Hello,
Here’s a story
that I wrote for the 2000 Christmas Eve worship service.
Jacob Shepherd
hadn’t been to church for years. It wasn’t
always that way, though. For the first
30 years of his life he was there every Sunday.
As a young child, he learned all the Bible stories and sang in the
children’s choir. In his teens, when
many of his friends stopped coming to church, he still went … even without his
parents demanding that he go. He found
that going to church gave him strength to meet the challenges of his live, and
it gave him courage to face his fears – little fears, like asking a girl to a
movie, and big fears like the darkness of death. When he graduated from high school, lots of
people in his congregation thought that the might become a pastor, and he had
thought about that, too, but instead he decided he needed a break from school
and took a job working in an auto repair shop.
He discovered that he enjoyed working on cars, and so he just settled
into that job – still going to church, even though he was now living on his
own. It was a couple of years later that
he got married and began a family of two children – and Jacob still went to
church, every Sunday, he and his family.
Even though Jacob
enjoyed working at the auto shop, as the years past he began to feel cramped
and stymied. So, at the ripe age of 26,
Jacob struck out into an auto repair business of his own. He knew it was a risk, starting something on
his own, especially now that he had more mouths to feed than his own. But he had brayed about it, and decided that
it was a risk worth taking. So, he
rented a building, hung out his shingle and waited for things to happen. And before long, a lot was happening. His reputation as a car mechanic had followed
him, and soon he was booked for days in advance. He was a hard worker, putting in lots of
hours, but never on Sunday morning, because Sunday morning he was always in
church.
Looking at his
life from the outside, you would have thought that all was going great for
Jacob. But inside of Jacob, things were
stirring. The bills always overran the
income. The pressures of the long hours
were wearing, and soon Jacob found that he had become a regular in another place,
the local bar. Before he knew it, he was
spending more time there then with his family.
He found himself drinking at work, now and then, to handle the
pressure. He also found that the money
to pay the bills was being swallowed up in cases of beer. And then one night when he finally made it
home, his wife told him to sit down. She
had had enough of his drinking and absence – it was tearing her apart, and it
was tearing the kids apart.
“This has gone on
too long,” she said, “You are not welcome here anymore until you get yourself
put back together.”
Heartbroken, he
went to the only place he could think of, his auto repair shop and set up a cot
in the office. And when Sunday came, for
the first time in his life, he did not go to church, and he hasn’t been there
since. He had made a mess of his
life. He was ashamed of his life.
“My life stinks!”
he said to himself, and he just couldn’t go and foul the sparkling clean church
with the stench of his life. So, he just
stopped going.
Well, it was the
week before Christmas some years later and Jacob was still livng out of his office
in his auto-repair shop and the neighborhood bar. Still not going to church. He really missed going to church, but he knew
that he didn’t belong there anymore. The
mess of his life just stank too badly.
As he put his empty beer glass down on the bar, he decided to go out of
his way a bit and walk past the church on the way back to his office/home. As he neared the church, his stomach started
to tighten up with nervousness. More
than once he thought about turning back and just going to his auto repair
shop. His life stuck so badly that he
wondered if he should even come close to the church. I’ll stay on the other side of the street,”
he told himself, and he kept on his path to the church…….
To be continued next Monday……
Have a great week.
God’s grace and peace, (ggap)
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
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