Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Grow Tenchel. I'm Sarah and I'm here with my dad, doc, on a gorgeous morning. How are you?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Super. Labor Day, nice cookout. Shared the whole day with the family.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: That was fun. Our brother Jay is back in town with his girlfriend. It was a fun day to be with everybody.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Yes, it was.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Well, so we do this podcast because we really want to just share some of the stuff that we're learning and we're going through. And as part of being leaders in the church, there is a reality that a lot of people go through a lot of very hard things. And just on Sunday, I think we were probably stopped by, I don't know, five or six people that it's just very, very heavy and that's just one service.
And they're longing to find some hope. And so I thought what we could do for this podcast is we could talk about how do we relate to God when things are incredibly hard, when situations happen in life that you never asked for or you've lost someone that you truly adored, and just when it's over, it's, you know, you're overwhelmed with the reality of some of the pains of life. Have you ever been there?
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Once or twice.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: I've had those moments where it took every drop of energy I had just to draw one more breath.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
I feel like one of the gifts of the church is my mom. We were walking out of church and she's like, is this hard for you? Like, is this weight hard for you? Because mom is an empath, so she carries everything.
And I've just had this perspective, especially over these past couple years.
Working with you is the reality of the beauty of the church, the reality of how thankful I am that we can be a source of hope, that when you are hurting, that this is a place of light where you can meet Jesus Christ. And so I almost look at it as like a great reward that we get to be here and that this church can be a beacon of hope. And so I hope to share that today with you. I recently was reading a story I was telling you. I just finished Craig Rochelle's book, Hope in the Dark, and I think it would be a great resource, if you are looking for a resource.
And in it, he opens with the story of a woman who life was good. She grew up in the church. She was young and vibrant and loved God faithfully. She met her husband in the church. They got married young and life couldn't be better. And they had a baby, a little girl.
But after a couple years of marriage, he got a sales job, and he had to travel a lot for work. And he came home one day and ended up basically telling her that he was leaving her. And he wasn't just leaving her, he was leaving her for her best friend. So in one foul swoop, she lost her husband and her best friend, and she clung to God, and she trusted in her faith. But a couple years after that, her little girl got very sick, and at five or six, she ended up dying.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Oh, my.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: And so Craig Rochelle says he goes into this hospital, and he looks at this woman's face, who has been so beaten by life, and just her spirit is crushed.
It makes me tear up because I know so many people who maybe have not experienced the same thing, but have been there. And he said, he looked in her eyes and she said, I want to believe, but I just can't. I just don't know how a good God could make this happen. And we were talking before this that a lot of times in the pain of life, confusion happens. Can you talk a little bit about that confusion?
[00:04:02] Speaker B: So we want to.
We don't have a chance of getting it right if we don't accept reality.
And here is a hard reality.
The painful things of life can be very confusing.
I'm not confused because I'm a dummy. I'm not confused because I don't love God.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Right?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: I'm not confused because I'm being resistant or stubborn. I'm confused because the nature of pain, the nature of grief, the inexplicable nature of what this lady experienced, it doesn't yield to reason. It's absurd. What happened to that lady isn't reasonable.
And we want life to be reasonable.
We want to be able to. We want to be able to explain.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Everything right and have the right words to fix it.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: And that's really not the way life works.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: No.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: So I want to say from the very beginning, if you are confused in your sorrow and in your misery, that's normal. It's not that you're. It's not you alone. It's the human condition.
Our friend, the prophet Jeremiah, who was as godly a man as you can find, he once said to the Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived. He was confused.
So I start by saying it's a natural part of the experience of sorrow and grief that it can be confusing.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: So when you find yourself in a place where you are confused, you're angry, you're questioning, like, what would be one healthy first step to do, in your opinion.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: So when I'm afraid, then I will trust in the Lord. Remember, we memorized that years ago.
I have to turn my vision off of myself and toward God because I'm confused, because I'm in pain, because I don't have the answer. Okay. So I take my vision off myself and I turn toward God, and I say, what is there in the nature of goddesse that I can trust right now?
So in the story, the lady just couldn't trust in the love of God anymore. But there's more to God than love.
So maybe there is. Maybe I've lost my trust in the love of God. But maybe I can trust in his promise that he'd never leave me or forsake me.
Or maybe I can trust in his promise that he's a good shepherd and he's going to guide me out of this valley of the shadow of death.
I have to take. I have to turn from looking to myself and I have to look to God and think of what quality. Is there any quality of God that I can trust right now?
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really good. Even, like, leaning on a strengthen. Oh, God.
When you think about your own life, is there any moment that you'd be willing to share with us of, like, what your first step looked like? I know that in mine. I talk about my marriage a lot was hard when we were younger. And now I look at where God has brought us, and I look back and I remember days where I just thought, this is never, ever going to. It's never going to work, you know? And I look at us now, and I am so incredibly thankful that God has been so faithful in our lives. And so I take that as, like, a foothold so that I can move to the next.
Is there a time in your life that sticks out?
[00:08:26] Speaker B: We outgrew our facilities in Parma, and we bought a building in Strongsville and remodeled it.
And when we moved, it was a major distance. We moved.
And then some changes I had been trying to make for eight years. When we moved, we made those changes.
We became a non denominational church.
We enlarged what women could do in ministry.
We pushed real hard on culturally acceptable evangelism, and we lost more than half the congregation.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: So you got this new building, you're ready to go, and it's your first Sunday and half show up.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
And it was just. I was saying to God, this is not the way it's supposed to be.
This is just not the way it's supposed to be. And I was very distraught.
And I remember going into the new auditorium of the building we just bought, and I don't know if I should tell a story. I just laid down in the middle aisle. It was during the week. Nobody was there. And I said to God, this is not the way it's supposed to be, but if this is what you want, I'm all in.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: I'm not happy.
I don't understand why this has to be this way.
There was economic distress that went with it, because when you lose half your church, you lose half your givers.
But I remember the only thing I could do. I had no other solutions. The only thing I could do was just surrender and say, if this is not my will, but your will be done.
And oddly enough, it lifted the pressure I felt. Yeah.
When I started praying, I felt the weight of the whole world on me.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: And by the time I was done praying, I felt like no matter what happens, I'm still on God's team.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: And that's a really good point, because I think a lot of times, the things we want to do the most in our hard times, at least for my personality, is to control, is to try to take more or figure it out. And so then the level of pressure, the level of stress, the level of overwhelm, only grows in the hard times. And so now you're not only left with broken heart, but you're left with the pain of trying to do it on your own. And so I love this idea of, what other promises can you look for in God because he is faithful. And how do you just surrender?
We're doing our college. We did our college ministry this summer, and it was booming, and it was awesome. But then all the kids went back to college. And so for the last, I don't know, couple Wednesdays, we've had less and less people. And part of it's cool because you realized how many college kids were there, but the other part is just seriously painful. And my intern who was with me over the summer, texted me, and she was trying to encourage, and she was talking about the sermon and stuff, but I texted her back and I said, if it's one or if it's 1000, I will follow him, because I felt the very same way.
It's more about the act of what does God want from me than what do the numbers look like or what. And I think often when things are good, it's easy to feel that presence of God. It's easy to be like, you know, hundreds of kids are coming, God is the favor of God is with us. But then when you shrink or when what you think should happen isn't happening, you feel like, one, have I done something wrong?
Two, is this a punishment of some sort, or three, I'm a loser. There's just a reality of, like, when things are good, it feels good, and God is alive. Can you talk about that for a second? Like, what does the Bible teach us about that?
[00:13:38] Speaker B: Well, let's start on the negative side.
Job was very confused.
He said to God, I don't understand how this can be.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: And job is a man in the Bible who lost his family, lost his children, lost, lost his wife, everything, his health, everything.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: And in his confusion, he ended up saying, even if God slays me, I will trust him.
He was baffled and couldn't explain it, but he reached a point where his confidence in God said, even if you kill me, I'll trust in you.
It's one of the high moments of the book. So in difficulty, sometimes God is.
He's molding us.
Sometimes God uses difficulty to make us more of the person that he created us and intended us to be.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And we often don't think that it feels intuitively wrong.
But in the reality of my life, the times that I've cling to goddess, most have not been in the good. They've been in the extreme hardships, you know?
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. The puritan said, the molding hand of God is loving, but it is not gentle.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: God wants to mold us, and he uses difficult things in life to do it.
Now, on the positive side, there is grace for every life experience, and we don't get that grace before we need it. So you can carry it around in.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Your pocket, talk about the bank account.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Yeah. God gives us that grace when we need it.
In the moment we need it, God gives us the grace.
So the longer you walk with God, the more you come to say, this is not what I want. It's not pleasant. It's breaking my heart. But God will meet me with grace at some point.
Paul had a thorn in the flesh, and it made him miserable. And he pled with God about it three times, but then he found peace because God said to him, my grace is sufficient.
So the positive side is that in every trauma, in every difficulty, God has a grace for you in that issue.
And at some point in your trauma, the grace of God is going to touch you in a real and meaningful way.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
We both have read the gentle, lowly, and he uses a lot of Thomas Goodwin, which you then read Thomas Goodwin's book, and one of the beautiful ideas of it is that we have a God who has experienced it all. He's not just, you know, in heaven, looking down and judging, but he was here on earth and he walked everything that we've gone through. And so in our brokenness, in our. If it's our sinful nature or if it's our just the brokenness in the reality of life, it actually draws him to us more.
What's the title of your sermon from Sunday? Last Sunday?
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Fashioned.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Fashioned by love or something. Shoot. We'll put it in the notes so that you can go back and listen to it. And I'm also going to be preaching a sermon on Wednesday. It'll be part four of have you heard? And in it both. We really do try to talk about this reality that we have a God who sympathizes with us, a God who is drawn to us and drawn in our brokenness because in his purity and his goodness, he wants to heal what's broken.
And so I think in some of our misunderstandings and some of our confusions, we don't really believe that about God. And so even trying to sit in the reality of he is so much better than we think in it, we are not alone in it. His steadfast love is with us.
In our hurt and despair, he's drawn more closely to us and not the opposite.
So it's not just when good things happen, God is really with you, and when bad things happen, he's left the building. It's just part of a reality of life. And actually in it, he's drawn even more closely to you.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Beautiful idea.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay. When you think about the challenges of your life and how God has shown up and, you know, we have listeners who right now are, you know, in hurting and pain. Pain. What is one good idea that you could share with them about the goodness of God?
[00:19:26] Speaker B: You kind of, when you were just speaking there, it reminded me of the passage in Hebrews.
We do not have a great chief priest who cannot sympathize with us, but we have a great chief priest who's been tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin.
So he's able to identify with us even at our worst.
I've said to people in the past, because you don't trust God right now, that doesn't mean that God isn't taking care of you.
Because you've lost your sense of the divine doesn't mean God has lost his sense of you.
I believe that my relationship to God is nothing predicated on how well I hold onto him. It's predicated on how well he holds on to me.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: And what a game changer when you think about it that way. What a game changer. Keep going.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: So good, I lose my grip on God. It doesn't mean God loses his grip on me.
John tells us in his gospel that Jesus said that he holds us in his hand and the father holds him and us in his hands. So I've got two set of hands around me, and in my sorrow, I get confused and my faith wavers and I doubt things I shouldn't doubt, and I don't trust the goodness of goddesse.
I lose my way, but the good shepherd doesn't lose his way.
And maybe the 99 made it to the pasture, but I didn't.
In my sorrow, I went astray in my pain.
But the good shepherd comes and looks for me.
If I can't find Christ, it doesn't mean Christ can't find me.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that idea. Because we do have a God who seeks us.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: And that is. It's beautiful. So good.
Okay, I want to. We're gonna wrap up this podcast here, but I'd like to do is do a part two with you where maybe we could give a few more tangible tools.
So if we're wrapping up this podcast, I think one of the biggest takeaways that I hope you hear is exactly just how you ended this. That you have two sets of hands around you, and even in your confusion, even in your pain, that you have a God who will see you through every single step of the way. Thank you so much for listening. If this has been helpful, we ask that you share it, send it to a friend like it, give us a thumbs up, and we will see you next time.
