When blessed Francis approached these men he said to them: “Tell me, I beg of you, where does Lady Poverty dwell, where does she feed, where does she lie at midday,” for I am faint with love for her?”
Grasping at straws
No one begins by wrestling with God. They begin by wrestling with themselves. The struggle turns inward before it turns upward. Jacob wrestled with his identity, calling, family, and masculinity before he wrestled with God.
Francis of Assisi took off all his clothes and walked away from his family inheritance before he heard the Lord ask him to rebuild the church. He wrestled with his call, his identity, and his purpose before he wrestled with God.
About ten years ago, the ministry I was overseeing decided to close, the church I was working with went through major upheaval, as a consequence the ministry school I was running ended, and the itinerant schedule that had been so busy the year before completely fizzled out.
Everything l had been working towards up to that point ended within the same year. It was around that time that I had discovered the Desert Fathers. Their words about struggle became a great comfort to me.
I wrestled with myself for the next two years.
How would I rebuild (and could I rebuild)?
Would my family be ok?
Why had everything ended so abruptly?
What had I done wrong?
While I was wrestling with my calling, identity, and relationship with God, he was busy working deep within me.
“The Lord uses of a veil of dryness that we would not know what he is working in us. If we knew what he was working in our souls, we would imagine that we were the one doing the good ourselves. That would be our undoing." Michael De Molinos
As the Lord slowly began to humble me and bring to death the need for validation, security, and success, Isaiah 45 became a key passage for me.
Isaiah 45:2-3 I will go before you and make the rough places smooth; I will shatter the doors of bronze and cut through their iron bars. I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden wealth of secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name.
In fact, I ended up writing about that same experience and the Isaiah passage in my book “Transformation: Catching a glimpse of the beauty of God”.
We started Wind Ministries at the tail end of that two-year struggle. And things picked up right away. Within a year and a half, my schedule was full for the next 12 months. Invitations were falling into our laps. The resources we were producing were selling out wherever we went.
The Cracks
However, I started to see cracks at the core of how we did things.
The pressure to schedule a course or event climbed when finances became tighter.
The more we grew, the more costs were involved. With employees came the need to provide not only for our family, but those we were walking with.
The competition for “selling your message” increased dramatically coming out of the 2-year lockdown due to COVID.
As people turned towards the digital age, the need to be active on social media increased.
Having a public profile and a successful YouTube channel became the new currency. The larger the audience, the easier it is to monetize.
More eyeballs on your content means more customers, more sales, more invitations, and larger conferences.
This meant that the need to schedule an event always carried the backdrop of what kind of income the event produces. It was impossible to escape.
This also meant that the need for money puts a demand on the relationship an itinerant has to carry with a pastor.
Social media strategies carried the undercurrent of “what will attract more attention”.
At one point we had a company managing our social media, video and web platforms. The strategy for blogging and vlogging was to look at the key word search results in Google and build your topics around what brought people to your website and social platform. The goal was followers, influence, attraction, and invitation.
It’s called a sales funnel in the marketing world. This is why you see YouTube channels with good people constantly using the most salacious headlines. It attracts eyeballs.
I don’t think I was a very good client, because I could never get behind writing and posting based upon search results. If the Father had put something on my heart, I would write about it. But even then, you are forced to think through the lens of “how do we monetize and attract people based upon the content production”. The end result felt like a mixture between successful attraction and what I actually wanted to say.
At some point, for me, the message began to feel hollow. I had given myself to studying the lives of the men and women who went into the desert and lived in utter obscurity, and I felt as though I was doing the exact opposite. I told Erin one day that I felt like I was standing on the side of the road holding a sign that read: “Have message, will preach for food.”
The Beauty of Hiddenness
Then I began to think about how everything the Lord had done that was significant in my life had been in seasons of hiddenness and obscurity. I recall a particular evening when we were having dinner with some friends and I was sharing about the season of hiddenness that had worked so much in me. I began weeping as I was moved by the tenderness of the Father and it dawned on me that the Lord was inviting me to hide in him yet again.
What I’ve learned about hiddenness is that there is not some other side to it. The end result is not that you would come out of hiddenness. It is that hiddenness would work its way deep into you. When I was younger, I would spend time planning for when I would eventually come out of the hiddenness. Surely the whole plan was that I would be visible and then God could use me again.
Psalms 91:1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
These kinds of passages have taken on fresh, deeper meaning to me. I’m not a very good itinerant minister because I don’t really want to be discovered. Now I say something when I think I have something to say. I don’t say something because I need to fill a social media feed.
I guess my question to many out there in the social media world is: if you didn’t have social media what would you do for ministry? If there were no more conferences, what would your ministry to the world look like? How do you plan for when the Lord will hide you? Could you disappear for days, months, or years at a time?
Perhaps that last sentence produced a nice thought and a nod. But hiddenness is one of the most deeply entrenched principles of the kingdom of God. It is inescapable, yet our modern world presents every possible way to eradicate the need for hiddenness.
I have wrestled with where our support would come from and would I have enough to care for my family. But that just betrayed how little I trusted the Father. The past few years have taught me that the words of Jesus are in fact precious.
Matthew 6:31-32 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
If I can’t slow down, discover him, and enter into obscurity because I have a bill to pay, then I have lost the forest for the trees. Maybe better people than I can navigate it all without it impacting their heart, but I don’t think I could.
From our family to yours, with the Father’s affection,
