What I learned on the sabbatical: control

Let’s do this one more time. I’m really grateful for those who have been reading these posts and then letting me know they’ve been encouraged by them. This is the third and last post about some of the deeper soul lessons the Lord reminded me of during my recent sabbatical, and I pray that this will be encouraging to you as well! There will be some similarities between this one and my first post (about lack of self-importance), but hopefully it’s different enough to warrant a separate article. I want to talk about control.

Our whole month of February was spent in the little Spanish seaside town of Alcossebre, where we had found an incredible deal on AirBnB for a two bedroom apartment. It was technically an “aparthotel”, a hybrid model with longer term stays but hotel-style amenities and staffing. We had never heard of the town before, but paying less than our monthly mortgage payment for a beautiful new place with a patio overlooking the Mediterranean was a no-brainer. Our month there was almost magical. I think we knew it at the time. We knew during that month that we’d look back at that time with incredibly fond memories. As a family, our regular routine was to work in the mornings (the kids with school and me with my writing project) and then to take the afternoon to go for a long walk or hike. But I had my own morning routine, hours before anyone else woke up- one of the benefits of jet lag is that it resets your sleep schedule. I’ve never gone to bed and woken up so early so regularly, and it was definitely a good change. My default morning routine that month was to hit the gym first thing and then go for a long prayer walk along the ocean as the sun rose. 

During those prayer times, one of the recurring themes was reflecting on the previous nine years of ministry at The Bridge. As I thought about some of the ups and downs, the seasons of stagnancy and growth, I came to see how mistaken I had been about my part in much of that. Here’s an example of what I mean. For my first three years at The Bridge, I felt like I was hitting my head against a wall. I felt like I was trying to build a snowman but with snow that refused to stick, falling apart in my hands. I felt like no matter what I did, the church just would not grow. Few newcomers came and many of those that did didn’t stay. And here’s the thing: when I look back at the sermons I preached in those first few years, they were pretty good! I had a fire in me, I had a passion for reading and understanding the Scriptures, and I had a pretty significant capacity for hard work. I look back at those sermons and I think, man, how could the church not have grown? But it didn’t, partly because of circumstances way beyond my control, like where we met. We were hidden away at CapU, a virtual ghost town on weekends. When I was four years in, though, we moved into our new building here in Deep Cove and almost instantly began to see numerical growth. What changed? Not my preaching. It was that we were visible, in a new building in an area that was starved for an alive church. We were also coming out of a pandemic that had shaken some foundations and created a greater openness to faith than had existed before. Again, all of this was way out of my control. If I think about the last few years before my sabbatical, when I’d been weary and sometimes felt like preaching was a slog, I ask myself how the church could have grown. In other words, reflecting on my years at The Bridge showed me that so much of our growth was out of my hands. Obviously, it was all in the Lord’s hands, but He used circumstances that were way beyond my control to bring it about.

Another area of reflection was relationships, particularly some of the conflicts I had encountered over the last nine years. Here, too, I was reminded of how much was beyond my control. My intuitive response in any conflict situation is to blame myself. If someone has a problem with me, it must be 100% because there’s a problem in me. It’s because I’ve messed up, I’ve fallen short, I’ve said something I shouldn’t have. And of course, I do mess up, I do fall short, and I do say things I shouldn’t. But here’s the thing: so do other people. In most conflict situations, the other person is reacting the way they are not just because of what I’ve done or said, but because of their history, their triggers, their disposition and so on. In those difficult interactions, there are circumstances that are actually beyond my control. Paul writes in Romans 12:18, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Those disclaimers are there for a reason, because sometimes it isn’t possible. It doesn’t depend on you. You do your part, but you need to recognize that a harmonious relationship with another person is actually not fully in your control.

And then I thought about my writing project. During my time in Alcossebre, I wrote the bulk of my book manuscript. Writing a book was always on my bucket list of things I wanted to do in my life, but it felt so daunting. Writing that many pages? Having that much to say? How was that even possible? I was so thankful to God that it seemed to come so easily and quickly. I guess it was the fruition of years of study and thought on this topic of church and culture. I was writing a chapter in two or three days at a time. And to be honest, I felt (and still feel) that it’s pretty good. If I compare it with some other published books I’ve read, I actually think it stacks up. It seems, however, that the hardest thing about writing a book is convincing someone to publish or champion your book. Since our time in Alcossebre and up to the present time, it has been a continual subject in my prayers to submit this fully to the Lord. There are things I can do like writing up submission proposals to publishing companies, but there is lots here that is out of my control. I’m a nobody in the writing world, an unknown pastor tucked away in the corner of one of the most secular cities in North America, a pastor without any connections to Christian literature heavyweights. That’s just the fact and there’s nothing I can do to change it. That part is out of my hands.

One of the passages that I meditated on frequently during my sabbatical was Colossians 1:15-20, a passage about the supremacy of Christ. A line that especially stood out was 1:17: “he is before all things and in him all things hold together.” Who holds all things together? Who keeps the world spinning? Not me. Who is before all things? Who is from everlasting to everlasting? Not me. I’m a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow. There are vanishingly few things I truly have control over. And there’s something actually quite freeing about acknowledging this. The modern mantras of “creating your own destiny” and “manifesting your own reality” might sound empowering at first. It turns out, though, that they place on an individual an unrealistic burden that is sure to crush them. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t to say we don’t have agency or responsibility. We’re not victims of circumstances. But to use a popular biblical metaphor that I referred to in a recent sermon, we’re like farmers. We do what we can but we recognize that the harvest is subject to forces way beyond our control. 

Accept your limitations. Accept your humanness, your creatureliness. And rejoice that God is not like us. He holds all things together, He is the beginning and the end, He has supremacy over all things. So the next time I begin to think that the good things at The Bridge are all to my credit or that the challenging things are all to my blame, remind me what I learned on my sabbatical. Old habits die hard, you know?

- Craig