Exposed as a Fraud

TRYING Chapter 8: How brokenness led to my repentance.

This post is part of an ongoing e-book titled “TRYING: Becoming, Being, and Breaking as a Pastor” in which I chronicle my twenty year history as a Pastor.

In today’s chapter I resume the story of when, at 17 years old, I experienced the call of God on my life to go in to ministry. In the previous chapter, I shared about attending a conference in Southern California called SEMP [Students Equipped to Minister to Peers] in which we were trained to do street witnessing. You can read here about how I randomly approached people on the beaches of LA with the question, “If you died today, do you know where you’d go?”

Broken on the Bed

At 17 years old, months before starting my senior year in high school, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I remember crying.

There was that time when I was maybe 8 or 9 and my mom sat next to me on my bed, oversharing things about her and my dad and why they were getting a divorce.

Then there was the time at 16 when I was sitting on my girlfriend’s bed and she told me that, while we were together, she had gone back and cheated on me with her ex-boyfriend.

Maybe there were other times, but also, maybe not. I simply was not connected to my interior world. The gap between my conscious self and my emotions was significant—a gap generated in childhood as a necessary survival technique to protect myself from the chaos, instability, and unhealth of our home.

It’s interesting to me that as I typed out those two memories above they both happened while I was physically on a bed. Which, if you recall from the end of this story, where I’d returned to my temporary dorm room after a day of harassing (I mean, evangelizing) unsuspecting vacationers on Huntington Beach, was precisely were I found myself.

On a bed.

Sobbing.

Utterly broken for reasons I didn’t understand at first.

And then, with a rush of insight the likes of which I’d never experienced before, a truth so clear and piercing bowled me over and immediately explained why I felt ripped in two.