Hello,
I was rummaging through
some boxes in my garage attic and came upon a baseball that was signed by my teammates
from the All Star team that I was on when I was 12 years old. Although I am not certain, I think it was the
game ball from the game that I pitched against the other All Star team from our
town, a game that we won….a game where I hit a home run off of Rick Bouchard,
and struck out my best friend, Mike Kripner, on a curve ball in the dirt. Some of the names on the ball I remember
well, other’s have passed through my memory.
Back in those days I had dreams, and so did others of me, of going
somewhere in my life with baseball. Of
being a baseball success. Well….only
dreams….as it turned out that I peaked out in my high school years. (Not so for my friend, Mike, who played in
the Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates systems for a number of years.)
It would be fun
to find out what all those other guys who signed that ball are doing in
life. I suspect that I might be
surprised where life has taken many of them, as they might be surprised to see
me standing in a pulpit rather than on a pitcher’s mound.
As a pitcher,
success was fairly easy to measure. If
we won the game…if I struck out a bunch of batters…if I pitched the whole game,
I knew I had succeeded. As a pastor, I have
discovered that success was a far trickier mark to claim. When I look out at a congregation and see
some people dozing off as I preach my sermon….when I visit the hospital and sit
with someone who is in rapidly declining health and I can only watch it happen….when
I invest myself in the lives of young people only to see them pulled away from
Jesus by other things in life…when I lose my patience and become cynical …….all
of these things cause me to wonder, “Have I succeeded as a Pastor?”
I know that the
primary question to ask of myself is, “Have I been faithful as a Pastor?”,
because that is what I hear God asking of me in the Scriptures, but amid the
faithfulness that I have striven for, it would be nice to see that I have had
some success in my vocation. Early in my
ministry as I pondered what a successful pastorate might look like, I decided
to measure my degree of success in this way: If I, with the grace of God, have
made a difference in one person’s life….that is enough to count my ministry and
life successful.
The world, of
course tells us differently. The more
people who know your name….the more toys that one collects…the stores that you
shop in…the breadth of influence that you have…the neighborhood that you live
in….these are the things that the world has marked as signs of success, marks that always leave us always falling
short of success. But when I consider
what it means to see a person who has been overwhelmed in hopelessness take the
next step in life with courage ….when I see a person who has fallen into a deep
pit of their own making leave the shame and guilt behind having experienced the
power of God’s forgiveness to amend their lives…when I see a person engaged in
a battle with death with eternal confidence in Christ’s love say to death, “Death
be not proud.”…..if, by the grace of God, I have been part of these things
happening even in just one person….I will lay myself down at the end of my days
and say of my time in this life, that I have been a success.
You don’t have to
be a pastor to make such a mark in a person’s life. As a matter of fact, I think that those who
are not pastors find themselves maybe more often on the front lines of life. So, let me encourage you to plug your ears to
the world’s depiction of success, and with the power of the grace of God step
into today with the hope that you might be blessed to make a difference in one
person’s life…and be thankful that you can count yourself as a success.
Have a great week.
God’s grace and peace, (ggap)
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
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