When crisis brings conversion
I regularly tell my students that suffering is our best teacher—if we allow it to be. The most transformative moments of my life have been during the deepest crises of my life—the more than two years that Heidi and I were separated, two separate bouts with cancer—both thyroid in 2000 and salivary gland in 2014, Heidi’s experience with ovarian cancer, my diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, and a number of church crises that some days I thought would take me under.
I regularly pray and have done so for years, “Lord, do in my life whatever it is that you want to do to make me who you created me to be.” With the list of crises I’ve just noted, sometimes I think I must be a very hard-headed saint. And yet, and yet…every one of these crises has been a moment of conversion for me, a moment when I was forced perhaps to go deeper in my life with God because as I so often say, “What alternative do we have?” We either go deeper with God or we choose death—which always comes when we abandon God because in abandoning God we are abandoning the only Life there is.
And perhaps that is what the old tent revivals with George Brunk II and others were an effort to do—to bring us to a crisis in our lives and to push us to decide between life and death. And while this message may have been effective for some, the problem for me as a kid was that I was already aware that of the crisis I was and that I was in, and didn’t need to be reminded of any others. What I needed in the midst of my torment, doubts, fears, and insecurities was the experience of a God who was just waiting to save me, of a God who really did accept me “Just as I am,” of a God who was running toward me, of a God who offered me hope every morning when I awoke. But that God alluded me.
The world is full of crises, as much today as in the 1970s when George was hot on the trail of the saints. But what we need today is not a reminder that our lives are a crisis—as David says in Psalm 51 “my sins are always before me”—but of a God who has the answer to every mess we face when we awake each day and whose loving care and grace are going to be enough.
But getting to a point in my life were I am more aware than ever of this loving God, has required crises, has required those moments when the world that I took for granted to be the true, real and best world was broken open by some divine earthquake and everything I took for granted was up for grabs: Would our marriage ever be restored? At 35 years of age and diagnosed with cancer, would I live to see our little boy grow up, would Heidi live beyond five years with a cancer that is so often a death sentence, would I survive one more church crisis? And now, what will my end be like with Parkinson’s Disease and how where am I in this journey? How long will my health hold out? Will I end up with dementia? And on and on. For it is in the moments when life’s answers are most out of reach that some of us finally reach for God.
For myself, coming to know God has required being in a place of needing God. To come to know God I have had to be in crises where the questions overwhelmed any easy answers that so many of the saints wanted to offer. To come to know God I had to walk with God into and
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Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year. His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.
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