Mt. Hood Christian Center

I decided pretty early on that I would never want to write for a newspaper or periodical.  I figured that always living under a deadline would give me an ulcer.  So what do I do?  I go into an occupation that requires multiple deadlines every week.  I didn’t get an ulcer in my stomach but I sometimes think I would rather have the physical pain of a stomach ulcer than the pain of a mental ulcer.  For a guy who appears to others as never having a shortage of words…I have to confess that I feel like I’m exhausted.  Not physically—that would require labor, which my hands can attest to the lack of since they don’t have many calluses right now.  What I don’t do in physical exercise, I think I more than make up for in my time on the mental gerbil wheel…always running but never arriving.

When I first started teaching on a weekly basis some 23 years ago, the most overwhelming and difficult thing for me to deal with was that constant deadline week after week.  As soon as I would finish teaching a Sunday school class, I would have about 30 seconds of relief before I began stressing over the “what am I going to do next” question that grips every new teacher.  Yeah right…new teacher…I’ve been doing this for almost a quarter of a century and I’m still prone to that weekly panic attack.  This is especially true when I happen to hit a “home run” message because I always ask the very same day, “How am I going to top that?”

You’ve just received an insight into what I believe to be part of most every speaker’s, teacher’s or writer’s psyche.  1 Corinthians 2:1-5 speaks directly to this but I’m honestly frustrated by its simplicity.  Simplicity implies ease yet I’ve never experienced anything easy about this weekly rollercoaster of thrill and terror.

It isn’t easy to do what Paul said of himself.  He says that when he came to the church in Corinth, he had one message…Jesus and the cross.  It is interesting to note that this one message caused God to show up in power to the hearers.  It wasn’t good illustrations, clever analogies, well-delivered points of doctrine or even a hip and happening worship band.  It was a very simple message about something we’ve grown mostly tired of hearing.  As someone who has tried really hard to get better at speaking over the years, it is hard to admit that all of that hard work really doesn’t matter in the bigger picture.  The truth is this…if God doesn’t show up when I open my mouth, it is better that I just keep it shut.  Simple?  Yes.  Easy?  No.  If we want to avoid running on the wheel to nowhere, our only course of action is to rely on a demonstration of God’s power and not our own.