Reading: 1 Peter 3:13-18
Blessing:
May God bless these His Holy Words and all of us present in their hearing and instruction.
(Sermon)
June 6, 2010
I should begin by providing Pastor Rick with some disclaimers for placing me before you all as a graduate of his “lay preacher” training program. I want to assure you, Pastor did his best with me and through his tutorage, I have prepared several sermons on topics near and dear to my heart and soul, all of which are clearly structured and guided by the thoughtful, scripture-based process he taught us very thoroughly. However, you won’t be hearing any of those today… maybe some day in the future… that is of course if you ever invite into the pulpit again after today… but not today!
Instead today I must begin to tell the story of what some of you may recognize as the theme of Doug’s Memorial Foundation,
If it goes South on us, please don’t blame Rick …he did his best! If it goes well, it will be by the Grace of God through the Power of the Holy Spirit, who has been urging me… nagging me actually, to tell this story for sometime now! The Holy Spirit’s insistence that I tell this story began shortly after Doug’s death when it could be characterized as an occasional “tap on the shoulder with a whisper… ‘you gotta tell them, you know?’ ” Lately however, it has become a regular “smack across the head…with a stern admonishment- ‘Hey! …come on, come on …what are you waiting for…LET”S GET IT DONE !’ ”
The most recent instrument for that smack has been this book…Crazy Love, which has been convicting me of becoming “lukewarm” in fulfilling what I know to be my small “place” in God’s magnificent plan for our Salvation- the place which the Holy Spirit has been faithful to reveal to me through many tiny glimpses, as I am ready and willing to see them. This book, combined with what many people might describe as a “chain of circumstances”, has me here in front of you today with no choice but to begin to tell the story of God’s Grace and the Power of the Holy Spirit in my life, especially as it is intertwined with the life and death and place in God’s Grace of my beloved son, Douglas. Today, I must follow Peter’s instruction as provided in our reading to: “be prepared to give answer to everyone who asks…the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).
This can only be a beginning though, as I am sure you don’t want to be here for the several hours that it would take for me to describe the many, many ways God has poured His Grace into my life. But today I would like to begin by telling the story of how God saw me through the most difficult trial of my life… the sudden death of my beloved son, Douglas and the abrupt end of my dreams for our long life together here in this world.
I am fairly certain that most of you here are aware of my family’s loss and grieving of Douglas and many of you stood there beside us…supporting us… wrapping us securely in your love and your prayers during that very difficult time. But I am just as sure that many of you have wondered about, and perhaps even worried about my manner of grieving or seeming lack of it! Some brave and caring souls have even warned me that it’s not normal mourning to begin to plan a “big party” like our golf outing in the wake of a loss of our son! Others, who are perhaps more trusting in my sanity or at least more polite, have asked “How did you get through that without being overwhelmed with sadness, anger, or fear?” And I most frequently would respond with a brief and illusive platitude about being faithful to God’s plan for me and / or being grateful for our Savior’s welcome for Doug into His presence. But I have never been able to give the full explanation of only way that I could survive that soul-wrenching loss. The explanation of how I “S.A.T. in my place!” Or more accurately… how the Holy Spirit lifted and carried me to S.A.T. in my place.
Now that doesn’t make sense, does it? If
Now what makes me think that I am somehow qualified to stand in this pulpit and instruct you all on these spiritual principles? Or more importantly, why should you think I am qualified enough to warrant your time and attention? The answer is …I am not! I don’t propose to teach you today about how to use these principles, but I must provide a witness to how these how worked in my life! I don’t have any other choice if I want to continue my walk with the Holy Spirit! So thank you in advance for giving me the opportunity to provide this witness and maybe through God’s grace you will find similar experiences and applications in your own life!
Now, many of you have heard me say on numerous occasions that I am a blessed individual … and I truly know that I am …although, I certainly don’t deserve to be blessed! (Now here’s where the head bobbing can begin and maybe Stuart and Sharon
The truth is I have had a good share of troubles in living my life and God knows I have provided more than a fair share of troubles and worries to those He has given a place around me in years gone by! But even still, God has remained very generous with his blessing throughout.
As far back as I can remember, things have come way too easily for me! I was the youngest of five children born to a mature, happy and fairly comfortable set of parents. Older people generally found me to be cute and likeable, I made and kept friends easily with my peers, I did well in school with minimal effort and was fairly good athlete…my young life was good! However, beginning in my teens and throughout my young adult life, I didn’t behave much like a blessed individual and life wasn’t so good in many ways! Exciting maybe… good, not so much! That is because left on my own… I am a mess! I do not and can not accomplish SAT naturally, as I am much more prone to be a SAP instead. That is STUBBORN – ANGRY- PROUD. And being a natural SAP has caused me and those around me a lot of struggles and pain!
Way too many to even start to talk about today! Whew!
But to save us all a lot of time, let me expose the root of all those difficulties… the lack of my understanding of my blessings as blessings…freely given by God! Instead, I had come to believe that the good things in my life must be somehow deserved or more accurately, earned! And at the opposite end of that reasoning, difficult things or hard times must also be deserved as punishments or consequences for not measuring up to lofty standards that must follow my blessings!
Because I knew I didn’t earn my many blessings, I began to feel myself to be a phony, a failure and a disappointment to God and I began to hide from him… to separate myself from his grace and his blessings! My favorite hiding place was in a bottle, as I turned to alcohol and other drugs to provide a kind of comfort that I could understand and that I thought I could control. Thankfully, God provided another blessing by making me very physically intolerant to alcohol and I fairly quickly became a full blown alcoholic!
And as life is sure to provide…some hard times also came along, first the premature death of my dear friend and father-in-law, Louie, then my failure to achieve the business plan we had crafted together alone, and finally, the on-going financial and family struggles in the aftermath of those losses. With each crisis, I became even more STUBBORN – ANGRY – PROUD and finally my alcoholism began to overwhelm my life. And it would have certainly taken my life, if not for my little hero… my four year old little boy, Douglas, who by a miraculous set of events, helped me to again trust in God, to accept his blessing and to find continuous sobriety.
Again, time won’t allow me today to recount that set of miracles, but I have been trying to write the full story of the place that God had provided for Doug in my life and I have brought a few copies of the first few chapters which detail those events. I would invite anyone interested to take a copy and please assist the Holy Spirit in nagging me to finish the writing, as this has been most difficult for me. Believe me, I need the encouragement! But on with my mission for today…
As God would have it though, my little hero, Douglas, was provided a place in this world much like my own! Too much like mine in all the wrong ways, by my preferences, but Doug was also richly blessed with God-given abilities and opportunities, and in most things, life came even more easily to Doug than they did to his Dad. However, he was also provided with major struggles just like his Dad: the disease of alcoholism and a propensity to be SAP just like his Dad… and then the added struggle of having a Dad who believed he owed God favor for having him save his life. You see when it came to Douglas, I remained more of a SAP than SAT as I believed that since Doug had saved my life, it must be my duty to God and to Douglas to make him a better man than I had been. And believe me…both Doug and I struggled with that throughout his short, but mostly blessed life!
But again, we must fast-forward to the last weeks of our time together on earth to get to the heart of today’s message. Several months before his death, Doug had an accident while driving drunk and thankfully only destroyed his truck. As a result, his mother and I made some tough decisions to not only to refuse to help him to buy another vehicle, but also to evict him from our home until he honestly faced his drinking problems. Doug did find support and living arrangements with of some very caring friends and began to a pattern of more “controlled drinking” over the next several months. Gradually he found his way back into our trust and into our home. Several weeks before he died, he convinced me to help him buy a new truck, which I did with the condition that if we found him to be driving drunk, I would take possession of the truck and sell it. The week before he died, Doug was on vacation from work and with extra time on his hands, he found the company of old drinking buddies, and as alcoholics are likely to do…fell right back into dangerous drinking and other behaviors, like driving drunk. Thankfully, two days before his death we received a call from the friends who had been looking out for Doug, alerting us that he was in a bar, very drunk, with the keys to his truck in his pocket and making plans to continuing drink down the road at another bar. I went to Doug to make good on my promise and took possession of his truck, leaving him walking down a back road to another bar, and very, very, angry- bordering on rage! I prayed that his walk would calm his anger, but instead it must have escalated, because what followed was more than an hour of increasingly angry, ranting and threatening phone calls from Doug, leading me to two of the most awful realizations of my life. First, that if he came home in state he was in, I might have to hurt my beloved son in order to protect our family from him; and second and most chilling, that Douglas’s eternal soul may be at stake if he acted on his drunken rage as he threatened!
I was broken…defeated… and I did what I was too stubborn, angry and proud to do for many years before… 48 hours before his death, I surrendered my son to Jesus…I confessed that I had failed to meet my obligation to make Douglas a better man than I had been… that I had again made a mess of my life and also Doug’s life and I pleaded for God’s help!
And then… the miracle! The phone rang again and it was Doug, but this time his voice was softer and cracking as if holding back tears as he said, “Dad, I’m sorry…can you come and get me!” My reply was a simple “I know you are Douglas , where are you?” What followed in the next several hours was the best father and son talk that we ever had, this time based on a common understanding that only one alcoholic can have with another when they face their common problem together. And although it wasn’t the first time he had heard about them, I believe Douglas better understood and accepted how he had ushered miracles into my life in the past…and he better understood his place in God’s plan!
Now it would be hard not to pay attention to a miracle like that, but God was also faithful to provide a stream of smaller miracles in the last hours of Doug’s life… and in the hours and days following his death, and every once in awhile in the years since. If I had my way, Doug would have immediately found sobriety and would not have had to die to fulfill our place together in God’s plan, but that wasn’t God’s plan and it is not my place to question Him!
We were blessed to learn from his many friends in the days after his death that he spent his last days re-connecting with those people who loved him most and died knowing he was loved! I also learned just hours after his death through a miraculous account from estranged friend, that Doug had poured out the story of his life to a stranger (but an acquaintance of ours) in the very last hours of his life. In that telling, he made his own surrender- resolving that he would quit drinking and his life would be better…that his Dad was going to proud of him again! Perhaps immediately after that surrender, an hour before his death…Doug called me and we had our last physical conversation! Although he was in a bar, he was not drunk and wanted to make a date to spend time together the next morning…golfing! Since it was to be a Sunday, I replied that it would have to be after church and which he followed with the promise that we would go to church together (a near miracle in itself for the past year or so) and then go golfing or to breakfast, because he wanted to talk. Our last words to each other were in the code that all Dad’s and Son’s use to say mushy things to each other in public… “Be careful Doug!” I said, which means “I love you!” in Dad-speak. His last words to me were Doug’s code phrase… “You know it, Pops!”, which in this case meant…”I love you, too!”
An hour later, Doug was driving…not drunk…but too fast for conditions without a seatbelt, and our Lord and Savior made good on his promise… He called Doug to the Place that he had prepared for him! Doug’s work in this earthly place was completed and his soul which I desperately prayed for 48 hours before was safe and joyous in Jesus presence! HOW COULD I BE ANYTHING BUT THANKFUL FOR THAT!
OK! I need to bring this in for a landing, so let me review how I S.A.T. in my Place
during this most difficult time…
I had come through the power of the Holy Spirit to SURRENDER my unreasonable expectations for myself and for my son to the Lord…
the Holy Spirit grabbed my ATTENTION in a miraculous way preceding and shortly after Doug’s death…
and most importantly the Holy Spirit has taught me that through THANKFULNESS I can remain open to and aware of the hundreds of little miracles of love and kindness that have sustained and strengthened me everyday since Doug’s death!
Taken altogether… the Holy Spirit has taught me that it was not my place to make
I hope today that some of you here today hearing Doug’s story can come to believe or better understand that God has a special place for you too, regardless of your own struggles or seeming shortcomings and that place is very good…and that you can find your own hope and joy …if you too choose to SAT in it!
God Bless You and I thank you! Please join me in prayer…
Father God, I praise you and thank you for this opportunity to share with my friends some of your grace and the wonders you have provided in my unworthy life! Please help our friends to better enjoy their own blessings and wonders in the place that you have prepared for them on earth… as we all wait in joyful hope to attain the
Amen.
Let’s sing together, our closing Hymn number_____.
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