The Seven-Year Zap

My adult life has been structured by cycles of upheaval happening at roughly seven-year intervals.

1973: I should have been riding on top of the world. Everything seemed to be going my way. I’d achieved everything I had set out to achieve in college. Yet I was a total mess. And it was this mess that led me to becoming a Christian.

1980: We had moved to St. Louis from Houston. The Texas housing market was at a standstill, due to state usury laws capping mortgage interest rates at 10% (and the prime rate was well north of that). Two contracts on our house in Houston had fallen through, we were paying for a mortgage in Houston and an apartment in St. Louis, my wife was pregnant, and we were worse than flat broke. This mess led me to become understanding of depression, the need to confess weakness, and the need to depend upon others.

1987: My father died, the leadership structure at the church we were attending blew up (blowing me with it), and then events at work led to what looked like my career blowing up. We would eventually find another church home, and what looked like my career dead end became the pivot point for my corporation,

1994-1999: This seven-year “zap” extended over three years. The CEO I was writing speeches for announcement his retirement; his replacement was, unfortunately for me and the eventually the rest of the corporation, a mess. The company went through three years of intense turmoil and upheaval; I was spun-off with a division and the mother company was eventually itself bought up. This is where I truly learned that ability, experience, and even reputation counted for nothing in the corporate world. What mattered was politics. What mattered to God was something different.

2003: The recession caught up with my communications consulting business. It had been gangbusters for two years, began to sputter the third year, and then was looking for a crash landing the fourth year. What I learned was to not dismiss unexpected opportunities, like working as a director of communications for an urban school district.

2009-2010: Back in the corporate world, a string of major career successes led to – a deliberate and ultimately successful effort to destroy what had been one of the best functioning staff organizations in the company’s history. Major lesson learned: the world, when it feels the status quo is threatened, will actively oppose even what’s in its own best interests.

These times were difficult. In questioned what God was doing in every one of them. I often shook my fist. I often felt abandoned. But I hung on, sometimes by my fingernails and many times with the help of others. I knew I was being taught something. The “something” only became apparent after the fact.

In The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges says that “…in times of adversity, do not despise it by refusing to acknowledge God’s hand in it, and do not lose heart under it by failing to see His love in it.”

It’s about time for another installment of the cycle. And there’s been a situation going on for several months that’s been hard, one that it would be easy to learn the wrong lesson from. So I wait to see what God is teaching me this time.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges. To see what others had to say on this chapter, “The Discipline of Adversity,” please visit Sarah at ReadingBetween the Lines. This concludes the discussion.

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Think of what you could do with the money!”

In The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges says that “the world, or the sinful society in which we live, is characterized by the subtle and relentless pressure it brings to bear upon us to conform to its values and practices. It creeps up on us little by little. What was once unthinkable becomes thinkable, then doable, and finally acceptable to society at large. Sinn becomes respectable, and so Christians finally embrace it.”

It happens just like that sometimes. I had been a Christian for only a few months when a serious temptation arose.

During my senior year in college, I lived with three other guys in an off-campus apartment. We had a constant stream of visitors – friends, girlfriends, fraternity brothers, campus political types (one of my roommates was active politically on campus), law school types (another of my roommates was in law school), even journalism types (I was a copy editor and managing editor of the campus newspaper). It was busy.

One of the people regularly dropping by had been at college for two or three years and was desperately trying to pass freshman English. He had flunked it several times. (You had to know him to understand; English simply wasn’t in his DNA.) During my last semester, as I began to realize I was graduating and needed to find a job, he came to me and suggested a quick summer job – he’d pay me to take freshman English in his name.

I had just become a Christian, but I wouldn’t have liked the idea anyway. It violated all kinds of university rules and regulations. It was unethical. It was immoral.

He was also offering $500. That was in 1973 dollars. For the purpose of perspective, my share of the apartment rent was $62.50 a month.

I said no. He kept trying to convince me. He pointed out I could buy an engagement ring with that $500. I still said no. He came up with other convincing arguments, including a rather innovative one of considering it as a charity. “Just think about it for a few days,” he pleaded.

I kept saying no, but I have to admit I considered it. “Lots of people do it,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how common it is,” he said, promptly reeling off the names of well known people on campus who had done it before.

But I finally said a big final no, and getting a job out-of-state that started the day after my graduation in May clinched it.

He did find someone to take the summer course. And they got caught. Someone who had flunked freshman English four times was simply too well known to the English Department.

My friend engaged in a wearing-down process. He was persuasive and persistent. But what he was asking me to do was flat-out wrong.

The experience did teach me something. I need to be watchful, always watchful. Not only did I not know when temptation might come along, I didn’t know how vulnerable I might be when it happened.

I needed to watch for the temptation, and watch for my own vulnerability.

I still do.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges. To see what others had to say on this chapter, “The Discipline of Watching,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Linnaea Mallette via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Discipline of Choices

When I became a Christian in my senior year of college, I was bewildered from the beginning about how I would go from “me” to something else. In other words, I wasn’t able to see how I was supposed to move from Point A to Point B.

To be clear, Point A wasn’t exactly the campus party animal, but my becoming a Christian shocked more than one person who knew me. What I instinctively grasped was that one thing – one very important thing but only one thing had actually changed – and that was my identity in my head and my heart. I was different, profoundly different, but I was also the same person – with the same weaknesses, sins, and attitudes. I might have become a Christian, but I was still the guy who had (literally) danced the heel off his shoe at a fraternity party.

What I also realized was that I had not been suddenly transformed into Joe Christian. No one waved a magic wand over my head to make me perfect.

In the meetings I had afterward, the path became clearer. There was this process called sanctification, which would last the rest of my life. Transformation would happen, and it would happen gradually. And the key point was that it might never be finished.

And I had baggage. A lot of baggage. And it wasn’t only things I had done but things I had thought and things I had believed. I wasn’t a living example of secular culture at its worst, but it often appeared that that’s what I had aspired to be.

The process of transformation started with reading the Gospel of John. And writing down questions that occurred to me as I read. Then I met with the guy who had led me to Christ and we talked. Eventually I joined a small Bible study group led by one of my fraternity brothers. I went to a spring break outreach program. I started attending church services.

Those were big changes from what I had been doing, but they were small steps in hindsight. Gradually I came to understand that it wasn’t only things that I did but also things that I thought and said. This process has lasted a lifetime, and it is far from finished.

In The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges says that “the practice of putting off sinful attitudes and actions and putting on Christlike character involves a constant series of choices. We choose in every situation which direction we will go.”

Some of these choices are obvious. Some aren’t. And some are downright difficult, like when you’re faced with doing the right thing or the expected thing at work, the thing that everyone else does without a second thought.

Choices can be hard. Very hard. But you still have to make them. 

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges. To see what others had to say on this chapter, “The Discipline of Choices,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.