Category: Spiritual

The Longer Story of the Whistleblow that Ended My Denominational Employment

INTRO

If you were to tally 2022’s posts to this blog, you’d find…none. The main post of 2021, too, even though that was an extremely eventful year for us, was missing nearly all detail. Such time gaps don’t concern me; I’m not really that kind of blogger. But there was a reason beyond just “not getting around to it” that I didn’t post in 2022. We were regrouping. It was a take-time-to-be- grateful year. A new job year. 

2021 was the Year of Trauma.

And before now, it was not the right time to talk about it.

My reasons for speaking now, in order of importance, are: 

1. My own healing. 

I’ve learned more about trauma in the last few years than I imagine I thought I ever would have. Which of course means I now understand much more about (and have so much, much more compassion for) those who’ve known worse, and far worse, trauma than me. But it also means that I’ve learned not to dismiss my own. Big T or little t, trauma doesn’t simply just go away. We do the work of moving through it. Understanding it. Rebuilding. Replacing. 

We all move on, and my whole family is in the process of moving on. But we don’t move on from trauma; we move on with trauma. We take it out and work on it when we can. Or, it comes out whenever it freaking feels like it. We deal with it either way. We tell our stories. 

The timeline I am going to link to in this post forms the scaffolding of my story. It’s missing upwards of 99% of my inner story, but there is rarely a forum in which we can (or want to) tell our whole stories. I suppose in a “tell-all” book. But normally, bits and pieces get brought into the light as the time is right and the audiences are right. Before now, I kept this timeline largely to myself.

But I have come to recognize that my own healing journey requires sharing more. Because of good counsel, I value sensitivity against over-sharing, but because of good therapy, I know the value of speaking. It’s a rhythm and a path that I am choosing to engage, and I am merely a learner on that path. I’ve miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep. (Great one, Mr. Frost.) 

2. Family and friends.

While therapy is for the minutiae, many people we are in relationship with can love us well enough for what we need with far less complete versions of our stories.

Though I’ve hit a majority of the major ones, I’ve still cut the episodes/events in this story by at least three-fourths. But even then, you may prefer not to read my timeline of this account. I invite you: go with your gut. It is absolutely your freedom and your choice, and I have done the favor of making it easy by putting the timeline on a separate page. You will not get there unless you click the link. If you are one of the two handfuls of people who subscribe to this blog, I believe you will not even get a notification of its posting, nor will it later show up in the list of past entries. Everyone remains free at all times to “take a pass.” If you’re uncomfortable with accounts like these, honor yourself and don’t read. There’s enough detail in the Outro for you to catch on. If you dislike the thought of a negative report about your own denomination (should you happen to know me; you won’t find named names), or are simply from a generation, in a family, part of a tradition, or at a time of life where the supposed need for the public airing of dirty laundry mystifies you to begin with… please, be my guest and don’t read. Proceed directly to the Outro without clicking the link.

For the record, please allow me to confirm how many, many members of my former denomination still get counted in this friends and family category. There may be strain or silence characterizing some current or future relations, but there is not bitterness and ill-will. For all of them, maybe especially those who might recognize their juxtaposition to parts of the story because they were there, there’s no better way to begin to appreciate some of the impact of the full story than to hear it told from the vantage point of the one who lived every chapter.

3. Encouragement to others with a yet-untold story of their own.

Be assured, our stories have value even before we have the courage to tell them. And yours has value even while others may drown out your hope by shaming you that you can’t make a trauma case out of every boo-hoo experience. Telling our stories has always been part of the human experience, and it always will be. 

As I am always blessed by the honest telling of stories––stories that help me know I’m not crazy… or defective… or alone… but beloved––so may you be. 

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

–Flannery O’Conner

4. Righteousness. Justice.

Yes, I care about righteousness and justice. But I also don’t forget that I have contributed towards unrighteousness and injustice, sometimes consciously, more often unintentionally. Hardly anyone, and I would include many a Christian man who abuses his power, is purposefully working on behalf of the antitheses of the things he says values. But good intentions and good motives are nothing in the face of the power of wickedness and injustice working their will upon humanity. And, throughout history, in the name of God as often as opposed to it.

My question for you, reader, is: How will you pursue justice and righteousness in those places where you can determine that others are failing to flourish? What shall you do when the missing piece is your voice? Don’t think that the day will come when institutions simply “do the right thing” somehow disconnected from self-preservation. For our institutions do not bear the imago Dei, we do. Only you, image bearer––whether you decide to simply lay down your self-protection or whether you gather allies and speak together––can choose to speak. Everyone has a voice. It’s a priesthood of all believers. 

THE POST-WHISTLEBLOW TIMELINE

I whistleblew.

The Timeline linked below is not an attempt to prove I was correct; indeed it does not even lay out my case. It assumes the accusations were credible and routinely verifiable by qualified persons. Only one of the original accusations is referenced, and that is not in the Timeline but in the Outro below. The Timeline is a sketch only of the process that, together to date, forms the full organizational response to a request for help in a case of perceived abuse. The net result of that process was my family having been removed from our life-long organization.

Click here to read the Timeline.

Alternately, proceed directly below to the Outro, instead.

OUTRO

Welcome back, if you chose to read the Timeline. 

Should anyone be feeling some inward insistence that, had you been around, you would have stepped in and done something!… God bless you. Thank you for the sentiment, truly. But not likely. It’s not like there was a shortage of very good people all around and all throughout all of this. No one intervened. I think it is simply our congregational and community default, for whatever reasons, to believe the narratives our leaders are speaking. So I would say, “Please, turn your eye to your present. Is there someone(s) in need of you now? Someone who could use your defense on their behalf against those wielding power, even in church, not in service of them, but over them to their harm?” We need more people with these kinds of eyes.

More is broken in our beloved institutions than just a few scattered leaders. In the story I have just told, almost everybody involved were fine, good folks committed to good leading. To a (wo)man, they probably followed policy right down the middle. At every turn. In spite of that, and in the midst of that, somehow an image bearer’s human needs were invisible. There is no way on God’s green earth that any image bearer’s human (including spiritual, emotional, social, financial, or other) needs should be that invisible to us, ever. How many are in this world, I personally find myself deeply convicted about, and never more so since undergoing this experience. It should not be possible in the Body for anyone (whether you’re speaking about me, or my boss, or an outsider) to be that mischaracterized and misjudged. And don’t get me wrong: I am as capable of blindness as any. I am as capable of power abuse (had I any to abuse) as anyone. 

In other words, whatever problems we have won’t be solved by simply plugging new people into unchanged paradigms. 

…the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end, and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them.

N.T. Wright

What if there had been someone who had decided they wanted to seriously advocate for me in my situation? What options did they have? Another letter? To be ignored? (Happened.) To be publicly denigrated? (Also happened.) What else? Was there anything for such a person short of risking their career and reputation as we were? Is “I’m going to put career and reputation on the line” truly the only downstream option to “I guess I’d better just trust the leadership and stay out of this”? Where is care? Justice? Protection? The place for appeal? The non-in-house input? Without safeguards, who would choose a dangerous road just to help another? There are far too many dominos with extremely long-term ramifications directly in the shadow of career and reputation for anyone to risk toppling them all. 

No, I do not blame anyone for not joining us in the furnace. 

We did have Someone walking around in there with us, don’t forget. Yes, we were alone, but we are none of us ever completely alone.

On the other hand, if in a case like this you wanted to fire and hold everyone accountable for every error, who should be included? Everyone who did not fully join the proven-correct-in-the-end side? We’d all have been fired years ago. What about the dozens or scores of people up and down the organizational ladder with some measure of direct or indirect power to do something to defend me but who didn’t? Do a clean wipe once the truth comes out? Fire everyone? No lunatic would suggest it. These are good, ministering people. (We, too, I guess, once enjoyed that reputation.) 

No. Not for one minute would I support this kind of thinking. The firing of hardly anyone.

Even if one did it gently. Like, in person instead of via FedEx. Or letting them know what the reasons were. Preferably ahead of time. And informing them on which day their network access would end, and did they need any of their files? And, if they were offered a severance package fairer than one month, if one were even to take––heaven forbid––their age? number of children at home? length of service? other human factors? into account. Still no. For most, not deserved.

Yet firing any one of these people sharing any of the guilt for what was done––the age-old story: buying the fabricated narrative of the powerful, closeting the truth, then punishing the one who’d dared to speak it (in short, all those who called good evil and evil good)… firing any of them would be more justifiable than firing me was. 

For at least they did something, right? Maybe no legally fireable offenses, but neither did I. And they did something.

I did nothing. I reported abuse; I asked for help. Help for myself, help for the lambs beneath (to borrow a term used by my successor who immediately came to see the same problems I’d reported), and help, especially, for the accused. 

That is all.  

I was charged with the raison d’être for whistleblowing laws: “disruptive.”

Secondly, “harmful to team cohesion and ministry effectiveness.” Of course, whistleblowing does those things. So yes, guilty on both counts. But these are knee-jerk, stereotyped responses to whistleblowing, not actual charges. Now, to be clear, the simple fact that these charges, specifically, were levied does not automatically somehow exonerate me. But they don’t incriminate me.

However.

Let’s not move past “disruption” and “harm” just yet. I submit that there is harm and disruption that deserve to be called out. If the board and the denomination would open themselves to an impartial look, I submit that their actions would be shown to have been more disruptive (to people’s lives) and more harmful (to people) than the disruption and harm I caused to the organizational status quo. And I would make that statement without the need to add in our family’s trauma to the equation. (Including that would break the scales, I’m afraid.)

Is anyone even surprised that abuse was protected with more abuse?

In hindsight, sure. But this pattern across the Christian world landscape is too commonplace, too predictable, and too rampant for real surprise to be justified.

When I told the RO (on his phone call 4 days after the FedEx that terminated my employment) that I was surprised by being fired, my notes record that he replied,

“I don’t see how, as this has been going on for over a year, and you’ve been going around to all your colleagues telling them you’re going to be fired.”

…I shut up. 

It was time to get off the call. The full weight of my fate crystalized in that moment. 

When I’d filed accusations six months earlier, the first was about my boss’s repeated threat to me that “The board and the RO want to fire you.” Used on me as a means of attempted control for almost a year, I’d finally grown tired of that dark cloud and gone to the RO (also the Chairman of the Site board) directly to point-blank ask him to clarify. To which he replied that he had no idea what I was talking about. (Later, neither did the one board member I knew.) That’s when lights––very bright lights, for I had always assumed the statements to be true––first came on for me. 

Now a grueling, traumatizing six months later, the victim discrediting process had run its full course, and that fantasy had become reality. I was having difficulty wrapping my head around how.

My sinking heart saw that I had appealed for safety to the one entity in which my lack of safety would become ultimate. Pick your podcast, documentary, or article, and we’ve all learned by now that this is all I should have expected from the outset. But somehow I had sincerely––and, I feel embarrassment and shame to admit––naively expected the people that I knew to do better. But no. Everyone went along with the final solution that one man with awesome power dictated to our entire ministry site. 

More than one person has told me of being informed of the existence of “real reasons” for my dismissal that go beyond “disruption” and status quo “harm.” And rumor has it they are alarmingly dire. But they remain, as they have from the beginning, in the dark. Purportedly, it is claimed, to protect my future! No. They were kept in the dark because they are fabrication and spin. Sure, charitably, maybe they were birthed in exaggeration of actual faults and weaknesses I do have. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing.

Shrouded in mystery, at least from me, they yet managed to leverage an offer for salvation: a clean personnel file. Here was my opportunity to present myself acceptable to a subsequent ministry. Perhaps my reputation was not yet a total loss. I was welcome to move on and minister somewhere else within the organization or denomination; not only would no one be forcing me out, they would keep my record scrubbed of any overly damning verbiage.

In 2021, I had not the wherewithal to respond to this false grace from the left hand whilst the right yet rested on the knife within me.

I shall respond now.

Any such offer––intimating that I might desire preserving career and reputation above Gospel duty and love––irrevocably demonstrates an utter failure to understand, not only me, but the entire situation. It is, in fact, evidence of the absence of even a good-faith attempt to understand the situation. Regardless of what some so-called clean personnel file might purport to offer me, I reject it, for it stands on lies. It cannot and does not offer any vestige or iota of kindness to me.

Some months ago, I heard through the grapevine that the boss I reported on was dismissed for the same basic issues I reported on.

I was possibly never going to write publicly about this story before that day, as 1) I watched many of the lambs who most needed to leave do so, and 2) I wasn’t that interested in playing an interfering role after I was gone. From what I understand, his firing came about because, unlike how my position was structured, the person who succeeded me had direct access to the site board. Eventually, those men’s eyes were forced open, I guess, and they made decisions based on actual knowledge. If the denomination had simply engaged a more correct response when I first came forward (and it’s not some buried mystery what correct responses look like in these situations), it would not have even mattered that the board never met me. The truth would have come to light, and the bleeding would have been stopped. Instead, it got protected, then blessed. Everyone bears some measure of responsibility for those additional years of bleeding. 

When I heard the news of my former boss’s dismissal, part of me grieved. I hadn’t stuck it out for 287 days in order to get proven right. And no, I don’t “feel vindicated.” (Everyone asks.) I engaged an “If not me, who?” situation fully aware of its seriousness, and the result I’d hoped for never materialized. And it has not materialized with this development. I only ever hoped for redeeming correction and real help leading to healing. “Vindication” wasn’t even a line-item that made any sense before the denomination mishandled everything. Besides, just because I could see more, and much sooner, than many other site people, that doesn’t mean I was the one experiencing the most mistreatment back in pre-Day-0 days. Not at all––others were. My mistreatment was probably, in therapeutic hindsight, worse than I realized at the time, but trauma for me did not begin in earnest until after I came forward. 

“Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation.”

-Herman Melville

Do I wish today that I’d taken an easier way out (there were a number of routes we might have chosen)?

I do not. I have even gotten to, a few fleeting times and for the very first times, personally experience actual, real, paradoxical joy in suffering. Who would have thought? May I prove worthy of more, if need be.

Thank you for listening. By letting me speak, even to you few, you contribute to my healing. I will keep at this process––we must all keep at our processes––for as long as I need. 

How I came to farewell my denomination of 40 years. Or, How do we know that’s God’s voice?

Does God speak things to you? Even without having touched on this topic with each of them, I’d wager I have friends at every point along that spectrum. 

Some who might say, “Dude (people my age are, after all, GenXers), if you think God is specifically speaking to you outside of the Bible, welcome to heresy.”

Others who talk about hearing God about as clearly and specifically as one could possibly imagine and certainly beyond what most experience.

You might reside at one of those ends or somewhere in between. I’m not today writing to convince you of anything. 

As a college student thirty years ago, I discovered that spectrum along with the fact that some people seemed to have “more” of God than I did. So I wanted it––Him––too. [It’d be immaterial for my purposes here to get into what I think was good or bad about all that was going on there; for now the point is just the story.]

One night, in a long session of earnest seeking and prayer, God spoke. He told me something about my future. Something good that was going to happen to me. And the reason I was being told ahead of time was so that I wouldn’t struggle with pride when it happened. 

Sure enough, the next day, it happened. 

Just not to me. It happened for somebody else.

Not purposely and certainly not knowingly, I’d stepped out in true faith and sincerely believed something my God had told me all while imagining the entire thing. 

At least I’d been smart enough (“you mean faithless enough” the Enemy would long taunt) to keep one foot in reality and make a pre-arrangement with God:

“IF…if for some reason this doesn’t come true? And it turns out this wasn’t You? I’ll meet you THERE where I sit on THAT marble ledge to wait for the cafeteria to open. And we are going to deal.” 

I was sitting. And we dealt. 

As best I can remember, it took rather some time for shock to wear off and devastation to sink in. Hours, perhaps days, but the real effects were long-term. My newfound conviction that God’s voice must be out of my reach devastated my ability to engage the topic for the following five years. For fully ten years, it handicapped me significantly. Not until fifteen years after the fact––the difference between age 20 and age 35––could I honestly say that I no longer experienced its effects when talking or praying about hearing His voice. Fifteen more years are now passed, and well, it’s finally an old, almost humorous story overwritten by many others and hardly thought of. 

_____________

Earlier this year I watched a video put out by the president of the denomination I’ve worked in for two decades and otherwise been a part of for four. He announced a celebratory demolition event at the denomination’s new national office property. 

And the Lord said to my spirit: “You’re going to be at that.” 

That’s odd. Really? I wonder why? That’s like… (checking map) 9 hours away.

But I pretty quickly jumped to Ohhh… hey! I’ll bet I could do that on the motorcycle! Might set a new record for myself…yes! I am going to run this by Tammy. 

And I began to plan my trip, operating out of a sort of a learned default that obeying even when not sure of the reasons is almost always preferable to skipping out because of doubts. I’d come a long way in 30 years. That old college-days wound was such a non-factor by now that it failed to cross my mind even in instances like this.

I did think a lot about the possible whys for such a trip, however, and while I really couldn’t say much for sure, what I began to say out loud to my wife and a few friends was, 

“I think… I’m going to say good-bye to my denomination.” 

Now while that wasn’t exactly a super logical statement, it was also not completely disconnected from a few certain things on the horizon that could have been construed as clouds. Six months earlier, I had filed an official complaint/report about a leader. There was a mediation process of sorts under way. There’d been an inquiry. But in no way did any of those present like some demise of the relationship was imminent. Perhaps some end lay beyond a bend in the road I could not see? I had no real ideas, but even if such an end was months off, I could easily appreciate how a loss like that would be best grieved properly.

Three days after the president’s video released, my denominational employment was terminated. Do we actually need reminders that His sovereignty is not limited by bends in the road? As if. 

But I wouldn’t experience the shock of the news for seven further days until the notice arrived via FedEx. No warning, hint, or discussion had preceded it. It contained one sentence of rationale. Nothing further has ever been added to that.

Clearly there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than I’d been privy to.

Suddenly, my good-bye trip had become über-pertinent.

A few asked why on earth I would consider even bothering with the situation any more––surely I was not still driving up there? But I figured that if the best I’d come up with was that this was good-bye, how could getting that irrevocably confirmed do anything but confirm my trip as well? 

I had to go. Fortunately, I did not take my motorcycle. (If you liked that sentence, take a moment to savor it, maybe print it out and stash it away, because you will never see it again.) I wasn’t in a good place, and driving a car was all I was going to be able to handle. The growing realizations about what people up the ladder must be believing about me… things that had never been explained to me… had left me the night before begging God for sleep for the fourth night in a row. 

Thankfully enough sleep came that by morning I felt I was okay to drive. IF the Psalms were playing. Anything else or nothing over the speakers left me rocking and jittery. But praise God, by Psalm 70 I had stabilized, and then had a car to myself for wonderful, wide hours of phone conversations. That night, at a childhood friend’s house, I slept in an unknown bed with an unknown pillow in a strange room of a strange house better than I’d slept in a week. Finally, tackling the final couple driving hours the next morning, I was back on the road to being myself again. 

_____________

At breakfast I was met by friends driving down just to be with me. When we arrived at the event together, I held back with hat, sunglasses, and covid mask, desperate to stay anonymous. While at the same time fighting to stave off wild imaginings about God engineering deliverance from our nightmare by sending some rescuer with more power than those who’d come against us. Foolishness.

I was there to say good-bye and nothing else. I took my moment alone in front of the demolition fence and reflected on my entire professional life. And felt nothing. Disappointing? Perhaps, but hardly surprising seeing as how I was standing in a parking lot I’d never been in looking at a building I’d never entered.

No catharsis, no tears, no word from above, no sense about the future, no anger, no self-pity. Silence.

“Well, it was really nice seeing you, Dann. We’re so glad we came to eat breakfast with you. We’re going to take off, now. You?”

“Actually, you guys go ahead. I’m going to find a spot at the edge of the parking lot for one more listen in case I’m still going to hear why He sent me up here. Thank you guys so much for coming. I will remember it for the rest of my life.”

I walked to the back of the parking lot and headed to a light pole where it looked like maybe I could sit down. 

Even before I’d gotten to it, He started in:

What if it wasn’t Me who told you to drive up here? What if it was just your imagination?

Yeah, and? I replied.

Oh, my. 

Apparently 2021 is irrelevant even in 2021, then?

Thirty years back, now, sitting there in my mind, even as my physical body is sitting here in the present. I already know his next question––and simultaneously my next answer.

How would you be?

I’d be fine. I’d be… totally fine…

BOOM.

See how far you’ve come? You’ve grown to absolutely know My voice. Along with knowing that it doesn’t matter about reaching 100% certainty about every thing every time, as that is not to be expected. It threatens nothing.

_____________

It truly did not matter to me if “You’re going to be at that” had turned out to be me––though I didn’t believe that––instead of Him. Without thinking much about it, I’d just acted anyway, allowing Him to direct from there. Neither my own faith/worthiness or his faithfulness/worthiness were connected to it like they had so very much been in my youthful episode. So what if I’d gotten this one wrong? I’d done the best I could with the spiritual discernment I possess at this time, and I did what I thought was obeying. If it turned out not to be? Okay, fine.  

The King had just reminded me that I have obeyed his voice over and over again in the fifteen years since my great wound concerning it healed over. Not to mention those times in the previous 15 where I’d stumbled through learning to navigate intimacy and abiding while still unresolved. 

And here, now––during the trials of 2021––I have yet to tell most people some of the ways He has at times spoken. Some of the most spectacular ways of my entire life. 

He has seen me. He knows it all. 

And He cares so much for me that he brought me nine hours from home to say something totally off topic that He declared was the topic. To sit me on a piece of hot concrete that would symbolize a piece of cold marble from thirty years earlier and grant one final healing touch to an old wound I hadn’t even realized could still use it. 

He hadn’t abandoned me then or ever. And isn’t it something how even our failures become integral pieces of how He fashions us into the child He is making us? Every part of me…100% redeemable.

I’d have driven nine hundred hours to be given a message like that.

I looked up and saw my car across the emptying parking lot. 

It was time to go home. 

That Passeth Understanding

We’ll be dispensing with the “Wow, it’s been like forever since my last post,” and “Oof, what’s up with 2020!?” stuff and get right to it.

Today was a lousy day.

I take it from the bits and pieces I’ve gathered about social media that lousy isn’t exactly an uncommon exclamation these days. 2020 has been a doozy.* 

[* For the word nerds only: How do you do it, English? Dispense a sentence about 2020 in the same stroke you nullify the previous commitment to dispense with doing the very same?]

My lousy, however, didn’t happen to be related to the virus. Nor even to the election or social events even as surely anyone who caught the smallest piece of that first presidential debate Tuesday must still be sorting through at least some levels of PTSD. 

I started the day feeling anxious. (This isn’t the lousy part, yet.) 

I’m not 100% sure why I felt anxious, but I was well aware that I did. Financial reasons, mostly (or at least partly) I guess. Overall silly stuff in the grand-world-stage scheme of things. Kid in college just finding out we unexpectedly still owe a few thousand for his current semester, never mind the next, which he personally doubts can happen, now. Record high tax bill showing up. A few other big bills. Pretty pedestrian stuff viewed from the outside. And another adoption––okay, this is big––and the creeping realization that the current straits are probably mostly being caused by this as expenses inexorably creep (or leap, depending on the Fee of the Day) towards that $30,000 mark. In my head, though, I’m not really worried about this piece. God has provided three times previously; it’ll come from somewhere. 

But, c’mon, we all pretty much know (and for sure know if we’ll just turn to the right and judge our neighbor’s anxiety instead) that anxiety ≠ “based on reality.” So the details of why I was anxious are basically irrelevant, wouldn’t you agree? Anxiety is much more a spiritual issue than a logical issue. It’s not in the end actually about math. It’s about trust. 

(In other terms, I’ve known times of way less money and been less stressed, and I’ve seen far bigger balances but witnessed them evaporate quicker than thrown water on hot pavement. So enough of my anxiety particulars. They’re about as periphery as yours are.)

Where I went wrong today was ignoring a premonition.

You know, before I start work today, I really should stop and deal with this heart issue. Get to the bottom of this restless, nagging anxiousness. 

“Ignore it, Dann, at your peril,” did the Spirit even whisper? 

Not sure. I’d already gallantly pushed it all aside. 

Nope, I’m getting cracking on this pile of work. 

Especially niggling were two nonsense phone calls. Dentist appointments. I’m our family administrator for everything but medical, but Tammy has given up on this one. Somehow we’ve kept up with six kids’ teeth (Read: “make appointments” not “prevent cavities”), but I don’t believe I’ve had a pro cleaning since Bangkok (so that’s at least 5 years). Tammy thinks she went once in New York. Then there was phone call #2. Setting up online account access for my organization with the telecommunications company. Simple. I was in a hurry to get them out of the way. 

EIGHT HOURS later… I’d made two dentist appointments.

There were calls to nearly double-digit offices searching for in-network doctors also taking new patients, literally an hour and a half of hold music with Marketplace healthcare, then subsequently eleven––you read that right––different telecom reps correcting me with four different phone numbers, transferring me all over the world, or to dead-ends resulting in at least six start-overs with the asinine computer answering system, his deafness only to be outdone by his chattiness, or to one rep I swear was not even a phone professional or was somehow fielding calls in some sort of nap room (he hung up on me!) and after hundreds (I can dream) of anger-burned calories later… I still don’t have a log-in, and still cannot pay my company’s hotspot bill.

Carnage complete. (Though there’s 100x the detail if you had the stomach for it.)

Fast forward through a few hours’ sacred-space date night with the wife and a repentance session for my unbelief, self-sufficiency, failure to trust, and prayer-less-ness, and you can easily imagine the flip-flopped world of difference from which I now write. 

But this query hits hard:  In taking a hard pass on dealing with my anxious heart first, had I not only missed “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding,” but possibly chosen to actually forego a different day altogether? How would things have gone if my calls had been made, not just by a better-hearted man, but simply at different times on the clock? Or been fielded by a completely different set of people? I know Aslan far too well to seriously think I’ll be getting an answer on that one, but I can identify the thought, or the pressure (for whatever reasons) that I was too attuned to (there’s three words fun to string together):

Activity is the name of the game, dude. Pray later. 

Only to watch hours and hours unbelievably flushed away and away before my eyes with ultimately the entire day––not to mention my attitude––irretrievably wasted. 

Why do we so often only present verses 6-7 of Philippians 4 as a memorization pair? And not glorious verse 5, or at least its latter half? It strikes me as indispensable preamble. 

(Do you even know what it is?)

“The Lord is near.” 

That’s the reason we can “be anxious for nothing.” That’s the starting point from which we can begin to imagine that being anxious about nothing might be possible. 

I don’t know what your lousy yuck is today. Let hope in the truth that the Lord is near form your foundation of trust that anxiety can be dispelled and replaced with peace. It’ll pass all understanding.