Roger Kovaciny
For a long time I was a minister without a synod, not on anyone’s membership list, not intentionally but actually. I got caught between the WELS and the ELS because of an early retirement which–the ELS president informed me–meant I’d resigned from my synod, albeit without intending to do so. So I did things like fundraising for Ukrainian orphans and for my Bible-translation project through pastors who knew me or knew of me. I bypassed elected officials and synod organizations, and mostly still do.
When a new pastor was ordained and installed at my first parish, I gave him a call. After congratulations and pleasantries, I started to ask whether we could continue to work together as I’d been doing with his predecessors–and he hung up on me!
Do you want to know what goes through your head when a pastor hangs up on you? Especially when it’s the pastor of your first parish?
Let me tell you, you spend the next three hours thinking about your sins. “Good grief, he’s only been there for five weeks, I’ve been gone for 40 years and he’s already gotten such a boatload of gossip about my faults and failings that he hung up on me!” And I remembered every one of them, because that’s the kind of memory I’m “blessed” with.
Unfortunately. Because that’s not the way things actually were. Mostly, people remember how much they learned. And came up to tell me so at the centennial.
If I may draw a parallel, there are homemakers who can recall every dinner they ever burned. But was that the history of their cooking, or is that just a flaw in their memories? If it weren’t for the dinners she DIDN’T burn, the fam would have gotten mighty hungry! And they probably all prefer their mother’s cooking. It’s not that dorm food is so bad; it’s just that it isn’t what they’ve learned to like.
President John Quincy Adams was almost in the bleak pit of despair when he thought back on his career–which was actually stellar. All he could remember was his errors, which nobody else recalls. And if all you can remember are your sins and mistakes, that doesn’t mean that other people regard you that way, or that you should so regard yourself. For one thing, people have their own regrets and are too self-centered to obsess on yours.
Even if the only thing you can remember from your past are your faults and failings, your sins and wickedness–even if you aren’t surprised when the pastor hangs up on you–Jesus won’t.
P.S. He hadn’t hung up on me; the desk phone is probably older than either of us and spontaneously disconnected. And so is Jesus–older than the both of us, I mean–but He won’t disconnect, spontaneously or otherwise. He is always readier to hear than you are to pray. And He doesn’t spend time thinking about your sins.
Christian News 