God Doesn't Need Us - But He Chooses to Use Us!

Guest Blogger: Dave White, AC3 Elder



Doug

In September of 2014 I got news that my brother Doug had mouth cancer. He had surgery scheduled in early October to remove part of his tongue and several teeth where the gums were affected by the cancer. A couple years earlier he had been diagnosed with Cirrhosis of the liver and several other potentially fatal conditions. He had been a heavy smoker and drinker all his life. About 39 years earlier when I became a Christian I had shared my faith with him and “preached” the Gospel to him. He told me that he believed that what I was telling him was probably true but that he didn’t want anything to do with it. He didn’t want to change his lifestyle. The lifestyle that led to the health problems he was now faced with.

The day before the surgery I called to talk to him. I was afraid that after the surgery he may not be able to talk and I really wanted to hear his voice. We talked about what was going on and how he was feeling, both physically and emotionally. I reminded him of the conversations we had years earlier and asked him if what he was going through was making him think about God and eternity. He told me that he was thinking about it a lot. We talked for a little while longer and I was able to briefly share the Gospel with him and told him that there were a lot of people praying for him; both for his physical healing and for his emotional and spiritual healing.

During the surgery they removed about 2/3 of his tongue as well as a lot of his teeth and gums. They did a biopsy of the lymph nodes and found out that the cancer had spread. They planned on taking out the rest of his teeth and gums and starting chemotherapy and radiation. The doctors told him that with or without further treatment he would most likely die within 6 months so he decided against treatment. My sister and I wanted to see him but he didn’t want us to come until “nearer the end”. We wanted to honor his wishes but at the same time we hadn’t seen him in close to 10 years and we wanted to go when he was still able to communicate and enjoy the visit as much as possible.

I was praying a lot, as were a lot of my friends and family. I was praying not so much that he would be healed, but that he would be saved. I started praying that God would surround him with His Spirit; that Doug would feel the presence of God and the peace and comfort of the Holy Spirit, and that he would feel his need for God. One of my close friends sent me a message one day saying that she was praying that God would reveal Himself to Doug, and draw him to Himself “with or without human intervention”. It was reassuring to know that we were praying the same thing.

Over the next couple months we continued our text conversations. I didn’t call because I knew that he was hard to understand and that it was painful for him to talk. Texting was a great way to keep in touch. I could send him scriptures and words of encouragement and let him know that there were a lot of people praying for him.  

During football season we would text each other during the games. He was always rooting for the team the Seahawks were playing. During one of those games, after commenting on a play he texted’ “I believe now”. It caught me by surprise and I asked what he meant. He said that he believed in God now, but made it clear he hadn’t gone so far as to become a Christian. Though he was not confessing Christ…yet…it gave me a tremendous sense of hope; I knew God was working on him.

I continued to get updates on his condition from his wife Marsha. He was getting worse. We finally got the OK to go see him in mid March and started planning the trip. We set up our flights for the week-end of March 12^th. About a week later I got a message saying that he was getting worse and now had Hospice care. They asked if we could come earlier.

I was working when I got that message and I paused to pray. I wasn’t sure what to pray. I was feeling a sense of urgency and was afraid that he would die before I got a chance to see him and have another chance to share the Gospel with him. I felt like there was more I needed to do. As I sat in my patrol car and started to pray I heard an almost audible voice say; “I don’t need you for this Dave”. It seemed to come out of nowhere and surprised me. It wasn’t me saying that God didn’t need me to reach Doug. God was saying that He didn’t need me for it. All the stress and worry about being there and saying and doing the right things was gone. God was telling me that He had the situation under control.

We changed our plans and got reservations about 2 weeks earlier than the original plans. After a long day and a half of travel with numerous weather related delays we made it to his small run down travel trailer in Heber Springs Arkansas. Doug was in a lot of pain and taking strong narcotic pain medications. He could barely talk and had a constant flow of drool coming from his mouth. He had deep red and purple bruise type marks on his arms that were from the Cirrhosis and he had numerous golf ball sized tumors in his neck. He was miserable looked much older than his 59 years. We talked and reminisced for a few hours and then left for the night so he could get some rest.

The next day; Sunday March 1^st 2015, we went up to see them again. After we talked for a while I was thinking about how I could bring God and eternity into the conversation. I wasn’t feeling particularly pressured to bring it up because of what God had told me a couple weeks earlier but I still wanted to be available if He chose to use me. About that time Marsha and my sister left to go have a glass of wine and Doug and I were alone. The conversation started to change into more serious topics. We talked about what Marsha was going to do when he was gone, what was going to be done with his remains and other things like that.

I felt the nudging to ask about where he was with God. I told him again about how me and many of my friends were praying for him and praying that God would surround him with His Holy Spirit; that he would feel God’s presence, comfort, and peace, and that God would reveal Himself to him. Doug looked up at me and with clear peaceful eyes and a voice that was the clearest it had been since we’d been there said: “I felt it”. What he said, and the way he said it shocked me. I felt an excitement and was getting chills as I realized that God had answered our prayers!

We talked some more about being a Christian and being ready for eternity. Doug looked at me again and asked; “What makes you think I’m not a Christian?” I said it was because he told me before that he believed in God but that he hadn’t gone any further than that. I told him that there was more to being a Christian and being saved than just believing in God. I continued on to give about a 2 or 3 minute long explanation of the Gospel message, from the fall of man to salvation through Christ. Doug looked at me and said; I believe that. I don’t understand it all, but I believe it.         

I could hardly believe it! Doug was confessing his belief in Jesus Christ. I asked, still feeling like this was a very awesome dream, are you telling me that you believe that Jesus Christ is your Savior and that you are ready to be with him for eternity?  He looked at me with the most loving and peaceful look I’d ever seen in his eyes and said “yes I am”. All I could think was God did it! After 39 years of praying for my brother to come to Christ it has finally happened. We talked more about God’s love and mercy and grace and how God uses bad things like what he is going through to bring people to Himself. We saw them one more time the next morning on our way to the airport. I hugged him, knowing it was probably the last time I would see him on earth. As we hugged I told him; “we’ll see each other again, in God’s kingdom”. He said; “yes we will”.

Four days later I got a text from Marsha saying “call me, urgent”. I called her and found out that Doug died about an hour earlier. As we talked I had the opportunity to tell her about the conversation I had with Doug while we were there and how he had confessed his faith in Jesus as his Savior. That’s where I found out that I was apparently the only one he had told. I told her that only a few hours earlier I had prayed that if Doug’s faith in Christ as his Savior was real, and that he was ready for eternity, that God would take him soon so he would not suffer any more. Hours later he was home with his Savior; no more pain, no more suffering.

I wonder if maybe Doug had held on and waited until he could see me and our sister again and so he could share his decision with me, knowing that I had been hoping for it for so long. Had we kept our original travel plans I would have missed seeing him that last time and sharing that moment with him. I may have lived the rest of my life not knowing for sure if my brother was ready for eternity. God is faithful, God is good! God doesn’t need us…but He chooses to use us if we make ourselves available.

AC3 VB87.1 Extra

Do you like extra stuff? If so, Dan has some good stuff right here in this video blog extra. Enjoy! :)

AC3 VB87 No More Pause

The Pause is over! Weekend services start back up this Saturday at 6pm and Sunday at 9am and 10:30am. Hope to see you around at a service this weekend. Enjoy this weeks video blog too as Dan is solo this week :)

AC3 VB86 Grit

Here is this weeks video blog! Enjoy :)

AC3 VB85 What's Going On Around Here?

Rick and Dan are back from where ever they have been the last few weeks :) Enjoy!

Dirt Roads

Took this picture when I went back to my home town last week.  

How many scenes just like this have I seen in my lifetime? Wind blowing through fields of grain, big sky and a ribbon of dirt road that stretches off and disappears into the horizon. My home town.  Morden, Manitoba, Canada. 

Morden, MB

The longer I live, the more I'd like to go back there. To that sleepy town where nothing happens, where you travel just outside of town and there’s nothing but dirt roads for miles and miles… 

Yet ironically now I regret so much of what I was and what I aspired to while I was actually in that town. I didn’t belong there. I didn’t deserve to belong there. I thought Morden wasn’t worthy of me, but in truth, I wasn’t worthy of it. Everything I wanted Morden to be, it should never be and it thankfully never became. And all the things I was embarrassed about in my home town, are it’s greatest strengths. 

See, I wanted Morden to be bigger. It was a paltry 5000 people. I was proud of the fact that it was one of the biggest farming towns in southern Manitoba, but always embarrassed that it wasn’t bigger than Winkler just 7 miles away. I wanted us to be bigger than them. More modern. I wanted us to have the first nice theater. Winkler beat us to that. I wanted us to have the first big mall. We got a pathetic little strip mall near our downtown core that didn’t have a real “mall” at all, no indoor market of stores, just a chain of 3 stores next to each other. Winkler finally got a real mall after I left home – just what I wanted for us but it never came. Losers!  I wanted us to have the first McDonalds outside of Winnipeg in southern Manitoba – to mark us that we had surely arrived!  Winkler beat us to that too. I wanted industry and people to move in. 

And mostly, I wanted the main dirt roads outside of town to be paved. Only the old "1-6" was paved – and that poorly!  To my way of thinking, the more pavement, the more we had “arrived.” 

I wanted to see more new housing, more businesses, more schools. Some of it came but then went just as quickly; Tupperware(c) set up shop, then closed leaving a behemoth warehouse behind that’s never been properly used since. It still sits there, this gigantic eyesore just outside of town, like a pair of grownup trousers hanging over the end of the bed of a 5 year old – it doesn’t fit, it never did.

And so Morden never “arrived”… and now I say, thank God. It never arrived because that wasn’t it’s destination. It’s charm, it’s place in this world is to be small. And to have dirt roads that never get paved. To have a quaint little downtown core that never bustles with 10’s of thousands of angry shoppers. 

Instead, to have pickup trucks that stop in the middle of main street as they cross, farmers exchanging news, chuckles. To have everyone know everyone else. To have the pace be slower, to have progress be minimal; to have technological innovations and blockbuster movies come later; to have the standard of living be lower; to have the schools with less programs, smaller stadiums, fewer events; to have cars that get scratched and dirtied and rusted out faster on those salted, gravely, dirt roads.

All of this I was embarrassed about in my home town. And I set out in life, in no small part, to get away from all that. To live in a place that would meet my expectations for “progress”. Only paved roads. Driven on by late model cars that don’t rust or get scratched by flying rocks from grain trucks or tractors. Big schools, loads of industry, fancy shopping. 

I was made in a small town and I despised it. Like in some cruel and ironic twist of fate, the souls of babies got mixed up and mine got plopped down in rural Manitoba when I was supposed to be born in a big, progressive town, a center of commerce and activity. A Manhattan baby born to a farmer in Kane, Manitoba, Canada, population 25 (that was before they moved to the relative megalopolis of Morden!). 

I’m totally out of place. Coming into my world with a sneer and a look down the nose at everything and everyone around me. Arrogant, pompous, and determined above all else to leave this place after I realized late in my adolescence that Morden was never going to be modern. To get that, I was going to have to leave. So leave I did.

And now I have it all! I have the late model cars that I park in an actual garage, and they only drive on paved roads that are bustling and constantly improving for traffic flow; large webs of concrete going from tidy, but growing suburbs, to modern big box shopping centers where the latest and greatest shiny new stuff can be bought with money made from upscale jobs, and growth of industry in the latest and greatest technology in airplanes and computers. 

Pickups never stop in these streets because they’d surely be rear-ended if they did. And the only dirt roads my cars see are on carefully planned outings into the woods for momentary reprieves from modern, progressive life. But I don’t know the names of my neighbors. I now live closer to my nearest neighbors, by a (literal) mile.  However, my knowledge of my neighbors, my level of friendship with them, the amount of times I visit them or work with them to help them or they help me with some project, is exactly inversely proportional to the physical distance between us, compared to when I was on the farm.

It’s been about 27 years now. Since I left dirt roads behind me and got on a fancy interstate to find a place that matched how “progressive” I was… to find a place that could contain my aspirations because clearly this place I was born in had none. But now I’m questioning all that. I wanted an ill fitting yoke for my home town, one that I’m thankful to know it has never succeeded in carrying. Though it has tried. It did get that McDonalds. And another couple schools. (Though still only the one old High School, MCI, erected in 1964).  

And it did get a swanky new hospital. And a twin lane highway to Winkler. But mostly it’s still just dirt roads. 

And that’s what it should be. To remind us that progress isn’t always progressive. And that in progressing we often lose some very important things along the way. Like how to be human. How to love our neighbor. How to know and be known. 

A Christian pastor never had to teach his flock of farmers about “small groups”. What a laugh. The farmer would teach the pastor all he could handle about everything a small group was designed for: leaning on each other, barn raising with neighbors, sharing life, caring for the elderly, raising kids in a “village” and sharing our stuff. Small groups in big city churches are (among other things) like remedial lessons in how to bring a bit of farm into the city. 

So that’s my life now. I moved to the progressive city, and I find my mission is to bring to the city the taste and the discipline of Christian community. And for this task, I was given an upbringing in Morden to assist me. Somewhere in the archives of my mind and experiences are most of the tools and examples I’d need to build what Jesus had in mind when he invented the church.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I can go back. My wife tells me I've probably idealized it now beyond all reason. It had it’s own problems to be sure: Gossip, relationships between earthy farmers could remain quite shallow, and judgmentalism for those that don’t “fit” and other issues endemic to small town life. But now I overlook those problems and pine for a return… because in seeking to get out of that constricting small town life, I’ve run into all the problems that I was never warned about in big town life.

Oh, yes, some of it was as advertised. My cars don’t rust. My stuff is new and shiny longer, less dust on everything. I have what I want, when I want it mostly. I don’t get snowed in, and paved roads don’t wash out in spring like dirt roads sometimes do. But then, there’s the sense of isolation. The speed of life. The fatigue. The focus on self. I’m tired of being tired. I’m tired of feeling alone surrounded by a million people all the time. I’m tired of living for me. I’d like to have a porch where I sip a coke and read a book every night after a hard day’s work. And where I’m not too selfish or too busy or too tired to shout over the fence a “hello” to my neighbor and take him into my heart a bit (and why do I have a fence anyway?) and share my life.

Before I die, I’d like this to change. But it’s not about moving back to Morden. It’s about letting all that was right in that, seep deep into me now and come out in intentional, communal living, that bucks the speed and the isolation of big town life. If I retreat to the farm, who will tend to the flock of burned out city slickers who do not know how to do life together? 

It’s my job to shepherd them into this new kind of life, built on the Savior’s ministry – it was not invented on a farm, or in Morden. In fact, truth be told, it was first seen in this world in a big city! In Jerusalem, where the church first sprang into being. There, in the big city, a new kind of selflessness, a new kind of access to each other, a new kind of sharing, a new kind of caring, a new kind of purpose and community came to earth, as if transplanted –not from Morden, God forbid – but from heaven itself. 

Lord, transplant it here in my life in the community I’m trying to lead. Amen.

AC3 VB84 Vision Cast Promo 2

Have you been to AC3's Vision Cast yet? If you haven't, check out this promo video to see some of what you are missing! AC3's 20 Year Anniversary Celebration starts at Vision Cast this year, August 28-30 at Lakeside Bible Camp. You can get more info at AC3.org or call the church office at 360-659-7335 to register. Enjoy! :)