God Moved My Pulpit

When my kidneys failed, I thought I was losing my ministry. That is what it looks like from the outside. You cannot travel like you did. You cannot commit like you did. Three days a week belong to a machine now.

But that is not what happened. God did not take my ministry when He allowed my kidneys to fail. He moved it. He carried it out of the sanctuary and set it down in the one room I would never have thought to look. The very room where I was hurting most.

There is a fuller account in my memoir. But I want to preach the principle, because I believe some of you are grieving a calling that has not actually been taken from you.

Maybe what you thought you were supposed to do is not what you are doing anymore. What you trained for. What you planned for. What you spent years building. It is different now. And you are grieving that, and you should. That is a real loss and it deserves to be mourned honestly.

But Do Not Confuse a Change of Address With a Cancellation

Here is what I want you to consider. You may not have lost the calling. You may have been relocated. Because a calling is not a building, a title, or a schedule. Those are the containers we put it in. And God will break a container without touching what was inside it.

Joseph Was Relocated, Not Cancelled

Joseph had a dream about leadership, and then he was sold, and then he was imprisoned. And in that prison he did exactly what he would later do in a palace. He administrated. He noticed the men around him. He interpreted a dream for a cupbearer. The prison was not an interruption of his calling. It was the training and the placement of it.

Paul Wrote His Best Work in Chains

And Paul was a traveling apostle, and then he was arrested. And from that confinement he wrote Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Letters we are still reading two thousand years later. Philippians 1:12 says, the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel. Rather unto the furtherance. Not despite the chains. Through them. And he says his bonds became manifest in the palace, meaning he was reaching people in Caesar's household that a free man would never have gotten near. His new congregation was his guards.

And John Got Revelation on a Prison Island

And John was exiled to Patmos, and it was there, cut off from every church he loved, that he received the Revelation. God did not restore his old ministry. God gave him a new one in the place of his banishment.

You Speak the Language There

And here is the reason this keeps happening, and it is not sentimental. It is functional. In a dialysis chair, I have credibility I could never have earned from a platform. When I tell a frightened person I understand, I am not being kind. I am being accurate. Second Corinthians 1:4 says God comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. With the comfort you yourself received. Your pain gave you a vocabulary. There is a room full of people who will only take it from somebody who has been where they are.

And Nobody Else Was Going to Go There

And be honest about something. You would never have chosen that room. I would not have volunteered for a dialysis ministry. Nobody applies for that. God had to move me there. Which is exactly why those rooms are so underserved. They are full of hurting people and short on ministers, because ministers do not typically end up there on purpose.

Look at Who Is Already Around You

Stop looking for a new platform and look at your actual week. Who do you see now that you did not see before? The waiting room. The support group. The other parents at the therapy office. The people on your ward. That is your congregation. It was assigned to you by circumstance, which is another way of saying it was assigned to you by God.

Start With One Person

And do not try to build something. Just talk to one person. What if what matters now is that you sit with one frightened person and say, I understand. I know what you are feeling. I have been where you are. And it is all right to be afraid. You are going to make it. That is calling. That is purpose. That is ministry. It just does not look like what you expected.

And Let the Title Go

And here is the hard part for those of us who had titles. You may have to let go of being introduced a certain way. You may have to accept a ministry nobody applauds and no one puts on a program. But Matthew 6 says your Father seeth in secret and shall reward you openly. Heaven's records do not depend on a bulletin.