Below are addresses where we can be reached. I will not have email access and can use a phone on weekends to call family. Amy has access to the paypal account should anyone wish to show their support that way (there is a donate button on the top right of blog). It’s a crazy and daunting thing to leave a wife and 5 kids for at least 6 months. However, I am confident all will be well. I think God is granting us the gift of faith for this season.

To Reach Amy, please contact her directly via Facebook.

Our kids are Sophie (9), Eli (8), Maddox (6), Brody (5), and Ava (1).

Please continue to keep them in your prayers, hopefully as others of you pick up the mantle and continue the tradition of coffee and morning prayer

My address is:

552 E. Fairview Rd.
Williamstown, KY
41097

My date for leaving has been moved up to this Thursday. My son Brody’s 5th birthday. I want to believe the best present I can give him is a whole and well daddy.

Shouldn’t We all hope for the same for our kids?

Much love to you all.

Chad.

It’s with a mixture of sadness and hopeful expectation that I am saying good bye.  This will be my last blog post for quite some time.

Sadness because Dancing feels like a comfy pair of slippers.  A lot has come to pass for me and my family because of the things written in the pages of this blog.   And a lot of friendships (and other things) have been forged.   I have learned a lot over the years from each of you, whether you liked or hated what I had to say.   I hope you have received from me even half of what I have gained from all of you.

Hopeful expectation because I have mercifully been given an opportunity to save not just my life but that of my family.   I have a chance to be reconciled to my wife and kids.

I’m going to rehab.

Easter Morning, 2011

A couple weeks ago Amy asked me if I would be open to a live-in facility treating sexual addiction.  I told her I would be open to doing anything if it meant further healing and the possibility of rewriting our story together.   Soon after we found a place that seemed to fit our practical/financial needs while addressing the spiritual dimension of this 20-year war I have battled.

Pure Life Ministries, in Big Ridge, Kentucky, seems to be the spot.

A few days ago Amy invited me home – on the couch – while I wait for my application to be accepted. It was today.

I’ll be checking-in within the next week, we hope.  The $2000 induction fee (which is pennies compared to most treatment centers) has to be paid first and thankfully a few donors have offered to help with some of that.

Once gone I will not have access to email, internet, social media, cell phone or cheetahs (the last is the most difficult).    I’ll have to relearn the art of writing letters or using a pay phone on the weekend.

This journey will be for a minimum of 6 months or as long as one year.  

I don’t need to tell you what a burden this places on my wife.   With 5 kids to raise she is taking a huge risk sending her husband off for 6+ months to heal.   She is Amy, Full of Grace.   Words can’t express my gratitude towards her nor my sense of helplessness as I leave them behind to fend for themselves.

The reality, however, is that in my acting-out she has been fending for herself for far too long.

I’ll be turning the keys to this site along with the Paypal account linked to this blog (upper right) over to her.   Amy is going to need help during this time and I am choosing to trust that the family I have come to know and love online will think of her and our kids from time to time and drop them some words of encouragement if not some spare change.

Thank you for your prayers, love, support and friendship.   Life has been one helluva journey since March and that whole business with losing my job as pastor for believing that there is enough hell on earth for us to fight that we don’t need an eternal one.  But I never felt more like a pastor than I have with you, here.   Thank you for that gift.

Here’s to hoping and praying that indeed…

Love.

Wins.

The prompt for this particular blog post comes with one huge assumption. Namely, that I have ever had a foot in some area remotely known as “sexual purity.” If sexual purity is the Promised Land than call me Moses.   My story may help others get there but it’s not a place I have been.

And I’m not really sure that either place – the pure one and the impure one – is something that can be straddled. I’m not convinced that if I look at porn today I am sexually impure but if I abstain tomorrow I am now pure.   If this were so, then sexual purity would be a matter of actions. It would be all about what I do or do not do. And I think that misses the mark.

For millennia purity has been about action and inaction. The Sabbath was kept holy by a rigorous list of things a devout Jew either did or didn’t do.  Likewise, a kosher marriage meant a man did not sleep in the same room or touch his wife while she was menstruating lest they both become ritually unclean. Our ancestors, from Jews to Puritans to present day Christians, have spilled no shortage of ink (and blood) over creative dances which presumably land both feet firmly on some promised land we call purity – sexual or otherwise.

Not surprisingly, Jesus has something to say about all of this.

Jesus cuts to the root of our action and inaction and calls it all dross (I’m being polite) when compared to the state of the heart. It’s not what goes in or comes out that defiles a person, Jesus says. It’s what is in his or her heart. (Matt. 15:11-20).

In other words, sexual purity has nothing to do with where my feet are.

This can complicate things for us humans, sex addicts or other addicts, who are so task oriented, having convinced ourselves that our problem lies solely in our actions. If I could just stop looking at porn, we tell ourselves, then I’d be clean. Ever say that? It’s a fool’s dream.

When we fail again and again to make our actions bow to our good-intentions we hopefully reach the conclusion that we are powerless over our sexual addiction and that only God can restore us to sanity. It’s a heart, not a foot, matter.

So it is that I have gone long stretches of time without looking at porn or acting out in other, more harmful, ways, but I can’t convince myself that I was in a state of sexual purity. Heck, I’m not even really sure what that is. I imagine it to mean that sex, like other great gifts from God, is sacred and to be used responsibly and with thanksgiving. I imagine it means that I am freed from the desire to use sex to  either affirm my self-worth or to forget my self-imposed worthlessness. I imagine it means having motivations that are true and just and that every interaction I have, sexual or otherwise, is not driven by lust or selfishness. I imagine it means that love is my guiding rule, beginning first with myself and God, releasing me from the fears I have of being both inconsequential and a conquerer all at the same time.

All of this sounds like a land flowing with milk and honey and I feel like a stuttering Moses pointing it out. I can’t say I’ve had my feet on the other side of the Jordan but there are times I feel the waves lapping over my toes. I think it’s a place worth longing for, and learning to swim to get to. Or at least pray…

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me (Psalm 51:10)

Kevin asked me how I would address the cruel torture and stoning of a young Afghan woman whose final dying breath was one filled with sand while being buried alive.    What becomes of her killers?   Is is right that they get the same reward as she?

I can imagine at least three options.

The first one is consistent with the more traditional, evangelical view of the after-life.   In this scenario, all of the above – the young woman and her killers – spend eternity in hell together because presumably, being Muslims in Afghanistan, they don’t know Jesus.   They are all damned.   End of discussion.

Some people have a problem with option 1, however (in the same way they have a problem placing the 6 million Jews Hitler killed in a hell with their oppressor), and argue that God may have mercy on the young woman.   She will have a chance to enter Paradise.   Her ruthless, unrepentant killers, however, will get their just desserts.

We tend to like option #2 because it lines up well with our sense of justice and mercy.   The victim finds peace and comfort while the perpetrators of crimes against her get punished.   It is capital punishment extended beyond this life only better:  Death will not deliver the guilty.   They will be sustained (by God?) for ever and ever to become the tormented.   Granted, there are others who demure on the eternal torture part and argue for annihilation.  Capital punishment is swift and sure.  God is both Judge and Executioner.

Each of the 2 options above appeal to my most carnal desires.   I have to admit that my sinful self would love nothing more than to see either all those different from myself receive far less than myself or for those who wrong me to be punished.   Revenge is the quickest and often most cathartic form of justice I know and want.

It’s all very human of me.    But not at all Christian.

I believe God is up to something more radical than just appeasing my most base desire for revenge.  I believe God desires to see all of Creation reconciled not only with God but with each other.   Forgiving our tormenter, not tormenting those who wrong us, is the way of Jesus.   It is the way towards lasting peace and wholeness.

One day either this will be true…

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.  The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.  The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. (Isa 11:6-8)

….or it will not.

One day the killers of the young Afghan woman, the person who robbed you of your dignity, the bully in your school, the spouse who cheated on you, the rich who exploited you, the poor who took advantage of you, the terrorist who bombed you, the uncle who abused you, the thief who stole from you, the racist who denied you will either suffer for eternity or wash our feet….and we theirs.

One day we will either celebrate their demise or be reconciled around the Throne of Grace.

If Heaven is anything less than this sort of radical reconciliation then it isn’t Heaven.

It’s just more of the same of what we already have.

Below is the video of that talk which I delivered at Outlaw Preachers Reunion this week.  Since that time I have been deeply moved by the stories of brokenness I am hearing from fellow travelers as well as hope-filled stories of redemption.   This is what should be happening in our churches!

Help me take this message to others.   If you are part of a church or college, I would love to come speak with your people and share my story.   Naturally, I would be willing to change the title if appropriate, but I think after listening to the video you will understand why I say what I say.   Please email me at chadholtz36@gmail.com and if you feel so inclined, there is a donate button on the top right which helps support this blog and ministry.   Thank you.

Watch live video from outlawpreacher on Justin.tv

God, Incarnation teaches us, is not afraid to get dirty.

I believe this to be true.  I stake my faith on this.  If God is not for us and as our Creator is too far removed or too busy or too prude to become one of us, than I can’t see much reason to love and serve this God.  I don’t need nor want a dead-beat God.

And so it is that I find my dedication to Incarnation a bit ironic to me today as I ponder the ways I have historically insisted on a virgin birth.  I guess I just never gave it much thought, choosing to just believe the traditional story.  But it’s interesting, isn’t it?   A beautiful and powerful thing like Incarnation gets sullied when we try to clean it up through a Holy Spirit consummation.

What if the story is very different from the one we have been told?

I was fascinated to learn that Aristotle, writing 300 years before Christ, taught that a woman was defective by nature because she did not produce semen.  When a man and woman have intercourse it was believed that the man provided the whole of the human being (the soul) which was contained only in the semen.  Aristotle concludes,

A male is male in virtue of a particular ability, and a female in virtue of a particular inability (Generation of Animals, I, 82F)

What is so fascinating about this is how it has gripped our imaginations for so long!  St. Augustine carried this same reasoning with him in his writing nearly 600 years later (300 years after Christ) and Thomas Aquinas did the same in the 1200′s.  All three of these men are spiritual giants in our Church’s theological imaginations and all three of them were rather clueless about human reproduction.

Aquinas reinvigorated Aristotelian thought, arguing that the semen provided the virtus formativa, a formative power to make use of the otherwise useless matter of menstrual fluids.   Semen had the power to make a human life and carried with it the force and form of how that life would look.

Enter into such a world of reproductive thought the scandalous idea of God becoming flesh.   It’s no wonder we have a virgin birth story!  (Granted, ours is not the only virgin birth story that exists in antiquity. Other deity stories are told through a virgin birth as well).

I wonder what happened.  Mark and John say nothing of the birth of Jesus.  Matthew and Luke give us some back story, but the text itself is too vague for us to conclude definitively one way or the other what was going on.   The greek for “virgin” literally means “young girl” and while there are cues from other texts, (such as “How can this be, since I am a young girl?” (Lk. 1:34)), this doesn’t rule out the possibility that Mary has had sex.

I made a life out of lying about my sexual escapades.   Am I to believe that Mary is so different from I?  Or you?   Am I to believe that someone like her, or me, cannot be visited by the Most High God to be the bearer of salvation to the world?

Or does salvation only come through life-forms unsullied by semen?

You see, I think it’s a better story if Mary is caught in an impossible situation of being found pregnant while unwed in a patriarchal society where she would be shunned at best, stoned at worst.  A cover-up is hatched and the couple flees town in the middle of night.  No one will even give them a room in which to sleep.  So they end up homeless in a barn.

But they can’t escape God.   God wanted – needed – a body.

What better body to take than the one born to a young girl out of wedlock fearing for her life?

I’m not so sure I am convinced of this as I write it.  But it’s something worth thinking about, isn’t it?

Incarnation is central to our Christian faith.  But how we think of that is equally important.   Does God get dirty with us?  Does God take something hopeless and bring about the greatest miracle the world has ever known yet fails to believe?  

How does believing Mary to be a virgin, unspoiled by semen, make your faith more alive?  How might believing the above do the same?

Cleve had asked me to talk about grace.  He made this request immediately following my tearful recounting of how my sexual addiction had cost me everything – my wife, my home, my job –  landing me here, in Durham, seeking some sanctuary among friends.

I’d like you to come Sunday and talk to our gathering about grace,

said Cleve.   An odd request given what I just told him, but that’s the point.

Faith is odd.  And demanding.

That gathering was intimate and diverse.  A testament to the sort of vision and prayer giving flight to this unchurch church.  I felt at home.  And this is what I said, or hope I said,  when it came time for me to say…anything.

Most times when I am asked to speak to a group it has to do with grace.   But it is grace of a particular sort.  Karl Barth once quipped,

Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace may prove to be all too free…that hell, rather than being populated with so many people, may in the end prove to be empty.

What Barth is going after there is what caused one particular church to go after me in March of this year, deciding that a pastor who believes against hell, which is a posture I believe every Christian should maintain, wasn’t fit for their service.    But whether hell exists or not after I die isn’t the sort of grace I feel like talking about this morning with you all.

That sort of grace is amazing, and it’s worth losing a job and much more over.  A few days after I lost my job as pastor and the news began to spread a pastor, Carlton Pearson, called to encourage me and walk with me as he had gone a similar journey before.   He asked me a question that haunted me because I knew the answer all too well but was too ashamed to speak of.   He asked,

Chad, of all the people God could have selected to place on a platform like this to talk about God’s universal grace, why you?  Why a rural Methodist student-pastor not yet out of seminary?

Before he finished asking I knew the answer.   It hit me like a hammer to a nail:

Because I’m a sex addict.

I didn’t have the courage to tell him that on the phone.  But I knew.

Grace.  When Cleve first asked me to speak about grace to you all a number of images came to mind.  One was the Prodigal Son story.  I have Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son as my screen saver.  It’s a beautiful portrait capturing the loving, tender embrace of our Father  enfolding the broken, hurting, weary body of his son.  Of you and I.

But the following words from Paul were the most captivating for me the last few days:

Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. ⁸ Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12)

Boast in my weaknesses.   What an amazing thing.  It would make for a great tag-line at any church, wouldn’t it?   First UMC (Boasting in our Weakness) or The City Well (Boasting in our Weakness).  I was raised in a church culture, perhaps you can relate, where nobody boasted in weakness.  In fact, if it wasn’t overtly taught it was certainly implied that weakness has no place in here.   You may have had a fight with your spouse on the way to church, relapsed on Saturday night, doubted God’s existence on Thursday, but when you got out of the car in your Sunday’s best it was all smiles and “God is good!”    We don’t want to share our weaknesses, especially in church where we are told that if we are Christians, we should be perfect.

I suck at being perfect.

Two months ago my wife asked me to leave.   What began as an addiction to pornography had manifested itself over time to something much larger, to the point where I had broken every vow I held dear.

I sit before you today a broken man.   While I believe in the power of God to reconcile all things, I have no idea how my particular story might reconcile itself.   I have no idea what tomorrow holds.  I can only look at things today and name them for what they are.   Pretty bad.

I have a blog called Dancing on Saturday. The name carries two important images for me.  The first is “dancing” which harkens back to a theological term the early thinkers gave to our Triune God.  This God lives and breaths and moves in community – a perfect harmony of peoples – beautifully choreographed in such a way that creation is an obvious byproduct.   Because our Creator dances, so can we.

The second is not so pretty.   Saturday is that day between the cross of Friday and the resurrection of Sunday.   Saturday is a place of fear and trembling.  Oddly, it’s in that “fear and trembling” we are called to work out our salvation (Phil. 2:12).   Saturday is where many of us live much of our lives.  We find it difficult to believe.  We look at dreams shattered and vows broken and wonder if God is even aware that we exist, much less madly in love with us.

Saturday is where we the Church are called to sit and speak.  We point with crooked fingers and lives toward an empty tomb even as we stutter over the words of our creeds.  Saturday is where we are called to dance.   And we all need dance partners.   Church is a good place to find a bride to dance.  In church when I am too weary or jaded to sing I know someone will stand and sing for me.  Perhaps next week I can sing for them.

One place I have found great dance happening has been in 12 Step meetings.  Surrounded by fellow addicts who listen to the brokenness of others, share their own hope and experience and strength and offer nothing more nor less than a hug and solidarity in the midst of a storm is grace personified.  I have seen more grace in a circle of addicts than in a host of churches.

This saddens me because I love the church.  But I am hopeful seeing a gathering like this today.   That you are all giving me space to share this today speaks volumes of the sort of place this already is.   Grace.

Grace is a phone call from a friend at a moment of crisis.  Grace is sitting among a group of addicts bearing one another’s burdens.  Grace is homemade biscuits at Duke Park on a Sunday morning with new and old friends.   Grace is being asked by your pastor to come speak about grace in the midst of brokenness.

Grace is boasting in our weaknesses so that the power of both the suffering and risen Christ may rest upon us.

I want to close with another passage of Scripture that I hope you’ll chew on the rest of your day or life.  It comes from no stranger to brokenness, the prophet Hosea:

Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.

Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth (6:2)

He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.

Grace.

The writer of the story is looking back, reflecting on the dark road down which his or her addiction led them and now, years later, they are ready to share their story with the world.   Now that they have an established career, an amicable relationship with the people they’ve hurt, a restored leadership role in their church, 6 years worth of sobriety chips in their dresser, a lovable, scruffy, dog named Grace, they are now happy to tell their story of past suffering.

I’m glad those stories exist.   They serve a wonderful purpose, giving people like me hope.  It would be sad and depressing if no story had a happy ending.

But if I may be so bold to speak for most of us Christians, we are addicted to happy endings.  In our good-intentioned insistence upon Easter we skip over Dark Saturday.    We do not do very well when it comes to sitting inside tombs.

Get yourself all resurrected, cleaned up and shiny white and then tell us your wonderful story.  

That is a church culture I have known most of my 37 years and perhaps one you know, too.   Perhaps it’s why you won’t presently step foot in a church.  You, like me, are still dirty.

But I won’t give up on the Church.  As Augustine is famous for saying,

She may be a whore, but she’s my Mother.

1700 years ago we still had an understanding of ourselves in the Church that dirty saints can nurture other dirty saints.   If, that is, we will risk being vulnerable.

And so I’ve heard all the success stories, at least the ones that are able to still speak.   I wonder about the many, many more who never got their dog or their pulpit back.   I wonder if I will be among them.

The reality in which we live, Church, is one where not every homeless person ends up being discovered because of their golden voice.    Some die hungry on the streets in a pile of their own shit.   Not every broken marriage comes out on the other side as reconciled sweethearts.   Not every addict makes it through the rest of his or her life without relapse.   People die.

Many more are weeping alongside the waters of Despair.  They hide their voices in their hang-ups because their tormenters require from them songs of mirth.    They demand Easter songs or no songs at all (my own paraphrase of Psalm 137:1-3).

The Church has little room for singing the blues.

But sing we must.   At least this is what I am learning.   And it is why I have chosen to do what I do here.   I didn’t choose the title for this blog years ago thinking that it would come to this but how perfect it fits:  Dark Saturday, the day where nobody knows if Easter will happen or not is where I find myself.   It is also where many of my readers find themselves.    They ache. They hurt.  They yearn.   They cry out.   And for whatever reason, my words have provided a momentary balm.    Here are just a few excerpts from some of the many letters I receive daily (obviously their identities will remain confidential)….

Your story has made me want to check out a local 12-step group. I attended my first meeting. You don’t know how relieved I was to admit my addiction and to start undoing the fear I have that I will one day blow it so bad that it will ruin my family, my ministry, and my faith. Thank you so much for putting yourself out there.

I hope you’re doing well. Remember that all the way on the ____ Coast there’s a troubled guy that sought healing because of your willingness to be honest.

I must say I considered myself an agnostic until I heard of you loosing your church ect. You and Rob Bell have helped me to know that I am loved. You inspire me, you are wide open and more honest than most of us can face. You open up to the universe and everyone in it. That in itself is extremely healing because you are owning it.

Chad, I just want you to know I struggle with you and thank you for sharing your burden. Secrecy is always the tool of the powers of this world. Compartmentalizing is a great tool, but also a weapon of choice by the forces of darkness to keep the light confined. Thank you for lighting the path out of darkness.

I write to you with tears streaming down my cheeks. I just read your very honest revelation that you are a sex addict on your blog….FIrst, let me say, “thank you” for being so honest and transparent with your own life…I think God just offered me an invitation to get healthy and sober. Your prayers will help me work up the courage to accept.

You have no idea, Chad, how much good you have done over the past few months and, with your latest blog post. Thank you for slapping me upside the head. You will never know how grateful I am.

My writing (or journaling) gives me great joy personally but these testimonies and many more like them give me purpose.    We all need a purpose.   As I said here, you are invited to help me in that pursuit through your continued prayers and letters as well as through donations.   This, for the present, is how I make my living.

So I don’t know how this story will end.   I can’t see around the bend.    I am confident, however, that this is a road I need to travel and I don’t wish to travel it alone.    If my journey, as dark and twisted and dirty as it may be, gives someone else the courage to take a step then perhaps we can one day give thanks.   Giving thanks whether we still find ourselves weeping along the waters of Babylon or playing fetch with Grace.

Maybe, just maybe, life in God is a bit of both.

The insinuation being made, and perhaps understandably so, is that I am purposefully concealing some of the dark places my sexual addiction led me.   I get that.  I can understand why certain people, particularly those who are hurting the most right now, would read one blog post and demand more.

My intent was and is never to conceal but to heal.   How I tell my story and when I tell it is, in the end, up to me.   For today, 3 days following a preliminary divorce hearing, I am simply grateful for the gift of being sober today and for the friends presently surrounding me providing a safe haven to heal, grow and begin life anew.

Having said that, this is not a place where I envision having to daily defend myself as though there were something to defend nor do I wish to see it become a place where fellow sojourners feel intimidated to share their own struggles and failures and attempts to restart for fear of being attacked for not telling their story in the manner others think they ought.

If you wish to contact me directly to ask me questions about anything you like I welcome that. I also ask that you respect the pace and manner with which I move towards wholeness.  Presently I am surrounded by good, trusted friends who hold me accountable while insisting I be gentle in my own recovery.   I’m confident that you, friend, would desire nothing less.

And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.

That was my posture Tuesday morning.   The day prior I was sitting in court, the first hearing in a divorce proceeding where custody arrangements for our 5 children and financial obligations were set. The judge’s ruling on both of those matters was not surprising as most of that had already been pre-determined.   What was surprising, however, were the emotions that came with it.

Sitting alone on one side of the courtroom awaiting our turn was the most humiliating and painful experience of my life.   Being run out of town for believing against hell felt nothing like the hell my sexual addiction had now presented.   In mid-July I wrote about how I really mucked it up this time, but sitting in court Monday made those consequences I wished away or ignored a sobering reality.  It was a perfect storm.

And so I found myself Tuesday morning mourning the devastation the storm in my life wrought.   I had built a house on sand, seeking shade behind the backlight of a porn-packed laptop which in the end took it all, leaving me scorched and barren.  I wanted to die.

And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.

In the midst of my crying out to God my phone rang.  A dear friend from Durham.   I almost didn’t answer because of the state I was in but this was a friend with whom I knew I could be vulnerable.

Would that we all have at least one person in our lives like this.

Gareth insisted I come spend some time with he and friends who can sit with me through this storm.   This was no time to be alone and, he said, we can walk with you over the hill.

And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we lived for.

The ensuing 8 hour drive began to lift my spirits.   And for the first time in months I began to “remember our own land” and what is worth living for.

Apart from my kids what truly gives me life is when I write and speak.  I have tried to make a living through other means since being dismissed as pastor and it has not worked.   Particularly now, given the circumstances I find myself in, my present career in sales is untenable.

But if I am to believe what my friends tell me, I am still a pastor.   My church is not one of brick and mortar but, ironically, made up of the very stuff that has been my thorn – the internet.   I continue to be profoundly blessed and encouraged by the number of notes I receive from people whose own faith or recovery has been helped through my willingness to be vulnerable here, among you all, whom I am happy to call friends.

As I look up from the bottom in which I find myself I am reminded that I still believe in a God who is in the business of resurrection.   Out of the pits of hell life springs.   Into chaos, God speaks.   I believe in the power of the gospel to transform lives, including my own.

And so it is that i am choosing to reinvent myself today.  Or, at, the very least, my vocation, and I want to invite you to join me.   I would love nothing more than to take your hand as you take mine and together we navigate the complexities of living After the Storm.    In the midst of my own brokenness I find myself more aware than ever of the sustaining grace of God.  Where weakness abounds, God gets to work (Rom. 5:20).

Another singer/songwriter, Andrew Peterson, paints a beautiful picture with his words in Many Roads:

Could it be that the many roads you took to get here/ Were just for me to tell this story, and for you to hear this song/ And your many hopes, and your many fears/ Were meant to bring you here all along.

So if you’ll trust me with your time I’ll spend it wisely/ I will sing to you with all I have to give/ If you traveled all this way, then I will do my best to play/ My biggest hits (that don’t exist).

Change.  I’m making some serious changes in hopes of using my gifts of writing and speaking to sustain me and my family.   One of those changes is recognizing that my blog where I share my life with others takes time – time I love to give – but doesn’t pay to even allow me to have internet service at home (thank God for Starbucks).   I desire to devote more time to my writing and to this blog and in order to do so I have linked up a PayPal account (see the DONATE button on the top right).  If you have been blessed by this space perhaps you will consider making a donation to the ongoing ministry I feel called to provide.

But there is more.   Funds permitting I will revamp this website and begin hosting online weekly Bible studies along with recovery resources.

And speaking of recovery, I have exciting plans for launching Recovery Church, not in the way I once thought, but here, online.   There are a number of ways I wish to serve and while the means may appear unconventional I sense they can work.

In a world where you have far too many choices of things to read and people to friend, I am so grateful for you.   Hearing your stories of pain and triumph as you give me the space to share my own have been a source of great healing, not only to myself but to many others.    It’s what church ought to be.

I’ll close the way I began by sharing the last stanza of After the Storm.   May it be so.

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.