The good fruit of grand failures

A friend struggling in his marriage asked to meet with me the other day. I showed up and listened. Then I told him the beautiful truth about my marriage. I told him that my relationship with my wife is near perfect and we have had almost no conflict in over 12 years of marriage. How was that for a good joke? All kidding aside, I revealedto him all of the pain we have gone through the last 2 years- my wife losing all feelings of love for me, my total blindness to my judgements and critical spirit towards her, her commitment to divorcing me but not going through with it, my loneliness, depression, and suicidal thoughts, bucketfuls of tears, hatred towards God, sleepless nights, and on and on.

He called me the next week and expressed a deep, heartfelt thank you for my honesty in sharing such painful truth. My words had touched him and given him hope in his own marital journey. When I hung up the phone I was overwhelmed with emotion. I experienced a profound sense of joy by being able to offer up my brokenness as a gift to this friend.

It has been 21 years since I first felt the call to live my life for the purpose of ministering to others. I have spent many of those years as a ministry expert- giving biblical solutions for people's spiritual problems. I thought a preaching a good sermon was the same thing as making disciples. I really thought I was good minister. And that was exactly my problem. I was being a "good minister" instead of being the real me. My ego grew much while the Kingdom grew little. But the real calling is this- I get to connect my failures with the failures of others and watch Jesus transform us both. Wow!

I don't want to waste any of my past sins, pain, and brokenness! There are a lot of people that can be transformed by my personal story of redemption. I pray that I have eyes to see these people today and the guts to tell them the truth, both God's truth and mine.