Don’t take it personally.” He was near retirement, a seasoned and distinguished veteran who was about to back off a bit from the sweat and muck of active ministry. He had also been my first boss, a dear friend, and mentor. I had asked him a question: What wisdom do you have to give to those of us who are still in the thick of it? Specifically, how can we persevere to the end, fight the good fight, and finish the race?
“Don’t take it personally,” was his answer. “We’re in a war. When a soldier gets shot at, he doesn’t get his feelings hurt. He isn’t plagued by self-doubt. He doesn’t wonder if this is the kind of work he is cut out for. He doesn’t peer over the edge of his foxhole and shout back, ‘Was it something I said?’ Getting shot at just goes with the territory. Don’t take it personally.”
St. Paul would agree. He says the work of the ministry is a spiritual struggle, but no less lethal for being spiritual. It requires that we put on a kind of armor and therefore assume a certain realism about life. We will be attacked. If not, then what’s the armor for?
In another place, changing the metaphor, Paul says he is in the pangs of childbirth until Christ be formed in his people (Gal. 4:19). Mothers may not like the pangs of childbirth, but I’ve yet to meet one whose self-esteem was wounded because of them.
Grow up–that’s what my friend was saying. Be realistic. Your enemies are many: the world, the flesh, the Devil, and sometimes even Mother Church, in a sense. She doesn’t always soothe and serve milk and chocolate-chip cookies. She can be touchy and demanding. Once one realizes that, her occasional snits and tantrums become a lot less hard to take. It’s burden enough to serve Christ and his now less-than-perfect bride. Don’t add to it the extra weight of feeling betrayed.
That was the perspective that kept my friend faithful in his service through the years. And believe me, he had lots of opportunities to practice what he preached.
That’s one kind of realism: The work is hard, so count the cost before you sign up and don’t be shocked when you are forced to pay.
But there is another, deeper kind of realism that keeps us going. It’s the knowledge that the only lasting reality is not the ordeal of the present but the glory of the future. There is a crown for the victor, a harvest for the farmer, an eternal Sabbath for the laborer. It was the joy set before him that enabled Jesus to endure the cross. Crosses are but for a day; joy lasts forever.
“Therefore we do not lose heart,” exults Paul. “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all (2 Cor. 4:16, 17; italics mine).”
Troubles are actually achievements for this kind of realist. Another friend, a champion wrestler, kept a poster on the wall of the basement where he worked out with weights. It showed a man straining to lift a weight, sweat fairly bursting from a grimacing face, veins bulging on his neck. The caption read: “There are two kinds of pain. The pain of discipline. And the pain of regrets.” That thought kept my friend going when he descended into the depths of that basement to do the painful things he knew would make him a champion.
It also reminded him that reality is not a matter of agony or ecstasy: it is always agony and ecstasy. Hope is the truest grit, the toughest realism. And that, we may take personally.
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Ben Patterson is dean of the chapelat Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Copyright 1994 Ben Patterson
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
