05-Slow, Curve Ahead
V. Slow, Curve Ahead A SUCCESSFUL JOURNEY UPOK OUR MODERN HIGH ways depends much, upon the road signs. The highway numbers indicate the right road. But to be on the right road is not enough. There are also caution signs that must be heeded. Of these one of the most common is, “Slow, Curve Ahead.” A phrase much quoted a few years ago was, “Live dangerously.” It has a proper challenge for us. We cannot be good ministers of such a one as the Lord Jesus Christ and always live easy, placid, safe lives. There are times when “safety first” is the refuge of a craven soul, and when only “safety last” will do. “We cannot, however, abandon ourselves to a policy of recklessness. In life, as on the highway, right going is a matter of considered judgment. The wise procedure is to drive carefully. None of us has reached the point where all warning signs are unnecessary. We all learn best from our own experience. Nobody has ever improved upon the effectiveness of learning to profit by our own mistakes; but we need often to be reminded of our own experience, for it is easy to forget to remember. If mottoes in themselves were effective, this would be a good one to issue with every seminary diploma, with the requirement that it be put above one’s study desk, “Slow, Curve Ahead.”
It is, of course, not for the young minister alone that the ministerial highway is marked with signs of caution. Prudence remains a virtue with which a minister must be on familiar terms until his work is done. “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” None of us is ever any more than a beginner in his task.
When, however, we begin to think in terms of warning signs for a minister’s task, it is hard to see the woods for the trees. There are so very many of them. Which ones shall we single out?
How shall we generalize in a way that shall be constructively critical for us all? My choice of points at which to go slow is naturally not exclusive, for anyone else could easily choose many others.
Caution is indicated in the matter of our hurry, our impatience, our eagerness for results. It is peculiarly a warning for a young minister. He has been through a training in a body of truth and of method. He is prepared to use them, and to believe that if he is only diligent and faithful certain results will inevitably follow. Well do I remember my early efforts with a sermon on Sabbath observance, and after most careful preparation and exhaustive treatment and some zeal in presenting it, how surprised I was that it made no apparent change at all in the Sabbath habits of my congregation. But we never quite get over our expecting too much too soon as a result of our labors. “The Impatience of a Parson” is something more than the title of a good book.
Danger lies ahead. Out of a too-eager expectancy of results are born worry and fret, nervous strain, criticism of others, a disproportionate sense of our own part, and even a lack of trust and faith in God.
Jesus gave us our clue, “First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.” It is too much to expect that we would be able to continue in our task without some fruit for our toil.
It would be silly indeed to sow our seed with no thought of a harvest. But it is just as lacking in sense to expect the harvest to follow overnight.
Perhaps the thing that I am driving at here is really a matter of too great a trust in our own ability and our own methods. When these fail us, as often they do, the consequence is either a feverish activity to find some new method, or we are plunged into a mood of despair. Most of us must admit that, in looking for some final and sure return from some plan of ours, we have often failed to learn the lesson of our fruitless effort, and have only sought the more feverishly for some other human twist of the wrist to bring it about. If we could only hit upon the right stratagem all would still be well! So our ministry descends to the level of a frantic search for some new scheme that cannot fail. And if our failure has not meant a further dependence on the very thing that made for lack of results, it is probable that we have lost ourselves in a blue funk over it all. And it is very easy to get God mixed up in this too, and to believe that, because we have failed, God has deserted us. I don’t know a juniper tree when I see one, but like Elijah I have sat under one many a time. And when things are not going according to our schedule, it is appallingly easy to find fault with somebody else for it. It is the cause of many a scolding sermon. And scolding sermons never did any good except to relieve the preacher’s feelings. Our people suffer enough from our sermons without our using them as a vent for our peeves.
I was once caught up short in this matter by my own child, who, having heard me preach a scolding sermon and noting some more fire in it than usual, said at the dinner table, “Daddy, you sure like to jump on ’em, don’t you 1?” Hambone, the genial Negro philosopher, says, “Pahson ’low dat’s de shepherd’s job to shear de sheep but ’tain’ no need to skin ’em!” The method is suspect because there is just too much self-satisfaction in the process.
It does not make much difference whether our demand for quick returns is the cause or the effect of our lack of trust and confidence in God’s methods; this is really the heart of it. We have been choosing God’s time and God’s ways for him. Our frustration comes because we have been trying to hurry God. We have forgotten that it is not we but God who brings about the result. Whose work are we trying to do, his or ours? I believe that I know what an ideal day in his service should be for me. It is that I should begin it on my knees in earnest prayer for God’s presence and guidance for the day, and that he might help me truly to give all of myself to his work. And after I have done this, I should go about my work with my dependence on him, counting on him, but with true diligence in every effort of my own. And finally, if I have done that, conscientiously given of my best, I should be able to go to my rest at night without fear or anxiety for the day, as I then leave every outcome of the day to him. He is the one that will have worked through me during the day or nothing will have come of it. So why not leave it all to him? Tomorrow is another day. A second caution is in the matter of making an issue of things. It too is, perhaps, a warning peculiarly necessary to young men just beginning their ministry; but it is something to be heeded by us all, all along the way. We deal, of course, in issues of life and death. Matters of religion are vital for time and eternity. The church is the “Bride of Christ”; its purity must be protected.
Questions and practices arise which cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. Situations arrange themselves in a way that compels an adjustment of them. There are times when silence gives consent, and we must speak out. All of which, is true.
There are issues which, if avoided, are as much of a denial of our Lord as was that of Peter in Pilate’s courtyard. But the lines are rarely as sharply drawn for us as we think. Surely it would be a more peaceful world, especially in the church, if more of us were less sure that so frequently destiny hangs in the balance waiting our action.
Generally what we choose to think of as an issue is what we have created ourselves, or so named, because we want so desperately to have a hand in doing something about it.
We ought to want to do something about many things. We ought not to be content with things as they are. There are many things in the lives of our people that ought to be different, as there are in our own lives. There are many things about our church that should be improved. There are official practices and official persons that could well be shaped anew. To be satisfied with the status quo is a mark of unfitness to be a minister at all. Our only hope to be a faithful minister of Christ is to hold his banner high, to march under it ourselves, and fearlessly challenge our people to go with us. But it is one thing to yearn for, and to work for, and to pray for those changes, and quite another to seek to force them by making an issue of them. The zeal of youth often makes its most grievous errors just here. That might be expected and excused because of inexperience and one’s theoretical preparation. But it is almost tragic to note how often this expectation is so fully and literally fulfilled. I have occasion to see and to receive reports about the work of young men beginning their ministerial careers. The most frequent criticism that comes to me is that they want to change everything, and do it right now. They make an issue of things that could be brought about to the satisfaction of everyone, including the Lord, if they would give them time. The other day a church officer asked if it might not be possible to teach the young men in the Seminary what he called a “give-and-take attitude toward the church officers.” He liked and respected his young pastor, but he felt deeply that the young man’s standing on an issue, and holding uncompromisingly to it, was a grave weakness. It is, of course, for any man. We may have our way by forcing it, but the true shepherd does not drive his sheep; he leads them. A pressure that brooks no delay, or the very lack of it, may be a matter of personal temperament.
If I may be pardoned for another personal allusion, I think that I have always been temperamentally unfitted to force an issue. And it used to worry me terribly. I wondered if I was not perhaps woefully weak-kneed about bearing down upon some things which seemed to require just that. I seriously questioned whether I was not something of a moral coward. But it does not bother me any more, and today I am grateful that it is so. Thirty years of experience have given me an assurance that some of the best things that have come about in my ministry and pastoral work have been the result of the things I did not do. A case in point was an outbreak in an officers’ meeting on the part of one man who spoke his mind forcibly and freely in opposition to some proposed action. It was not directed at me personally, though I could have taken it as such, for the proposal was one that I had made. He said that he was through and would leave the church if we voted what was proposed. We dropped the matter, though we considered it an important one. I felt that he had spoken in the heat of some personal feeling and had therefore overstated himself, as I have often done myself. So we did not refer to it then or later. The next day he met another officer on the street who had not been present the night before, and said to him, “Did you hear what a fool I made of myself last night f ’ ’ A month or two later the proposed action was passed with his hearty support.
I once made the mistake of raising an issue with a member who wrote me an unfair letter. He was a doctor whose church membership centered in that of his wife. She was an active worker. The content of his letter does not matter, but it was critical. He had been unwisely approached in a building campaign. I never will cease regretting that I answered his letter calling his attention to what the church had done for him and his, and turning the point of his criticism back upon himself. If I had ignored and forgotten it he might have done so too; but I made an issue of it, and he saw to it that his family broke connections with us entirely. I never had a chance to minister to any one of them again.
Slow I There is always a curve ahead in making an issue of anything. It can always be said that we must not compromise the Lord ever, but it usually turns out that the Lord had little to do with it.
Another slow spot for us ought to be in accepting the fiction that as ministers we are any different from anyone else. The old conception of the minister as a man utterly apart in manner and dress has happily disappeared from the thought of the public, and the minister as well. But he is still deferred to. I am just now spending a week at a delightful auto camp where I can do this writing without interruption. And everybody about the place seems to treat me a little differently because I am a minister. It is rather pleasant and perhaps will do me no harm, unless I begin to defer to myself. Paul says, “I say,... to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think. “ It is a terribly easy thing to do, and it is not the least of the many things against which the minister must guard himself.
People do say nice things about us. Fortunately we do not hear all of the things they say. Kind words are always most pleasant sounds, and we often need them; but we are done for just as soon as we begin to believe all that we hear. Courtesy and politeness toward us are not to be disparaged, but we need to keep our heads about ourselves.
After every service some people say flattering things to us about the sermon. What do you expect them to say? They cannot every one of them make a remark about the weather. There is one form of ministerial discount that is always in order, and that is our own.deductions of the praise that comes our way. If we do not know how little of it is deserved, we do not know enough about ourselves.
Still another place in which to go slow is in actually making an exception of ourselves. The fact that our ministry is concerned with the life of others puts us on the judge’s bench when we ought be standing with others in the dock before the Judge of all. What concerns us about others should concern us about ourselves. Hornell Hart says that he was astounded one day to have his daughter say to him, “Father, do you know that you are an awful problem to me!” He says that he had so concentrated on the psychological problems of youth that it had never occurred to him that in the pattern of life.for his own family he was not excepted as a problem. A young woman said to her pastor: “You know, what I like about you is that in manner and in speech you do not set yourself off from us. I notice, for instance, that you never say ’you’ but always say ’we.’ “ To which, her pastor replied, “To tell you the truth, ’I* and ’me’ give me so much trouble grammatically that I find it safer just to say ’we.’ “ We do, of course, share all of life with our people, and the degree in which we manifest this both in manner and in speech will determine how far we can lead them. It is said that Father Damien one day began to use the words “we lepers.” He had discovered that he himself was a victim of the dread disease. And from the day he was able to say “we,” his ministry began to be truly fruitful.
If we begin to make exceptions of ourselves, there is no longer anything we can learn from our failures and the buffeting winds of adversity.
There is a hymn which says, Blest be the sorrow, kind the storm, Which, drive us nearer home. Our great Atlantic liners have been in the habit of making record runs from European ports to New York City. Such records are, however, always made in fair weather when not the least thing goes wrong. But ask the captain, and he will tell you that his ship and crew are tested not by their smooth runs, but rather by those in which, through buffeting gales and mountainous seas, the vessel is at last brought safely into port. Some day the storm hits us in the failure of a cherished hope or project. Have we weakened ourselves by making exceptions of ourselves? Can we take it? This is our test. Can we sail our boat in a storm? Are we ready to admit that life for us is cut out of the same cloth as for our people? Then, and not until then, will we have the first faint likeness in our ministry to him who said that he came “not to be ministered unto, but to minister. ’ ’ When driving in mountainous country and following the curves of the road for a long distance one often comes upon an official sign reading, “Caution Winding Road.” I have often commented to myself, “What do they think I’ve been driving on up to now?” The sign seems to be utterly superfluous; but doubtless it is useful as a reminder that there is more ahead, so do not grow careless. Our ministry is on a winding road with curves aplenty. Someone has said that a rearview window is a good thing to use on the highway of life, especially when making a left turn.
It is equally true that our forward progress will be determined by the use of our brake as we come upon the many signs that read, “Slow, Curve Ahead.”