I can't say I ever aspired to be a hospice chaplain, but that was the job that opened
up after I finished my training and I needed an income, or otherwise my wife might kick
me out of the house.
Since that time I have fallen in love with that ministry.
It's not as hard as you might imagine.
I'm sure for some people it is, but you're coming in contact with people at a very vulnerable
time in life and you get to make an impact.
Not only are employed people utilized, but also volunteers.
If you ever think you might like to sit with a hospice patient and provide a little extra
support you can talk to Jennifer or myself.
Many times we want people to come to us to minister to, but there are opportunities where
we can go to them and meet them where they're at.
Amen.
Number of years ago I watched a movie about a dog and a cat who were separated from their
owners.
I don't remember the details, but I remember them making their way from one part of the
country to another.
And of course either these animals talked or we understood their thoughts or how television
is and so forth.
But it was a heartwarming story of advances, setbacks, fun times, and heartaches.
The name of the movie I believe was Homeward Bound, The Incredible Journey.
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
Again, it's been probably 15, 20 years since I've seen it.
I was probably only partially paying attention.
You know we're fascinated by the tales of people's journeys.
There's stories.
When I was in the library I saw one of the books about the Adventist soldier that was
in combat and saved so many people.
What was his name?
Desmond Doss.
You know his story, don't you?
We're intrigued and fascinated about people's journeys and their stories, their ups and
downs.
The story is pretty much a boring one if everything goes alright, isn't it?
You're not going to stay and watch that or read that book.
You're probably not even going to be able to relate to that.
So today I want to look at a story, an incredible journey that begins in Genesis chapter 12.
If you have your Bibles and like to follow along, we'll look at some passages along the
way, just some highlights.
I tend to use my phone these days, so if you have a phone that's welcome as well.
Genesis chapter 12, as was read just a few minutes ago, Abram, and sometimes I'll say
Abram, sometimes I'll say Abraham, you know he's the same person, heard God's voice which
called him to leave the security of his father's home and go to an unspecified location with
his wife and all of his possessions.
God promises to make him into a great nation, to be blessed and to be a blessing to others.
And in verse 5 we read, then Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother's son and all
their possessions that they had gathered and the people whom they had acquired in Haran
and they departed to go to the land of Canaan.
While in Canaan, God's voice, I don't know, can you say a voice appeared?
God's voice was heard again and God promised Abraham that the land that was surrounding
him, one that was a very luscious, green, prosperous, desirable land, would one day
be his family.
You ever been on a journey that started off as exciting, became difficult as you entered
into it?
Number of years ago, after I finished up my studies at Andrews University, it was wintertime
and we were called to move to Connecticut, Bridgeport in Stamford, Connecticut.
And kind of hated leaving Michigan.
We made some friends, enjoyed the Great Lake there and everything, but that's why we'd
gone to school was to serve and minister.
And so we packed up our stuff, which for those who know is a very difficult thing to do,
to get everything put into a truck.
And not only our stuff, but my mother's stuff.
And I can't remember why she wasn't on the trip with us, but we had her stuff.
It was loaded in a truck.
We drove the next morning and when we got up in the morning, I was sick to my stomach.
I didn't feel good and I wanted to stay in the hotel.
Well, my wife wanted to meet the truck to be able to tell them where to put things.
And so her opinion prevailed.
And we drove along, I think it was Highway 80 in Ohio.
I'm sick.
My son had been sick the night before.
The journey was miserable.
It was so miserable that when we pulled over to the side of the road, there was snow and
I had to get down on my knees and do what sick people do on the side of the highway.
A journey that was supposed to be exciting became difficult.
But here you see Abraham on a journey and God has spoken to him.
God has made some promises to him.
Abraham has responded faithfully with all of these things, what could possibly go wrong
for Abraham or Abraham?
In verse 12, we see the first one or two problems.
We're told that there's a severe famine in the land that God had promised Abraham.
Wow, that's got to be a disappointment.
Fandome means no water, no fruit.
This is what God is promising me.
Which then led to problem number two.
Abraham and his tribe had to move to Egypt.
I can't imagine what it's like moving all your possessions and stuff without having
a moving truck or a pickup truck or a trailer.
But Abraham did it and other people during that time did it.
They figured out they must have been great pathfinders.
But without the equipment that pathfinders have today.
And so they packed up their stuff and they moved on to Egypt.
And at face value, it's an inconvenience.
Except Abraham saw it as more than that.
In verse 11, the second part, if you want to read along with me, I'm reading from the
New King James Version.
He said to Saraiah's wife, indeed, I know that you are a woman of beautiful countenance.
Therefore, it will happen when the Egyptians see you that they will say, this is my wife,
and they will do what?
They will kill me.
But they will let you live.
They say that you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake and that I may
live because of you.
There are two things that go wrong here.
A famine forces them to go potentially to a hostile place, Egypt.
And the second thing that goes wrong is Abram's interpretation of the event and his fearful
reaction which made the situation much worse than what it really was.
Are you with me this morning?
You ever do that?
Interpret something to be worse than what it really is?
People who study human behavior tell us we do it all the time.
In fact, we have two encounters or two experiences of suffering for Abraham.
One, the need to move to a potentially hostile place.
But his suffering, his difficulty is increased by his response or his reaction to problem
number one.
He makes the assumption that the Egyptians are going to take his life and that the only
solution is to pretend that his wife is his sister and hand her willingly over to the
Egyptian leaders so that his life can be spared and his life can be spared.
Think about that.
Abraham has difficulty.
It's not easy moving stuff around, traveling with a caravan of people.
Who knows how many he had at this time.
He assesses a threat which our brains are trained to do and need to do because there
are real threats in this world.
If you see a dog that's growling, you may want to protect yourself, make sure you're
safe.
And so our brains are wired and God's given us that instinct.
But today I want to share with you we can't always trust our instinct.
Amen?
We have to be careful with our responses and our thoughts and our assumptions because sometimes
in life we make a difficult situation worse by trying to fix the difficult situation in
a way that isn't helpful.
Imagine for a moment being there when Abraham turns his wife over to the Egyptians and says
goodbye.
Imagine the pain that's in his wife's heart.
Imagine the pain that's in the community's heart.
Those lot and others who bonded with her and were close to her and were used to having
her around in whatever role she played.
And imagine the pain of Abraham potentially never seeing his wife again or never living
as husband and wife again.
Because of his interpretation of a problem, he increased the suffering that actually took
place.
Many times we can increase our suffering by our reaction to a difficulty or loss.
Thankfully God rescues them from Egypt, but the hardship does not end there.
Abraham repeats the experience in a different setting.
And then another example we'll look at of making something worse is when they were childless
and decided to have a child through Sarah's servant.
I'm not going to ask anybody here who has had trouble, who wanted a child, couldn't
have a child, had to go through infertility and all that stuff.
My wife and I were there and it bothered her more than it bothered me because I was kind
of afraid to have children.
Now I'm glad that I had them.
But at the time, that interpretation of a lifelong desire to have children really was
a struggle for my wife because she personalized it.
And many times we can personalize our difficulties.
Why me?
What did I do?
Why is God not allowing me to have children?
And at the same time she was working in an office that worked with addictions, providing
healthcare and she would see drug addicted women get pregnant that didn't want children,
have abortions, and she had to live with this reality of here I am, I have a decent income,
a stable home.
I want children.
What did I do wrong?
Why is God punishing me?
So you have the event of difficulty, of pain, of hardship, but then the suffering can be
increased by how we interpret that experience.
Thankfully, God was able to help her work through that and actually reveal some assumptions
that she had, some things, concepts that she inherited from growing up that had to be undone
and unworked.
But essentially we can increase our suffering with our interpretations and that's what happened
to Abram and Sarah.
They were so desperate to have children that they decided to set up a situation where Abram
would impregnate Sarah's servant and they would claim that child as their own.
I know it sounds kind of strange, although those things are still happening today in
a different way.
But then eventually they had to send that child and woman away to fend for themselves
because of the strife that was created and that sending away increased their suffering
even more.
You know, you have to wonder if Abraham knew there were going to be all these difficulties
along the way, would he have responded to God's invitation, God's call to leave and
to set out and to create a new nation, a new people, go to a new land?
Thankfully, God doesn't reveal everything to us at the beginning.
We have to discover it along the way or we may not venture out on that journey.
And so it leads us to the question, is the journey with God worth it and why are journeys
so difficult?
And I want to propose three reasons this morning.
First, we live in a broken world where there's suffering, loss, hurt and pain.
It's the reality that we live in.
Second, we have an enemy that seeks to kill, steal and destroy and that's a reality.
Third, we are flawed and in need of transformation and that transformation can be painful.
Are you with me today?
In my personal journey, I found myself at a place of disillusionment, disappointment,
frustration, negativity, judgmentalism of myself and others and it placed me in a very
stuck place in life.
And here I was a pastor.
I wanted things to change.
I wanted my wife to change.
I wanted my children to change, my, at that time, teenage, young adults.
I wanted my church to change.
I wanted my friends to change.
I wanted the politics of the United States to change but none of those things were changing.
And so I protested internally and sometimes externally.
I ruminated on those things.
I sought to argue for change of perspective, change of things that were done.
I would retreat.
I would withdraw.
I would suck.
I, you know, I tried all kinds of things to change everything around me but eventually
I came to realize that the only thing I can change is me.
Amen?
I can't change my wife, although she's a wonderful person.
I can't change my kids, although they're good kids.
I can't, I couldn't change my church, although there were good people there.
I can't change our society.
I can't change our world.
There are lots of things I came to realize that I couldn't change and so I had to come
to a point and thankfully in my chaplain training and so forth, learn the concept of radical
acceptance where you accept things as they are and you make the most of them.
So what did radical acceptance look like for me?
Instead of getting frustrated, ruminating, I just accepted.
That's how it is.
Where can I find something that brings meaning?
How can I engage in meaningful activity?
How can I find joy and purpose in this setting, in this environment?
How can I, how can I respond differently?
And when we learn radical acceptance, we can take care of two problems.
One is the fact that we live in a broken world where suffering and hurt and loss and pain
happen.
When we accept that as a reality, that's just where we are.
We're not going to change it, but we can find meaningful lives in the midst of it.
That takes care of that.
And then the second, we have an enemy that kills, steals, and destroy.
When we accept that and we place our trust in God, that takes care of a lot of the problems
that some of us experience.
But then there's a third thing that needed to change, and that is me.
The process of transformation is often painful.
I've skipped around here, so I'm just going to catch up in my notes and see where I'm
at.
So when I began to accept life as it is, trust that God is in the midst of these things,
working out his will and purpose, even though he did not necessarily cause certain things
to happen.
As I began to seek out more meaningful activities and work, and one thing I began to do was
practicing gratitude at the end of the day by counting all the things that went right
that day instead of ruminating on the things that went wrong.
My mind, my heart, my life began to get better.
It doesn't mean that we don't have hardships and losses and we don't grieve, but our vision
of life can become very small and narrow, and we can miss out on the beauties that still
exist.
Currently, I'm reading a book, it's a psychological book that talks about resilience.
And one of the things that says it's fascinating to me is we can become resilient by developing
a couple of skills, a couple of dispositions, outlooks.
One is radical gratitude, learning to be thankful for all kinds of stuff.
Thankful that we have running water, thankful that we have heated running water, thankful
that we have a shelter, thankful that we have transportation, thankful because we take these
things for granted, we just assume that they're there and they should work and when they don't,
we get upset and so forth.
But when we can fill our lives with a sense of gratitude and appreciation for what we
do have, we become more resilient in the difficulties of life because the difficulties don't overshadow
everything else that's good and beautiful in the world.
And the other thing it recommended was developing a sense of awe and wonder.
And I think both of these are biblical concepts.
Science, good science only observes how God has created and organized and makes things
work.
And so it says to start appreciating the little stuff that happens, the beauty in nature,
the beauty in personalities, the beauty of art, the beauty of poetry, the beauty of music.
Create and develop wonder of how electricity works and other kinds of things.
And one exercise that actually amused me was imagine yourself in your home and someone
from a hundred years or a thousand years ago comes and asks you about things in your house,
explain it to them.
Yeah, that microwave, that cooks food.
It draws electricity.
Well, what's electricity?
Well, electricity is something, you know, and trying to describe this, oh, that smoke
alarm, that warns us if there's a fire and there's smoke and it sets off an alarm.
Imagine explaining this to someone who's never seen or heard of these things.
A bathroom, a toilet, what is that?
Well, that's, you know, where you do your business and well, where does it go?
Well, it goes down some pipes and into a tank and then, well, where does it go from there?
And I found myself amused explaining these things to this imaginary person.
Well, where does it go?
I mean, what happens to it?
Well, it gets carted away by a truck.
Well, what's a truck?
Well, that's in, we need to cultivate a sense of awe and wonder for the ordinary and the
beautiful things that we have and that are around us.
And it can help us along the journey of life when we face these difficulties and disappointments.
Amen?
In the Bible, you read in Psalms in different places the sense of awe and wonder and appreciation
and gratitude, but it's also a mixture with disappointment and grief and loss and they
seem to balance each other out and make life more palatable.
And so we see in Abraham a mixture of radical faith, but also distrust in God.
Distrust that God would allow someone to take his life after God had made those promises
to him.
We see it as a mixture of radical faith and joy and resentment and anger and need for
control and pessimism and judgmentalism and impulsivity and fear and you name it.
And the journey with God challenges us to grow often without providing the details of
how to do it.
There are principles in God's word that help us.
Time spent in meditation and prayer can help.
Also advice from others, experiences can help.
Learning to manage our responses and our reactions can be key because when our feelings are intense,
when there's a strong sense internally of anger or resentment or disappointment or judgmentalism
or whatever it is, and it can happen in split seconds, we have difficulty thinking clearly.
We react in ways that we might not have reacted as if we were at peace.
And God has given us the gift and ability to calm and soothe those emotions so we can
pause and make thoughtful choices and decisions.
One of the things that was helpful to me was the acronym STOP.
When you're facing some strong feelings or whatever it is, stop what you're doing.
That's the S. Pause, don't react.
Take a step back from the situation mentally.
T-O is observe what's going on inside of me.
What am I feeling right now?
Well I feel angry and I should feel angry because they did this and that or I feel hurt
because of this and they didn't invite me to that or I feel whatever.
We can come up with all kinds of ways to justify our feelings.
And we don't want to discount our feelings but we want to remember that our feelings
are things that come and go.
It's our mind trying to predict and anticipate and respond to the past and to the future
and it floods into the present.
And so we want to pause and observe what's going on inside of ourselves.
I've learned to label it.
Oh I notice I'm having fear right now.
Oh I notice I'm having judgmental thoughts right now.
Oh I've noticed and so I'm pausing, I'm slowing down my mind, I'm slowing down the physiology
because some of us can have real strong internal reactions.
Especially if you're like me, you've had some ADD and some childhood trauma and a brain
injury.
You have to learn to slow down and pause and calm yourself so that you can make good choices
and good reactions.
There are things like breathing exercises where we can slow our physiology down.
We can learn distress tolerance and practice present moment awareness where we're just
dealing with this now.
Not the past, not all that has happened, not our fears and anticipation of future but right
now what is going on?
It's interesting in Psalm 46 it starts off with the words, God is our refuge and our
strength, a very present help in trouble.
And then it describes this world shaking calamity and though the earth be moved and the mountains
go into the sea and all this and so forth and then it wraps up by saying, be still and
know that I am God.
So in the midst of this chaotic world, this stressful disappointing world, God wants us
to be still, to slow down, to be thoughtful, to be mindful and not to react because when
we react we find ourselves doing like Abraham and bringing more suffering into the lives
of our own and into the lives of others.
So Abraham faced all these difficulties, was the journey worth it?
We have this interesting insight in chapter 24, I think it's verse 24, where at the end
of his life his son hasn't got a wife yet so he calls his servant and says, you know,
I want you to find a wife for my son and so forth and in chapter 24, 24 the writer makes
a comment that probably we could rush right by it and not even pay attention to it or
notice it.
It says, now Abraham was old, well advanced in age and the Lord had blessed Abraham in
all things.
Who would have thought the mistakes Abraham made, the choices, the mixture of the faith
and the not faith, the hostile environment around him, who would have thought that his
life would end up being blessed in all things?
Interspersed between those big mistakes and hardships and disappointments, God was able
to work with Abraham and change him.
A high point was when God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son on the altar and Abraham
practiced trust and God intervened and confirmed Abraham's transformation.
If Abraham had not entered the journey, he would not have had those encounters with God
out in the wilderness.
He would not have witnessed God's work in amazing ways and most of all he would not
have become a close friend of God.
Today in our circumstances, God invites us on a journey of faith and trust and most importantly
personal transformation.
It's tempting to hold back, it's tempting to take another journey, a lot held back,
he took another journey and he lost everything sadly.
It's tempting to take on a side route, what I call elder brother ministry.
Anyone know what elder brother ministry is?
You know the prodigal son and the elder brother?
A ministry of criticism of others, which is no ministry at all.
There are lots of other routes that we could take, lots of ways to get off the journey,
half-hearted responses with God, but the real joy is in the journey of struggle, personal
change and learning to trust God deeply with our existence, no matter what comes our way.
I believe that we're going to have some difficult times ahead of us that will challenge us in
ways we've never been challenged.
But the word of God and life experience confirms to me that if we respond to God's call, practice
acceptance, learn to calm our reactions and to make thoughtful choices in faith, spend
time with God in prayer and meditation, we too can be deemed blessed in every way and
be guided by God in the midst of a broken world and be a blessing to others.
May God help us to be on the incredible journey.
Dear Lord, we thank you for these testimonies, these experiences, and as we seek to find
our own way, help us to slow down, to reflect, to seek wisdom and guidance, and that trust
no matter what happens, even if we were to lose our very lives in a situation or circumstances,
that we too will ultimately be blessed, either in this life or in the life to come, but most
likely both.
And we thank you in Jesus' name.
Let everyone say, Amen.