Running My Race: Reflections on Life, Loss, Aging, and Forty Years of Teaching

Running My Race

Reflections on Life, Loss, Aging,

and Forty Years of Teaching

David Alan Black

Energion Publications

Gonzalez, Florida

2016

Copyright © 2016, David Alan Black

Unless otherwise marked, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked ISV are taken from the Holy Bible: International Standard Version®. Copyright © 1996-forever by The ISV Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INTERNATIONALLY. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked The Message are from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scriptures marked as (GNT) are taken from the Good News Translation - Second Edition © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.

Cover Design: Henry & Jody Neufeld

Cover Photo Copyright © 2016, Walter Rossini, rossiniguiding.com. Used by Permission

Adobe Digital Edition

ISBN10: 1-63199-319-4

ISBN13: 978-1-63199-319-0

Print Edition

ISBN10: 1-63199-294-5

ISBN13: 978-1-63199-294-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952607

Energion Publications

P. O. Box 841

Gonzalez, FL 32560

energion.com

To the memory

of the number one woman in my life

and to our children and grandchildren.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Before You Read This Book xi

Marriage 1

Grief 27

Aging 77

Missions 119

Teaching 149

After Words 193

Foreword

When I agreed to write a foreword for Running My Race, I assumed that I would be writing primarily about dealing with cancer, grief, and loss. My wife Jody and I lost our son James to cancer 12 years ago. We have dealt, and continue to deal, with the aftermath of losing a child.

That way of talking about it, as loss, will startle some Christians. We sanitize and uplift our vocabulary, sometimes to the point of lying. I fully believe that James went on to glory. At the same time there was a loss. We still miss James! And yet we live in hope of the joy that God has put before us.

Dave Black misses Becky Lynn. Her long fight with cancer was also part of his race — as is his life without her now. That is certainly a topic of this book. But the book is about so much more.

At its heart, this is a book about mission. How does mission impact your marriage? How does mission change the way you deal with illness and death? How does mission change the way you live with your grief? How does it change the way you work, teach, and live?

Mission has become an unpopular word for many Christians. Some associate it with going overseas and imposing western culture. Others simply find it annoying and wonder why we can’t help people down the street instead of those in other countries. But mission is an essential component of being followers of Jesus. We are, whether we like it or not, a missionary community.

If we live as missionaries, it will make a difference in every part of our lives. If we choose not to be missionaries, it will also make a difference. Most Christians in the west have decided not to be missionaries. If you’re wondering why churches are dying in America, that’s your answer. Yes, there are many details, but those arise out of our refusal to heed the call of Jesus.

There is no option for a Christianity which is not a missionary movement. Christian missionary and Great Commission Christian should be redundant. Jesus was a missionary. He came to this world on a mission. You can’t follow Him without also being a missionary.

There are those who wonder how Dave Black and I came to be such good friends. He’s a Southern Baptist. I’m Methodist. He’s likely to be accused of being too conservative. I’m more likely to be accused of being too liberal.

There are a huge number of reasons why we can get along. We share many convictions:

Scholarship is not about liberal or conservative, but about accuracy and integrity.

We need an educated church. Not an educated clergy, but an educated church. That’s not a matter of seminary degrees but of emphasis on learning about the content of our faith. What we believe matters.

We need to put our beliefs into practice. Apathy is not an option for followers of Jesus.

God comes first in our lives, our marriages, our business, and all our activities.

The core reason, however, is that we both believe in the Great Commission. It’s the mission of the church as a whole and of every member. Your personal call may be down the street or around the world, but surely as you have been saved by grace, you have been called as a minister of that grace to others.

In this book you will learn how a good-news-driven person handles hardship, loss, and grief, and how you can find joy in all circumstances. You’ll see an example of living your life honestly, in public, as a witness. It’s a Great Commission book, which should be synonymous with it being a Christian book.

Let the Holy Spirit speak to you as you experience these words of witness to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. I suspect the call you will hear will not be easy, but it will only be by hearing God’s call — the call to your mission — that you will find the strength and the joy that you need to live an abundant life that also includes a life with hardship, grief, and loss.

Before You Read This Book

Dear Reader,

I’m so happy you’re here. My guess is that you found me through my other books or by reading my blog. This book is the story of my existence — a meandering spiritual voyage through the beautiful loud crazy called life. Hand to the heavens, I never set out to write Running My Race. I owe its existence to my friends, my family, my tribe, my community (you know who you are!) who wanted me to look back and look around and see that I’m part of a big and glorious story — a story much bigger than my career and my ministry and even Becky’s death. Since that fateful November day in 2013, I’ve come to know Jesus, deeply and intimately.

What has He been teaching you, Dave? you’ve asked.

We need your voice, your experience, your talents, even your struggles. Hence this book.

Like many of you, I’m an incurable optimist. I believe in the beauty of what is possible, even if it is only partial. Running My Race is for folks who want to be there but who aren’t there yet. At the age of 64, I’m a blessed man. But to be alive and responsive to the world, I must never stop learning what it means to be fully human. The words you are about to read originated in the trenches of the messy business called life. I’ve discovered that even death itself is merely a doorway into deeper relationships as we work through our grief and find the solid reality of divine truth. Running My Race is a book for people who are done with falsehoods and play-acting in the midst of life’s daily contradictions. Jesus alone understands our circumstances, our seasons of life, our vulnerabilities — which means that He alone gets to direct our lives. The key is that we run the race that He has set before us (Hebrews 12:1). He knows what we need and what we can’t handle.

I am suggesting this, friend: Find out who you are, and run your race. Not all pastors are alike. Not all teachers are the same. Children of the same parents are often total opposites. Thank God for the differences! I can say with some confidence: If you find God’s will for your life, you will be happy and content. Then you can begin to work with other happy and contented people to accomplish something great for Jesus. Church, we are all on the same team. That includes you house churchers and you traditional churchers. That includes evangelical Baptists and evangelical Methodists. We are cross-cultural and cross-denominational. We are intentional about overcoming the effects of consumerism (nothing turns off a millennial as much as a preoccupation with our church). The church organization is not central because it was not meant to be. We resist partisan identification as Democrats or Republicans because discipleship requires an abstinence from ego, greed, and selfishness. In Christ’s upside-down kingdom, believers stop being caricatures of their real selves and become real and transparent. We may even begin to change the way we think and act (instead of Halloween is evil we start alternative observances in order to leverage the holiday for the gospel). We lead with love, not with doctrine (yes, I love doctrine, but love comes first according to 1 Corinthians 13:13). A Christian gets a tattoo or nose ring and we compliment them and let it go. Enough of church-speak and condescending stares. A missional approach to life puts other people first.

Folks, we still need old, traditional, aging churches. But we’ve become flabby and out of shape. We’re sleeping while our communities are floundering. We’ve become homogeneous Christian packs. No wonder the world often maligns and rejects the church. I’m writing for people who aren’t satisfied with the status quo, who are committed to honesty in their homes, their careers, and their failures. It’s rebellious, in a way, to rethink the wineskins — to seek truth and to act out of that reality. But it’s high time we owned our place and let the kingdom break through in every possible way. God is big enough to do this.

When you’re done reading this book, I want you to see your own life as beautiful and special. I know that life is short and that death comes far too soon for far too many of us. But when I finish my race, I want to be found running on full throttle, wide-open and exuberantly grateful for the joys that come from loss and failure and grief, from reaching rock bottom and then clawing back up to the top. I’m a long way behind Becky and all the rest who have so brightly shown me how to run the race of life. As I stumble along, panting to catch up, I find peace and strength in knowing that I trust the same Lord who drew Becky to Himself and will keep on drawing me. It was the Lord who placed in my hands the gift of widowerhood. To walk with Him is to walk the way of the cross. There is a reward, of course — for us 5K runners it’s usually a silly medallion — but it comes at the end of the race. Yet all along the way there are countless joys if only we will taste and see that the Lord is good. Thousands upon thousands of Jesus-followers (I am one of them) have found it so.

David Alan Black

Kailua, Hawaii

Marriage

Good reader, I have to admit I’m scared to death about this topic. I tell you, it can be mighty painful, this losing someone who took away your independence, this person whom God literally joined you together with, immolating you on the altar of love. I feel my lips beginning to tremble just thinking about her. How in the world do I describe her? Well, I’ve decided to throw caution to the winds and give it a try. If nothing else, you’ll see how shockingly gracious God is.

Why Did I Marry Becky?

I married Becky because I was created to be a relational being. That’s why there were Adam and Eve in the Garden. They were not merely two people who knew each other. They were one flesh, and you could no more separate them without destroying both of them than you could separate a sheet of plywood without ripping it to shreds. Marriage exploits the fact that we humans were made for community, for sharing the deep things of life. The act of sex is only a small aspect of this relationship. Becky and I enjoyed, as it were, a hypostatic union involving our whole beings. Above all, thanks to the mercy and grace of God, we shared a common goal in life. The work God gave us to do needed both of us, and we complemented each other like hand and glove, like white chalk on a black board. If she was yin, I was yang. If she was the chili, I was the cheese. If she was the rubber, I was the road. If she was poetry, I was prose. If she was heads, I was tails. Unified ourselves, our main job in life was drawing people together in unity first with their Creator and then with each other.

In the 40 years that I knew her, I never ceased being stunned by her absolute beauty. When I held her head in my lap and moved my hands over her soft, freckled skin, I would drink in all the complexities of God’s creative handiwork. And yet, as complex and beautiful as Becky was on the outside, she was incomparably more beautiful on the inside. Even in death, even at the tragic ending of an otherwise happy story, she was Becky: strong, compliant, totally yielded to her Savior, determined to make the best of it. It was as if she was telling those present in words deeper than sounds, In even your direst needs you can trust our loving Savior. At that very moment, the second she drew her final breath, I knew that her spirit would live on forever in my life, our lives, and that every time I was tempted to twist myself into the narrow box of ego, Becky would be there, pointing the way to the cross.

In 37 years of marriage, we grew more and more like each other. Now if that isn’t scary! Even today I find myself saying things that Becky would have said or counseling my daughters in words that Becky would have uttered. Marriage evens out our differences and draws us into an odd, otherworldly kind of togetherness where you really do become one. This is an overwhelming reality that I’ve had to come to grips with since Becky’s passing. No, I am no longer married to Becky. But I live as though I am, in many ways. I still do not squeeze the toothpaste from the top; I still take out the trash as though she was there reminding me to do so; I still replace the toilet paper so that the sheets roll down and not under; I still wear my wedding ring. It is this unrelenting personalness of marriage that one cannot escape. Just as marriage gives face to unspeakable joy, so it also gives face to unbelievable suffering. Not only does marriage fail to mitigate the struggles of life, it exacerbates them. And just because your spouse is no longer living doesn’t mean that you have stopped being delimited and informed by that other person. Marriage always involves a drastic course of action, not least when one of the spouses dies. It cannot succeed without a complete and utter attitude of acceptance.

Death is the fate of all of us, and should your spouse die before you do, you dare not harden your heart or let your love grow cold. There are still many others who depend on your loving faithfulness, your constancy, your selflessness, your support, and your resources. You are no longer surrendering all of this to your mate, true, but in a sense you are surrendering it to others in her honor, in her memory, always with her presence and influence in the back of your mind. Just as you and your wife, bound together in pure love, learned to give away that love, even to give yourselves freely away, so you continue to give yourself away to others, motivated solely by love.

Whereas I could once look with love into the eyes of my wife, now I can look with love into the eyes of my parents, my children, my grandchildren, loved ones, friends, even enemies. That, in fact, is exactly the meaning of marriage. Marriage teaches us that love is the only true power in this world, is the only thing that can truly change lives. More and more, as time goes on, marriage in our society is being asked to stand alone, to become the symbol of righteousness and biblical fidelity, the sole yardstick of the Christian faith, when in fact it is so much more than that. There is nothing in this world less lovely than marriage without compassion, without the ability to enter into the hell of what others are experiencing simply because they do not know what God’s standards are for marriage. Divorce exposes the hypocrisies and falsehoods of modern evangelicalism like nothing else, for while we are condemning others for improper and ungodly commitments we ourselves are failing miserably to pay the cost of total commitment. Marriage, even Christian marriage, has a high dropout rate. This is why Christian marriage is so important today. It says to a watching, hurting world, Just as each of you is capable of being loved by another human being, so each of you is marvelously, radically, sacrificially, and perfectly loved by God.

To be married is to receive a precious gift from God. But it is not the most precious gift He can give us. Even if you should lose a husband or a wife through death (or divorce), He is there, and He will never leave you nor forsake you. Our spouses may leave us, but God never can. Marriage is like that giant California earthquake Becky and I once experienced: it shakes you right off the faulty foundation you established for yourselves and relocates the center of your universe. You begin to say with Paul, For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better (Philippians 1:21). No one else loves us as He does, and we will never find a Friend as true as He.

How to Thank Your Wife

I once got this email:

As I think today of all the people I’m thankful for, you are one of them. I know you are thinking of and missing your Becky today. Know that I am praying for you.

This came from someone I met while speaking at a church. I don’t know this man from Adam yet he is my brother in Christ. I assume he is married. If so, I’d like to say to him and to any man who is reading:

Say Thank you to your wife today. But don’t stop there. Show her the other 364 days of the year that you love her unconditionally. That’s the only kind of gratitude that means anything. For 37 years Becky and I explored what it meant to be truly one. I don’t think there was anything more maddingly erotic than her eyes. Yet as I think about our life together, I realize that it went far deeper than the physical. We each had to come to the realization that the other person was the perfect mate — perfect in the sense that she was the perfect one for me, the one God knew I would need to grow into Him. In marriage we learn to see the other as a precious gift bestowed upon us by God. It should be clear that love and appreciate are for all practical purposes synonymous in a good marriage. When it comes to marriage, therefore, we are faced with a question: Will we accept that the stranger we call our spouse is truly the best gift that God could have offered us outside of salvation? If two people can learn to love like that, then their marriage can survive all the ugly vicissitudes that life will throw at them.

Husband, don’t wait until your wife is gone before learning how to bask in the light of your spouse, in this glorious, maddening, frustrating gift of God, this unpolished gem you get to live with in the midst of all the mundane stresses of married life. I sometimes struggle with the issue of unfinished business between me and Becky. Statements were left unsaid, issues unresolved. Not many, but there were some. Husband, what can you do to finish what is unfinished? For one day you may say goodbye to your spouse. You will miss it all — her presence, her voice, her laughter, her body, her stubbornness. You will cry buckets of tears over her. You will have to adjust to life without your loved one. And saying goodbye is just the beginning.

I guess my message to you is simply this: Husband, it’s all a matter of appreciation and gratitude. God has granted you a precious gift. Accept it, be thankful, and live in the joy of your oneness. You have made the decision to love her, and there can be no reneging. Your marriage is nothing less than the free and spontaneous embracing