a strident
American, a bull of man. He had that quintessential look of aged success:
silver grey hair, still thick and manicured, clean cut and skin slightly tanned
– a man whose sheer physicality defied his age. 70 years old? No way! Him? He had written a slight though very
successful book on evangelism; a book now nestling somewhere in the lower
reaches of my bookcase. I sat alongside other eager beaver men of the ministry,
young and old, willing to drink from this exotic fount of wisdom.
I found those two days
quite disappointing; maybe I had set the bar too high, maybe this was the
beginning of a discernment process revealing that I would have many passions in
this multi-faceted faith of mine, but evangelism really wasn’t one of them.
But he did tell one story
that stuck with me: as a young man he had been in a church that refused to do
anything, no matter what he tried, what he preached, how many visits he did
there was simply nothing forthcoming. It was dead as dead could be. Morsdood.
On one occasion, after
calling a meeting that no one attended, he headed out into the churchyard.
There was a bell on the property, set apart from the church, and out of sheer
frustration he began to ring that bell, over and over he rang it, out there in
the evening air, under that darkened sky with stars lighting the heavens he
rang that bell. Late in the evening the sound of its clanging reverberated
through the town. He never did mention how the town responded. He never spoke
of anyone sitting inside their home, watching TV but momentarily distracted by
that crazy preacher who had lost the plot; he never spoke of a woman sitting in
a chair attending to some task but now staring quizzically through the window
and down the road in the direction of that sound; or the young girl who
stepped into the street, gravel and sand underfoot, dress catching in the slight breeze, who walked quickly spying
through the trees that giant of a man tugging on that rope. He could hardly
know.
He didn’t even end the
story with any measure of success, as I recall. The church wasn’t miraculously
full the next Sunday. Although I imagine it did have some kind of happy ending,
he wrote a book on evangelism after all which means he must have turned the
corner somewhere. (Otherwise it would be the worst book on evangelism ever
written right?) Or maybe he did explain it but I lost myself in the sad romance
of that story that I forgot to track the point of what he was saying. Or maybe
he just spoke the story as it came to him and left it there, hanging. I can’t
remember now but I hope he did that.
Sometimes stories exist
for a very clear reason; the moral all but jumps out of them smacking the
listener across the face with a two-by-four yelling Learn your lesson! Learn your lesson! And then there are other
stories that speak to you but at such a depth you can’t really fathom it, as if
the essence of who you are understands it but hasn’t bothered to inform the
operating room of your life, your consciousness. So you are moved and stirred
and you get emotional but you pray no one asks why as you would have a hard
time explaining it.
What I do know is that
sometimes I struggle to find passion in others for the passion in me and it is
vexing in the same moment as I recognise each person is free to follow their
own heart.
Do you ever feel lonely
in what you care about? Do you ever wish that others felt the same passion for
the same things as you?
I don’t know what to say
to you but I can lend you a story about a man who felt the same and went out in
the crisp night air and rang a bell relentlessly, disturbing his community and
awakening his slumbering God; it is a story of a passionate man, a man who
stood out there, his reputation as a sane individual on the line, alone, to remind
you that you are not alone.
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