August 24, 2010: Plan B

I honor people whose dreams get crushed, whose plans lie in ruins, whose life's work comes to nothing - and who still find some way to move forward. They are my heroes. If you are one of these people, God bless you. I will be looking to you, drawing inspiration from you, meditating on your virtue and doing my sorry best to imitate your ways. Thank you for being my example. Please take comfort in knowing that you are one of God's means - perhaps his primary means, certainly his most poignant means - of taking me through this season of bewildered melancholy. You have almost certainly inspired others too, but you may not have known it.

I will explain why I love you so much. A couple days ago I accepted a job offer with Sears to sell mattresses on commission. I start training tonight. It is good to have a job, and it's an abomination for an able-bodied man like me not to work. Ever since I got laid off from the pastorate a year ago (and have had only temporary jobs since), the Bible verses that most come to mind are not pleasant ones like "'I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future'" (Jeremiah 29:11), but rather stern ones like "If a man will not work, neither let him eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10), and "If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for the members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever" (1 Timothy 5:8). The money I expect to earn from Sears won't be enough to provide for my "relatives and household members" - but at least I'll be contributing something toward my upkeep. Hooray job.

I am thankful to God for this work, and have told him so. But I confess that my gratitude does not keep me from feeling like my heart has been ripped out and now lies on the floor in a pulpy mess. You see, all this time I thought that I had a sacred calling. I first sensed - or thought I sensed - that God was calling me to a pulpit ministry when I was about 16 years old. For the sake of that call I went to Wheaton College and majored in Bible. God's call to preach - or again, what I thought was God's call to preach - was the reason why, on returning from missionary service, I went to Trinity and got an MDiv. I studied Greek and Hebrew and read Calvin and Edwards not so that I could equip myself to sell mattresses but so that I could honor God by proclaiming his Word in the pulpit to which he summoned me.

Oh well. Thirty years after first setting my face toward ministry I find myself surveying the wreckage of a broken dream. The leaders of the tribal group that I worked with in Colombia insisted that I not translate the Bible. My first wife left me. Deacons in both churches that I pastored abruptly informed me that my services were no longer wanted. And now I can find no prospects at all for paid work in the only thing I know how to do.

It seems to me that when a man reaches middle age, it is reasonable to expect, in this culture, that he be working in a career for which he has acquired a couple decades of experience and skill. He should own a home. He should have a pension or be saving money for retirement. He should have life and health insurance. He should be providing for his family and paying for his kids to go to college. Well, I have landed in middle age and have failed at every single thing on the list above. (Though I do have 300 dollars in a checking account.)

So now I have little choice but to go on to Plan B. Not a ministry, but a mattress; not a pulpit, but a bed frame; not a mission, but (hopefully) a commission. Part of me says, "Very well then - if this is the hand I am dealt, I will play it as well as I can and work hard to be the best mattress salesman Sears ever had. I will hawk bedding to the glory of God." Then another part of me answers, "Right. How spiritual of you. But just what makes you to think you will be any more successful at this than you have been at anything else?" Deep within I know that there is nothing in my understanding of God that precludes the possibility of cascading down a series of plans from C to D to E to F, each one less fulfilling and more humiliating than the previous. (Have you seen Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space? The first 8 plans didn't work.)

This is where I look to my heroes. Actually heroines, since the three that come to mind are all women. There's my mother, who, in her mid 50s, battled fragile health and the despair of sudden widowhood in order to find work and carry on both emotionally and financially. There's my sister Lois: pretty, bright, capable, funny - she kept a beautiful house and raised three kids until her crap scum of an adulterous husband dumped her the same year their son was murdered and her (and my) mother died. She picked up the pieces of a broken life and now, in her 50s, works harder than anybody I know in the back-breaking work of an elementary school janitor. And there's my wife Lisa. (My admiration of Lisa embarrasses her, I know, but I don't care - she is admirable, and I need to admire.) For five years after her husband died this widowed mother of three would not wear mascara because it ran every time she cried - and she cried all the time. But she pulled herself together and raised her kids and went to school and became a physical therapist assistant and blessed a thousand hearts and capped off all her kindnesses by loving a lonely single-dad pastor of a small church. (Yes, I'm part of her Plan B.)

Was anyone more deserving of having their Plan A work out than Jennie, Lois and Lisa? A life-long marriage to one good husband and relaxed retirement in sunset years - that's the way it was supposed to happen. But it didn't, and when it didn't, they all found ways to assemble a Plan B from scratch and carry it through with character and strength and good grace.

May God be merciful to me for all my whiny, auto-indulgent self-pity. If you would be so kind, please say a prayer that he will give me power to embrace Plan B with the grace and dignity of my heroines and betters. And say a prayer of thanks, too, for them and for all the Plan B role models you know who have bravely assembled workable realities from the shards and fragments of broken dreams.