“My Story isn’t very interesting it doesn’t convey anything that others would want to know”.
What is interesting about this statement is that up until that moment, as the person was talking, they were mentioning many things that connected them to a broader human experience, and demonstrated the Creator at work within their life.
I was that person not to many years ago. I would listen to someone talk about their redemption from a drug addicted violent life and I would think that person can talk all day about how God changed them, how successful they now were, and people will listen and be in awe. “That person” has a powerful story and I have a boring story.
Raised in church, went to a Christian school, parents were Christians and so on a so forth. This was the so-called boring story I had in my head about myself.
My view was all wrong, and so was my motivation. The story wasn’t for me it was others to see how much God cared, because my story was and is laced with redemptions, creativity, and pain.
We all have amazing stories that have a person somewhere waiting to hear them, but the first person that needs hear that story is you.
Most all human beings share the same fundamental ability to engage in the stories of others.
One of the fundamental desires of people is to be known. When people don’t feel known they live in dissonance or disconnection between their outer lives, and their inner lives. Hiding sometimes in a pseudo intimate fashion in their relationships (being only partially known). People deep down want to be known, but are afraid for many reasons to reveal themselves for fear of rejection, criticism, or abandonment.
If your heart is passionate about something……..anything…… then what does that tell about you. You didn’t get that passion by accident. Iit grew out of your story. Your life sometimes seems “to normal” because that is what you have known for so long.
I am here to tell you that your life is full of amazing things that can help you and others live more vital lives. Like a singer who suddenly gets found and made famous, you too have a story inside of you waiting to be told to someone.
Some people do not tell their stories because they don’t want to be seen as “narcissistic” or they don’t want to be “vulnerable” to those around them. Your story can be a gift of life for someone out their. We live in an increasingly isolated, and anxious society that needs connection and human interaction desperately. Your story can be that connection.
In learning to be counselor I was asked to explore my own story in as much detail as possible and recognize my own journey as valuable, vulnerable, and in need of recognition….by me. I learned that having a mother with schizophrenia and a father who did not finish 8th grade was a way for me to understand and connect to some people who struggled with mental illness and poverty. I learned that my stories of loss created more compassion and empathy for others experiencing loss.
I learned to forgive for things that had happened to me, as I told my story to myself first, and saw that God worked in many ways to help me to become a new person despite what I saw as significant limitations. I learned that my story when told to others helped me and God within me to be known and not hidden. It helped me to be free.
It is important to understand the sometimes telling your story will take time, and may uncover events that are hard to process due to the pain that occurred from them. I would encourage you not to give up, but to take that uncovering as a motivation to find someone trustworthy such as a counselor or pastor to work thru those parts of your story, so that you can find healing and vitality.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
Staring up at the slowly eroding wall of dirt it dawned on me that this was really turning into a colossal disaster. In fact, it was a masterpiece of a failure. Have you ever had a masterpiece failure? A masterpiece failure usually encompasses the perfect amount of bad decisions coupled with the perfect amount of mistakes and misjudgments and a dash of wicked happenstance for extra saltiness. This was one of those situations.
While I wouldn’t wish a masterpiece failure on anyone and would not take lightly any such story that anyone has experienced or is experiencing I do not now regret one of my own. What came out of it produced many things of beauty, and dare I say……. growth.
It all started in early 2005 when I saw a small “for sale by owner” sign in the bushes while driving my then 2-year-old son around at 10PM to get him to just go to sleep. It was a big piece of private wooded property in the City and it was very reasonably priced (maybe a little to reasonably).
The “property” was in one of the most beautiful and exclusive areas in our town. Nestled on the Southern wooded and hilly edges of the community we called home. The property felt like it was in country while literally being minutes from downtown. With the sun and wind in the trees it felt like a Northwest Paradise. What made it even better was that the homes in the area were all large beautiful custom homes with 2 acre lots. This added to the overall attraction.
We bought it …oh rapturous joy …we were are on our way to building our dream home on a dream piece of property. The summer of 2006. We secured our building loan, drew our plans, and planned to General the job ourselves (as I had grown up in construction I had a general idea of the process). We broke ground in July of 2006 and slowly prepared our land for the foundation. Then it happened.
Have you ever been sideswiped, sucker punched, or just plain sickeningly surprised?
Well we were! After months of preparation and a very large sum of money and debt accrued we found upon excavation that the property was sitting on an “ancient landslide”.
By the way the Willamette Valley and most of western Oregon and Washington are full of them (just sayin). This of course changed everything.
We had to re-excavate, redesign a completely different house and the time that this took pushed us into the thick of the rainy season which brings me to standing in front of the rapidly eroding wall of dirt I started the story with.
Maybe you can relate to that feeling in your stomach, neck, chest, or back, when you realize wow this is really not good.
IN FACT, this is really awful and I can’t fix this. This was late 2006 and early 2007 by this point and some other events were happening in the US relating to the collapse of the mortgage market. Our bank backed out on us at this point leaving us with most of the bills for the excavation and dozens of other asundry services in our lap.
After 12 months of no movement in the process of building I was sliding deep into an anxious depression. My chest hurt everyday to the point that I went to Dr., worried that I was having heart problems.
Turned out it was stress.
We prayed and prayed, but it felt like it was just one of those moments where the only way out was to trust and move thru. I thought maybe I could see the light at the end of tunnel and hoped that it wasn’t an oncoming train. I slowly became consumed in the stress of trying to fix the problem while assuming all the bills with more debt. I lost all perspective.
One late night I sat out in the backyard and stared up at the sky, something that I started to do each night after this. I started to regain perspective thru looking at God’s creation. I realized that this was a small part of my life in the years that I would be alive and that I was small part of what I was looking at in the sky. I had been caught up in the sense of failure, the shame, and seemingly impossibility of the situation. The situation or more importantly my reaction to it was robbing me of what was valuable in my life such as my relationship with God, my family and even my vocation as a counselor.
God started to draw me back to reality thru his immensity.
I started to turn my focus back to what really mattered, and it took time.
In my brokenness I wanted to truly follow God’s design for our lives, but there were a lot of pieces to pick up. I felt stripped down and raw and that is where God met me.
Are you in the midst of a masterpiece failure situation?
Has a financial, relational, or vocational sure thing blown up in your face?
Are you in the position that feels Isolated, and alone?
The first and most important thing is that you should do is seek help! I stayed isolated and embarrassed way to long. God’s people are there to help shoulder the burden.
Galatians 6:2 “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
The thing that you probably should not do is to isolate for long periods, stop doing healthy activities, or distract yourself with unhealthy activities that pull you away from what is important.
This may be professional help, it may be a church group, it may be a pastor. Most likely it will be a combination of people and groups that will help you regain your perspective and start to see how to move forward. In fact, God may open some doors in those relationships that you cannot imagine were possible.
It may seem a paradox, but I am glad to say that I can’t end this story with a quick fix miracle. The truth is that we made these decisions, mistakes happened, and part of the story did not go well, there were tears and struggle, but that was not the end of our story.
Thru this experience God was present to help us learn a great deal about ourselves, His grace and provision, and compassion for others. The “others” that I am referring to are those that find themselves in the beginning, middle, or end of a masterpiece failure.
2 years after the triumphant breaking ground and after being for sale for 6 months the neighbor bought the bare ground for the mortgage owed on it. This was the only offer in the midst of the worst recession since the 1920’s. The neighbor was only in town for one month and it was a take it or leave it situation. God was gracious and we sold it. 10 years later we have finally paid off the rest of the money we accrued in our magnificent failure and I don’t begrudge a dime of it. We struggled with the repercussions of the situation for years after and it took me over 5 years to even drive by the property without feeling horrible, but God is sovereign, and has created in me, and my family something special in spite of and because of this struggle.
God has revealed himself in ways that I may not have ever been open to sitting in my beautiful home on my beautiful property in my beautiful town.
I would not wish magnificent failure on anyone, but it seems that they can come whether we are prepared or not.
Sometimes it is someone else’s doing that has brought us there leaving us bitter and estranged feeling the weight of their failure impacting us! We are left to figure out those next steps.
Magnificent Failure can be the catalyst for transformation to have magnificent life. I do not say this lightly because there were many night, weeks, months, and years where I did not have the perspective to see living anything, but the failure. What it said about me, and my vision of the future was that I was a failure. I was not a failure….I was a person that had experienced a failure. That eroding wall of mud can be a metaphor for many things that happen to us as humans.
God has a desire for us to transcend even our most magnificent failures turning them into vehicles of newness and creativity. This is not a forced thing. I believe that God collaborates with us when we are willing to see a new perspective, experience pain, and move forward rather than avoid pain and stay stuck. Time will move forward and you can too.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
Little Voices…from HomeDuring the stem cell transplant many of the effects of the treatment started to take their toll on me, and a voice would talk to me and say “Gene you need to get up”, you need to walk” , and we would walk ….if you could call it that, around the 14th floor (passed up by an elderly lady with her chemo bags still hanging, that’s additional motivation). That voice was my wife Daleasha, who spent those long weeks sleeping on the couch in the corner of the room. Making me eat, helping me walk, making me remember home. It was January and my wife’s presence was part of God’s voice in the room.
My daughter came and sat with me on the bed, and for a moment, for an hour, I felt a little more home. I looked at a blanket that my sister-in-law made for me and I felt a little home. I saw the Freeway and the same river that passed by my home to the South flowing to the mighty Columbia and on to the sea. It’s funny I always thought that I was tougher than that.
The time over the last year/s before this had ground me down. It was not one thing it was days of things. In past years we would go to the Oregon coast and see what the water from the waves has done by hitting those massive rocks on the shore. One wave didn’t do so much, but all those hits over the centuries has produced all that sand on the beach. Today maybe you have been hit by all that water, rain, or just a continuous barrage of tough stuff. Bruce Lee used to say that water feels like the softest stuff on earth, but it can penetrate rock. I want you to know that you are not alone. One important thing that made Christ so real me to me in that moment was that Christ was there; he also went thru very painful experiences.
We all come from places and pasts and parents and cultural groups and maybe religions. Places that have created and designed what home looks like or feels like for us. Some of you may even feel that you don’t have a home to go too because it is physically gone or changed. Maybe you never had a place you called home leaving you feeling unrooted unattached or unable to attach. The fascinating thing about that is that Jesus lived that out too. He grew up and journeyed all around Israel returning home only to be criticized and pretty much rejected; eventually betrayed and killed.
The key to his perseverance and compassion for those around Him was that Christ’s focus was on His Father. Yes, Christ had a purpose, and yes, He was the Messiah, but Christ made it abundantly clear that His focus was on His Father. Prayer to his Father in Heaven, glory to His Father in Heaven, stories about His Father in Heaven. Christ knew that it was taking time to practice the presence of God in worship, prayer, and acknowledgement, that was his strength to pass the eroded path of His life. Christ saw this as the most important thing in all his actions in His life, and it was His true Home.
I pray today that we can acknowledge God’s presence and action in all that we are, and know our true home. I challenge you and myself today and this week to pray a prayer for God to use your journey. Express to God not only the difficulty or joy, but the desire to focus onto the things in store for you, regardless of the present circumstances. Consider this Scripture about Christ’s focus in Hebrews 5:7 (Modern English Version), “7 In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death. He was heard because of His godly fear. 8 Though He was a Son, He learned obedience through the things that He suffered, 9 and being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey Him“ We are all children really and we have a parent that can and wants to hear it all and in the very best moment give it all and more. God already gave more then I can fathom.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
Today is February ….8th, and 5 years ago I came home from my stem cell transplant. I came home not really knowing all of who I was as I ventured back into life. Apparently I was a cancer survivor…I sure was hoping I was a cancer survivor, but I really didn’t know yet. After living at a medical facility for about a month. I came home.
Maybe you have come home. Home from the battle field, home from the hospital, home from college, home from the grocery store, home from church. All you wanted was to get home, a home, a place, a safe familiar place; a safe familiar feeling. Maybe you are at work right now and you want to go home..;)
Such was my journey at that point, for several weeks I looked out the window at unobstructed million dollar views of Mt. Hood from the 14th floor of a hospital in Portland, Oregon. It was a last effort for something that I never thought would go this far. For days I wondered where the tiny cars on I-5 were going as I watched them in my decreasingly lucid moments till I ceased to care about cars on the freeway, the spectacular beauty of the Mountain, or the flowing Willamette river.
Our Lives take unexpected turns many times that create dips and potholes in the road that we once thought to be pretty strong flat and passable.
When I was a kid, my Father and I would go into the hills in the coast range of Oregon to cut firewood. Frequently the logging roads (which were often goat trails made by heavy machinery) were cut into by the hydraulic force of the ever present rain that fell (whenever we went to cut firewood of course). That rain, rushing down these roads would create it’s own path, cutting, and eroding away even heavily compacted rip rap (giant gravel). The rain relentlessly fell, and seemingly relentlessly eroded the path that was once passable and flat.
Sometimes our lives and the experiences that happen in the space that we call life feel like that rain. Relentlessly falling, incrementally wearing at the road surface that we took as strong, maybe even impervious to the thousands of pounds of machinery that have rolled on it before. We don’t think too much about the passing rain storms or the passing machinery. Then more rain drops starts to fall into our lives. Job changes, a health care scare, a wayward child, your social group changes, a loss occurs, a bully at work, then a year later another loss occurs, and then your job changes (for the worse), healthcare becomes a real concern. I can’t create an exhaustive list, but we as humans know what I am talking about.
Incrementally, the furrow grows deeper into the path of our life making it incrementally harder and harder to move forward or be the person that we want to be or sometimes even need to be just to function. Passing on the road becomes more difficult, more slippery and more discouraging. All we want to do is that feeling of being home. Home hopefully where we feel that safety, support, and familiarity. Home not just as a place (geographically), but as a feeling and a thought inside of us.
I was in grade school and middle school when we would cut wood out in the forest. I really didn’t like to do it very much. We got up early 4 AM (early to me) to get the “very best wood” (or so I was told).. We would drive sometimes for over an hour out into the middle of nowhere only to find that the other wood cutters were there already cutting the best wood (yea, those guys), and did I mention that it would rain. We would pull logs out of piles of slash heaped up after logging operations were over. The whole time I dreamed of being home rather than standing in the rain breathing chain saw exhaust with freezing feet. Feel sorry for me yet? 😉 …poor kid. Wanting a place to be and feel home runs thru us from our basic neurology to our profound spiritual desires.
Our pursuit of that feeling can lead us to make some really healthy choices and some really poor ones too. This writing is not about how to make poor choices because I think most people can figure that out on their own. It is an encouragement to make choices that steer our lives from adversity into the best relationship that we have with our Creator. The word that I choose to use is home because it is the best word that I can relate to in this experience. In my story and maybe in yours, the road home has been cut into by the raindrops of life.
Struggles with feeling home didn’t start when I got cancer, although cancer was the downpour that really made one of the deepest furrows in my life road. My feelings and thoughts were in flux in the financial struggles, the death of close relations, and the underlying dissatisfaction with where my life was before I was diagnosed. One rain drop I could endure, one shower of rain I could recover, but this felt like the mother of all storms furrowing deeply into my life and making the road ahead seemingly impassable. The winter of life seemed forever at that point in so many ways. Here I was 39 years old and diagnosed with lymphoma, a wife, 3 children, 2 jobs and a very old cat. The day really did seem like a February that had went on for a decade. My focus was on the rainy impassable road in front of me always just about Spring, but not quite Spring, and certainly not home. Little did I know that God was changing me to know this home in a more real way then I ever had.
In April of 2012 I knew that things weren’t going too well. Instead of improvement after 6 cycles of chemo I was having new pain in other parts of my body. I had a private practice as a professional counselor and it was declining (and so was I). The truth was that I was tired and burned out. I was working bi-vocationally as a pastor with my lovely wife who is also a pastor ( and working bi-vocationally as well). We were at a small loving Church in Springfield, Oregon. Financially, physically, and emotionally the rain was falling, falling hard, and eroding even more of my road. I called out to God in my office one day and a very still solid voice spoke into my Spirit, “I will take care of you”. I knew that it was April, it was Spring, but it was feeling like February.
In the months and years that have intervened it hasn’t been platitudes or deep sayings that have intervened in tough moments it has been that one or two profound moments when God has spoken in a dark place to create hope, when I was focused on his presence. It has been the gracious words of a believer half a world away saying that their child prayed for me every night when I was sick. It has been Christ’s face in the hundreds of people that showed up to a Papas pizza fundraiser on my 40th birthday. This is not a grandiose or magical thinking kind of hope, but a deep manifestation of his Spirit mystically and profoundly touching my pain and my joy.
In that month of April my practice income fell by 75% and a loving gracious individual at our church handed me a $1000 check and quietly walked away. “I will take care of you”.
God wants us to move into the Spring he has designed for us, but he won’t shove us there, he nudges. There is an interesting passage in the Bible (John 5:6) where Jesus approaches a man that had been ill for 30 years and asks what I used to think was a really strange question, “do you want to be healed?”. Now one would think that after 30 years someone wouldn’t want to be healed, want to be whole, want to change from just existing, even just surviving, to living, and thriving.The assumption is that Jesus was looking for something more in this man then a demonstration of healing, but change of focus, a focus on living not just surviving, a focus on Christ himself and not just on what we get out of knowing Christ. Christ has made his home in my heart and although the rain falls I know that my place and my identity with Him is my home.
Thank you to my God, my wife Daleasha , my kids, Nate, Daisy, and Silas, and all those who have prayed and stood by us when things were tough.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
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