I am writing this on October 16, a good 11 days before it’s due to post. Why? Don’t I have better things to do, like reviewing for my sermon tomorrow or preparing for the Acts conversation next Thursday or getting my research together for my October 31 sermon?
Ordinarily, yes. However, this morning I woke up with a real wrench in all these plans--a voice that once again refuses to work without feeling painful. If you’ve never heard the origin story for this blog, it was to share insights from what I learned from this very same situation back in February. On that occasion, my voice refused to cooperate for six weeks. Six weeks of precious face-to-face social interaction were lost before the world shut down from COVID just two weeks after I recovered. I sincerely hope that it doesn’t take six weeks this time, for a grand variety of reasons. It’s possible this will only be a matter of days, but at the very least, I won’t be able to get treatment until after the weekend. The dilemma is not knowing whether to take the trouble to prepare for speaking appointments that my voice may or may not cooperate for me to be able to do. After all, I still have a sermon about Boaz that I wrote for last February which has not yet seen the light of day. The sermon I wrote for tomorrow (possibly to be delivered by Pastor Paquini from my notes) is all about God’s power as the solution to feelings of human powerlessness. It feels like a sick joke that I was rewarded for affirming God’s power with the one ailment that makes me feel more powerless than any other. Perhaps there’s a purpose to that. I’ve lost my voice several times throughout the years, and they all have lead to some interesting situations I otherwise would not have experienced. When I was in high school I lost it during an evangelistic series/vacation Bible school I was doing in Romania, and it made the locals listen all the more attentively when I got my voice back. The six-week voice loss earlier this year made me downright grateful when coronavirus shut the world down because at least I could communicate again. This blog would not be here without that experience. I don’t know what purpose it serves for me to lose it now, but I have to trust that there is one. The part of tomorrow’s sermon I was especially looking forward to preaching had to do with the book of Ruth. It starts with Naomi feeling so empty about everything she’s lost--her wealth, her husband, and her sons--that she asks to be called Mara, which means “bitter.” By the end of this lovely short book, she holds a baby in her lap who would not exist if all these misfortunes had not befallen her in the first place. That child, Obed, was King David’s grandfather and an ancestor to Jesus. The scary part of being a believer is the knowledge that faith is not always rewarded with pleasant, comfortable experiences. When you trust in God, you are also trusting that He may need to allow you to suffer for things to turn out right in the grand scheme of things. Just as Naomi died without knowing that her loss ultimately contributed to the birth of the Messiah, we may never know what purpose our suffering serves. Where does this leave us in the meantime? We do the best we can with what we have, using the tools we have (and not dwelling too long on the tools we have lost or never had. Then we hold on to hope. We hold on to hope that God will improve our situation, and that if He will not, He will use it for good in the end. Meanwhile, life goes on. I hope my voice returns within the week, but if it does not, I can still write. I can still plan. I can still research and learn. There is hope for the future as well as a task at hand to occupy me. For that, I thank God in His goodness. Update: I have now seen a doctor, and am on voice rest until at least November 4. Surprisingly, the pandemic has made it easier for me to keep working, as more of it is digital than it was back in February. I haven't even had to cancel any events--just speeches I was going to give at them. Special thanks to everyone who is substituting for me in those various speeches, especially Pastor Paquini and Jennifer Merklin, who are doing the bulk of it.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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