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On August 3, 1981, two families who had just left Ohio a thousand miles behind joined our family in Oklahoma City to help launch a ministry to the poor. That day marked the beginning of the fulfillment of a God-given dream that for nine years had been the passion of my life.
During our first year together, the three families bought homes in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood we had chosen for our ministry. By our second year, two more families had joined us. Several small ministry programs were up and running, and our ministry was providing two staff members for a neighbourhood shelter for homeless families.
As the administrator for Community of the Servant, I loved getting to know neighbourhood people and responding to their needs. I loved planning ministry with other community members and trying to build community. I loved speaking in churches, describing our work, challenging people to a more active concern for the poor.
I lived through those days intensely grateful for the privilege of doing such deeply satisfying work. After nine years of waiting, I was finally fulfilling the calling for which God had prepared me.
But from time to time my joy was tempered by a nagging problem. I knew that for the ministry to be all God wanted it to be, God had to be in control, guiding our decisions, providing the power to change people's lives. And I knew that for God to consistently guide me, I needed to take time regularly to seek God's guidance. I decided to set aside time each morning to be alone with God to present my own needs and those of community members and neighbourhood people and to seek guidance for my day's activities. At least, that was my plan.
Occasionally, I actually pulled it off, but more often I plunged into the work I loved with little more than a perfunctory nod in God's direction. What needed to be done seemed so clear and so urgent that I felt little need to consult God first. I said I needed God's direction, but my actions revealed that I felt I could run the ministry by my own wits, energy and will power.
This gap between belief and action bothered me, so I began asking God to free me of my illusion that I was capable of directing the ministry myself. For almost two years, I prayed that prayer, yet saw no answer.
I had given the ministry my best. It had looked to me--and to the churches and individuals backing us--like the ministry was making impressive progress. But now I faced the question: What do you do when 100 percent is not enough, when you have given everything and your life's calling lies in shambles at your feet?
As I considered that question, the pain of failure opened me to God's Spirit. I saw how specific mistakes I had made had contributed to the ministry's collapse: failing to clearly articulate the original vision, insensitivity in decision-making, spending my time administering programs rather than giving pastoral care to neighbourhood people as God had called me to do.
But the underlying reason for the ministry's failure, God showed me, was that I had too often relied on my own strength. Through the ministry's death, God had answered my prayer. This confidence-shattering failure left me broken, accomplishing what two years of good intentions had not: For the first time, I felt powerless to minister.
Now, I saw something else. Moses had watched his people suffer, longing for the day when he could strike a blow for justice. When he saw an Egyptian cruelly beat a Hebrew, Moses saw an opportunity. He killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand. That night, Moses must have looked back over the day's events satisfied. He had taken his first small step toward liberating his people. Perhaps the next day he would take his second.
The next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked one of them, "Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?"
The man said, "Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?" (Exodus 2:13-14).
His crime discovered, Moses fled Egypt for his life. In the 40 years that followed, the question must have returned to haunt Moses a thousand times: "Who made you ruler and judge over us?" Had Moses only been imagining all these years that God had a special mission for him? His miraculous protection at birth, his opportunity for education, his strong desire to help his people--surely these meant something. What had gone wrong?
While watching sheep, Moses likely spent thousands of hours agonizing over his brothers and sisters enslaved in Egypt, but whenever he tried to translate his concern into a plan of action, he always wound up at the same place: He was powerless to do anything about it. So shattered was Moses' self-confidence that he may have despaired of ever being used by God. The lesson God wanted to burn into Moses' soul was unavoidable: Moses was not equal to the task.
I identified with Moses' failure and the brokenness it produced. But God wasn't through with Moses, and in that I found hope.
But Moses said, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" (Exodus 3:10-11). This was not the Moses of 40 years earlier. He had learned, not just in his head but deep in his soul, that he was inadequate to the task God was calling him to do.
God's response was, "You're right, Moses. In fact, the reason I can trust you with this assignment is because you know you can't do it. You're not adequate--but I AM."
At the burning bush, God began to teach Moses that God's power can work most fully through those who are most convinced of their own powerlessness. God was able to bring deliverance through Moses only because Moses was absolutely certain he alone could not save his people.
Moses accepted God's call and went on to free his people from bondage. The mission Moses had failed to accomplish in his own strength, he fulfilled by God's power.
In the years that followed, God resurrected the community. New people joined. Peace replaced the former discord, and those of us who had come through the community's painful collapse enjoyed a time of healing. The focus of my ministry, in keeping with my call, changed from administration to pastoral care. It seemed to me that God was using me to touch people's needs more than ever before. And when the time did come for our community to disband, it was not because of broken relationships. It was because God was calling those in leadership to move on.
Why the difference? Where before I had struggled unsuccessfully to discipline myself to seek God's guidance, during those post-resurrection years I felt such a deep need for God's daily intervention that it was easy to start most days with time alone with God. I had learned, not just in my head but deep in my soul, that without God's daily guidance and power, I would fail.
Brokenness--the destruction of our self-sufficiency--leaves us with two options. The first option is despair. We can quit hoping and give up on life, either by committing actual suicide or by becoming one of the living dead.
The second option is dependence, falling into the hands of a waiting God. Paul knew what it was to find himself unequal to life's demands: "We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure. . . . Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death." But Paul saw God at work in his suffering: "This happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead" (II Corinthians 1:8-9). Not equal to the demands confronting him, Paul faced a choice: despair or dependence. Paul chose dependence.
To become dependable channels of God's power requires deeply learning two spiritual realities. The first is our own powerlessness: "By myself I can do nothing" (John 5:30). The second is God's powerfulness: "I can do everything through [Christ] who gives me strength" (Philippians 4:13). When we embrace our own powerlessness and throw ourselves in dependence on God's power, only then can we experience for ourselves the great paradox Paul discovered: "When I am weak, then I am strong" (II Corinthians 12:10).
Eddy Hall, who lives in Goessel, Kansas, is a church planning consultant and serves as co-pastor of the recently ~planted Church of the Good Shepherd, a Mennonite cell church.
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