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This experience cured me of both naiveté and certain kinds of ambition. It also exhausted our resources. We are just now beginning to recover, 18 months later.

An early step in our path toward wholeness was one-on-one ministry to Orange County, California's homeless population. Jeff and I took jobs at a homeless ministry in the high desert. Our directors had been missionaries in Asia during the ten years that we were traversing the landscape of American evangelicalism. The differences between them and us were startling. Jeff and I were not jaded, but we were marked by grief. We limped—in part because our children were jaded. And we saw disaster lurking behind every craggy rock. Our coworkers walked with a skip in their step, and danger didn't concern them much. This was both liberating and disconcerting.

Every morning, we had chapel in the barn loft, with the sound of cackling chickens filtering through the cracks in the walls and a view of dusty blue hills in the distance. But our sanatorium experience was not to last. We realized that our family needed a respite from vocational ministry, and we headed back home after a few months.

Nevertheless, the ranch was like a dream that refreshed my heart, and God allowed that dream to breathe life into two wounded disciples.

We settled in with a group of Anglican reformers. We were blessed by the freshness of the ancient rhythm of the liturgy, the warmth and joyfulness of the community, the ministry of healing prayer, and the stunningly beautiful Communion rite in which congregants remained connected hand-to-shoulder as they received the body and blood of our Lord. Here, too, our sex-saturated culture intruded, though, and the rector faltered and resigned six months after we arrived. Now we offer ourselves in service to those in the first throes of grief.

I can look at this journey and see a trail of folly. Or I can look back with tenderness and see churches and pastors that taught me all I know about loving Jesus and being loved by him. I choose tenderness because Jesus Christ exists on earth within his sin-damaged band of followers. This is the realization that breaks us—there is no better church.

"Sometimes we endure the judgment of God because we happen to belong to a people or a group that, as a whole, deserves the judgment," CT managing editor Mark Galli wrote recently in a blog post. "Some therefore suffer for their sins, while others suffer for the sins of others. The former is the suffering of cleansing; the latter is substitutionary suffering. Both are redemptive, and thus both can be accepted with grace."

In one of my favorite books, Into the Depths of God, Calvin Miller writes, "The trials that keep us kneeling before our lifelong assignments are never haphazard. All the sufferings that are thrust upon us can serve to bring us to maturity." Then he makes this terrible statement: "Hurt is the essential ingredient of ultimate Christ-likeness."

I remember sitting at lunch one day with the wife of a famous evangelist. As she talked about the church that she and her husband had grown steadily for many years, envy pierced my heart. I wondered why I had known so much sorrow in church. I did not and do not understand it. But I sense a calling not of my own choosing.

And so, with Francis de Sales, I proclaim, "If he is with me, I care not where I go."

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July 2007, Vol. 51, No. 7