When I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I can go more deeply into that time of my life, but here is a fellow that fits into my discussion today.
In high school I led a Bible Study that my older brother John had started, he is born in 1959, and I in 1962. It was part of the ministry of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.
So the group was a Christian, bible, evangelical based, but there were many denominations represented there. Of course now, looking back, I realize being children of parents who took us to those churches is different from folks who are at a church as adults if you know what I mean? But because they chose to spend a lunch hour once a week, in a classroom at our high school, that showed a next level up from kids who just went to church because their parents did?
I was young, and didn’t know so much of what I know now, and now that I am 63 the saying, the more I know, the more I realize how little I know.
So… I’ll move onto the Ken Peter’s story now… we were in the basement of his house. Its significant to mention that there was Mennonites, Baptists, United, Lutherns there, as well as myself, the only Pentecostal.
I had us all join hands for prayer, and we bowed our heads, closed our eyes, and I prayed. It quickly became a “lost in prayer” prayer. One which in my church culture was the norm, when in the prayer room. It was a shouting out the devil, weeping, nose running, eyes clenched tightly shut, soul searching prayer…
When I said AMEN, and opened my eyes, my nose running, tears splashed on my cheeks and shirt… and saw the what I thought was wide eyed terror on all their faces, I felt awkward, to say the least.
Over the years that memory has been a cringe moment for me. I felt embarrassment, and many times have just shook my head with a live and learn to do better next time kind of attitude.
Years later, and this is where you need to know the Hell I was going through at that time of my life back in 1995-1996 range…
My first marriage had folded, and I was living on a foam mattress in my brother Andrew’s extra room. And by extra room I mean he had a flat near the corner of Burrard and Fourth Avenue in Vancouver, BC. It consisted of a 15 foot wide kitchen, that was maybe 25 feet deep. Off to the left were two doorways, that led to a space equal to the kitchen, but half and half. The doorways had no doors, just loosely hung curtains. On the end of the kitchen, on the left hand side was a doorway to a bathroom, that exactly fit a full bath tub/shower, a toilet at the far right end, and across from the bathtub a sink and mirror, and about a 3 foot path down the middle. It was a tiny place, yeah?
I remember being there, hoodwinked into “staying at my brother’s for a few days, while my wife and I calmed down after lots of fighting… but in the meantime she went to legal aid… and declared herself as an abandoned wife, with 4 children to feed, and no money… and like that… and so… she was seeking a divorce, child and spousal support…
The night of the day she’s done this, she confided in me somewhat that she was doing this, and that it was “to teach you a lesson” and that if I didn’t fight back… just accepted what she did… we’d be back together, living in Abbotsford once again, with our four children. “Just let it happen” was her word to me, I’ve often used that horrid phrase in a bitter joke about what a man says to another man he is violating, “just let it happen”
Well, I let it happen, and found myself served with papers to appear in court, for the bitter beginning of a divorce…
I remember crying myself to sleep on that bare mattress. I was working fulltime as a Bus Driver for BC Transit… and there were kleenix’s all around my bed in the morning, I’d go to work on my shift that was from 12-8 pm, and then cry myself to sleep, wake up, cry til I went to work, and do it again. I felt utterly lost and alone… I had lost my whole life.
My beliefs at the time were frozen in the idea that a divorced man could have no ministry hopes. I’d resented having children and a wife, that held me back from being fulltime in ministry… and now that they were gone, I didn’t care anything about any of that… I just wanted back into JAIL… the tormented experience I’d had for the 12 years of marriage between 1983 and 1995.
…an aside here. I had an absolutely empty place inside… and my ex-wife had restraining orders preventing me from being with them unsupervised… having painted me as an abusive, dangerous man in court… and then calling me to come take the kids off her hands to give her a break… and if I stepped out of line in anyway, she’d revoke that, and claim I’d carted the children off on my own, and have me arrested. Right or wrong, I picked them up, and took them bowling. It was there in the bowling alley that that emptiness disappeared. And I realized it was these 4 children that floated my boat, and that she was so over for me.
So… if you’d like more describing of how miserable and desperate I was at that period of my life… let me know, I’ll try to fill in the blanks a little more.
Well, I remember there was a knock on the door of that place of Andrew’s an in walked Ken Peters. He’d gone to Bible College with my brother Andrew, years before, and I’d known that. But as he entered, he looked at me… I don’t know for sure, I was pretty much in the same shape as that time in his basement, bleary eyed, nose running, tear stained shirt… he pointed at me and told me boldly, succinctly…
“Laurence, YOU are the reason I’m a pastor!”
I blinked maybe, and begged to know what he meant by that.
He recalled that prayer time, and he said that when we parted that day, his prayer was that God would give him that fire in his own heart, that he’d seen in me!
When I remind him of that these days now that so much healing has taken place, he told me that the visit to Andrew’s was by a discouraged pastor, wondering how he, or why he… he was at a turning point kind of moment, and when he walked in that door, seeing the broken Laurence (my interpretation of what he saw) cuz he said, when he saw me, the WHAT FOR of all he’d been doing suddenly came flowing back into place.
For me in that moment, God ministered to me. A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “The Cost of Discipleship” comes to mind here, that a tree is not aware of its fruit.
The idea being that John 15 explains the process of abiding in him, and his abiding in us… we are apart of one another (I’m talking about Jesus & Me) but I’m also saying that each of us are members of one another.
Running Down Vimy 