early morning musings

O Lord, God of my salvation,
      I cry out to you by day.
      I come to you at night.
Now hear my prayer;
      listen to my cry. (Psalm 88:1-2)

It is 4:30 in the morning. For some reason I cannot sleep. I have had busy dreams all night, dreams in which I am busy doing things, trying to get them done, unable to stop doing stuff. That gets tiring after a while. I kept waking up and thinking.

And when you think early in the morning, it is not usually good things. It is usually things you would be just as happy not thinking.

Tonight, I have been thinking about my life.

In 1915, Robert Frost published a poem called The Road Not Taken. It has always fit me well.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

As a pastor, I took the road less traveled. I decided to be different and do something different. And I did. In the process, I found myself a wanderer. I belonged to a church with a fairly mobile ministry, never staying long in one place. And my wife wandered with me. It left us without roots or permanence.

At this point in my life I am not sure it was the right one. I have just come from two bruising works in which both my wife and I were hurt. We were financially impacted in a way from which we may never recover. We were torn up by this work.

Now I am sitting in a borrowed bedroom in my daughter’s house trying to figure out where I am going and what in the world I am going to do. At the age of 61 (I will be 62 in less than a month), I find myself unemployed with not income, no retirement and no real future. I would like to write but do not have the slightest idea of how to go about getting into that field. I truly do not know what to do.

I feel the failure strongly in my life, and all because I took a different road.

Why does a person become a minister? I am not sure. A desire to serve God full-time? I know there is more than that. Personally, I have always wanted to be an effective minister, to show God’s love to others, to have others love me as much as I loved them. The compulsion to teach has always been strong in my life. If it were not for Sunday evening Bible class, I do not know what I would do.

But it, this ministry, has not worked out and I find myself at the end of my life with a failed ministry, broke and in debt.

We were accepted into the church here again so well, and I teach Sunday night class, but at the same time, we are alone.

I guess I was like the guys who took off for the western frontier, who were looking for something different and more fulfilling to do with their lives. But the sad truth is that a lot of those men failed, and ended up starving to death, or killed by Indians or just dying by misfortune in some way. If nothing else, they slunk back home, financial failures, with their tails between their legs.

I cry out to God but he does not seem to hear me. I know that this is not necessarily my fault, yet Ella and I are the ones who suffer. And I know that this suffering even though not my fault is somewhat rife throughout the Bible.

Job did nothing wrong yet suffered extremely. And look at it any way you want, it was God’s fault he did. He was living righteously and God allowed the devil to hurt him anyway.

The same with many of the faithful of God. Hebrews 11 speaks of many of these who did the will of God to the best of their ability and yet died in the process. God is good, but he will not always treat his servants well on this earth.

Early morning musings. So it is 5:01 now in the morning and I am going to go back to bed. I am not an early morning person and do not enjoy seeing the sun come up.

I have entered the winter of my life and am waiting for what God wants of me.

I just wish he would take care of my wife. This has hurt her and has given her doubt for the first time in her life.

I come to you at night. Now hear my prayer; listen to my cry. Hear me, O God. Help us your children. We need you. Do not desert us when we are old. Do not let us suffer. We have served you faithfully all our lives and need you now more than ever before.