Father Forgive Me, For I Have Sinned Part II

If you’re not familiar with my story, please start here.

Author’s Note:     I need to emphasize that considering the situation, I was handled with MUCH grace.  The following confessions are not intended to paint anyone in a negative light or to shift blame.  I’m just sharing my story, my emotions, and my experiences.

Part Two: Rock Bottom

I left from Pastor Dan’s office on a Monday cautiously optimistic.  Food regained its flavor (and I regained my appetite for it), music sounded musical again, and my heart didn’t drop into my stomach every couple of seconds or so.  Maybe this was the grace that I’d been hearing so much about and feeling on the horizon.  You screw up, you confess, we talk and pray, evaluate, then move on.  It sounded so simple and yet…almost too good to be true.  Hey, I said I was CAUTIOUSLY optimistic, right?

Tuesday morning, I had a spring in my step.  Our Tuesday morning prayer group (a group of about 15 precious men and women that I still stay in touch with) experienced an amazing time of intimate communion with God, and I was feeling pretty great.  I had a productive day in the office, completing the next few weeks’ messages in the series I was teaching in my youth ministry (appropriately enough on the topic of grace), and I was convinced that I had a new lease on life.

4:30 Tuesday afternoon rolled around and I started packing up my stuff and getting ready to head home when I got a call on my cell from Pastor Dan, who’d been out of the office all day.  I cheerily answered the phone on my way out the door, immediately launching into the easy banter that Pastor Dan and I shared.  His tone, however, was serious.

“Have you left the office yet?” he asked.

“Yep,” I said, unlocking my door and tossing my bag in the passenger seat, “just walked out the door.”

“I need you to go back and wait for me.”

My stomach dropped.

“I’ve told the elders what you told me yesterday.”

My stomach was practically on the ground.  My dread intensified.

“We’re on our way.”

I was almost in tears as it was.

“Is this a bad meeting?”

“Well…it’s a meeting.”

Anger swelled up in me.

“I deserve to know what to prepare myself for.  You owe me that much,” my voice cracked.

I felt like such a pathetic weakling, barely able to keep my emotions together and I hadn’t even been fired yet.

“It’s not good.”

And so I sat.  Twenty minutes became forty-five, then an hour.  Pastor Dan was not known for his punctuality.  I am not known for my patience.  I just about crawled up the walls.  Clint was in a lunch meeting with his pastor (he was a youth pastor/worship leader as well) on the other end of the country and of no help to me.  That was the most alone I’d ever felt in my life.  I’d like to say I felt God with me, but all I had was the fragile assurance that I’d done the right thing.

“It’s worth it,” I kept telling myself over and over, “my integrity is worth it.”

The words sounded shallow, even to me.

Finally, they arrived.  We quietly gathered in Pastor Dan’s office.  I was barely holding it together.  My hands are shaking even as I type these words as I remember the ice water running through my veins.  It was fear: cold, hard, jagged fear that gripped me.

“Let’s open in a word of prayer,” Pastor Dan said with a deep breath.

The deep lines etched on his forehead told me this was as hard for him as it was for me.  That didn’t help anything.  The prayer felt obligatory and almost ritualistic.

Just fire me.  Please.  Spare me the embarrassment.

I don’t remember much about the meeting.  There was a good deal of encouragement, a very generous severance package, and more prayer.  I think I was in shock.  I was told to take my two remaining weeks of vacation and rest, reflect, and think about how I wanted to proceed.  When I got back, I would be let go.

“You know,  the economy being the way it is, we probably would’ve had to cut you back to part-time anyway.”

“You did the right thing, Ben.  That’s worth more than gold.”

“You’re called of God, and we believe in you.  We’ll lead you through a process of restoration, and the ultimate goal of that will be to see you back in full-time ministry.”

Each sentence felt like a punch to the gut, driving home the reality that the life I knew was now over.

The next week was a blur of meetings, subsequent confessions, and reassurances that I was honorable and full of integrity.  I couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that I was like an apple that had been dropped on the supermarket floor and swiftly put back on the shelf before anyone could notice.

By the end of the first week of my vacation, I’d had enough of the whole mess.  I packed up my car and drove a hundred miles north to stay with my parents in my hometown of Pearson, Georgia.  Once there, I couldn’t even work up the guts to tell them what was going on.  I just sat and stared at the wall in my childhood bedroom for hours.

I was in a deep funk.  I didn’t return calls.  I didn’t communicate at all with the outside world.  No on had my parents number and I eventually just turned my phone off.  I was effectively off the grid.  My dad sat down next to me on the bed one day and put his hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know what you’re going through, son,” he said, “but you’ve got to face it like a man.”

He patted my shoulder, then left.  The next day, I packed up my car and headed back home.  When  the final meeting came, I was told that I couldn‘t say goodbye to my students or the church, or the staff.  The elders would “take care of everything.”.  I was given my list of requirements and was “released” from my obligations to the church.  I packed up my office and drove away.  I’ll admit that I cried all the way home.

I tried to keep busy, to avoid that lull that one can drift into after being thrown off one’s routine.  All I knew was ministry.  It’s what I’d been trained for, what I’d dreamed of doing since being a teenager.  I was restless.  I started counseling with a wonderful Christian counseling service that I was referred to by my church.  I kept waiting for the calls and the meetings that would begin my “restoration” process.  They never came.  I called.  My calls were not returned.

I was crushed.  I felt dirty, used.  The tenuous hope that I would one day live in my dream again was all but snuffed out.  After those first two weeks, my best friends (thank you JESUS for good friends) circled in close.  Clint called me religiously twice a day to check on me.  My friends Taylor, Alex, Sam, and Chris surrounded me constantly with encouragement.  Taylor’s parents practically adopted me, and I started spending as much time at their house as I did at mine.

That was when I got my life back.  I approached five men that I knew to be godly men of character and integrity and asked them to hold me accountable and disciple me.  I got a job at a local retail store in a management position, and began to settle into a new routine.  I let myself begin to believe that the worse was over, and a very, very small beacon of hope began to stir inside me.  It was three months after my fall that I discovered the beauty of rock bottom:  you can only go up from there.

Next Week:  The Longest Year of my Life

Tweet This Post

Related posts:

1. Father Forgive Me, For I Have Sinned: One Man’s Journey to Restoration (Part 1)
2. Zero Tolerance
3. Small Group vs. Team
4. The Heart of Worship
5. Worship Team Retreats: Why They’re Worth It!