Today Jim Oliver shares his Resurrection story.
Jim Oliver is Chairperson of the Church Council, a Disciple Bible study leader, a member of the church’s Justice & Reconciliation Team, and a Group Life Minister, coaching and supporting small group leaders.
This is not just a recollection. My experience was extraordinary enough that I wrote it down at the time so I would remember the day.
United Methodists on occasion join in saying aloud John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer. We ask that we may be put to doing, put to suffering, employed for God, or laid aside for God, exalted for God or brought low for God. But how many of us really mean the latter half of each contrasting statement of submission to the Lord’s will? We don’t want to suffer or be laid aside or brought low. A few years ago, as usual, I was praying for just the opposite, for something that seemed positive to me.
We had moved to a new city in 1998, after twenty years at a church we dearly loved. Other churches we visited had little attraction and little talent (or so my inner critic would say) and they certainly didn’t love you the same. A few overdid it with unwanted attention, and at others no one even spoke to us. After four years without a real church home, we moved again–this time to Kansas City and Church of the Resurrection. But two years later, I was still a bystander and was questioning whether I belonged somewhere else. Perhaps I should be at a smaller church where I would be needed, instead of a church with thousands of motivated, highly capable members. Perhaps a church where I knew the people would be better than sitting next to different strangers every week. Finally, in August 2004, I signed up for Disciple Bible Study, hoping to find what God would have me do (my operative assumption being that “doing” is always good).
God’s answer came during Lent in 2005. On Friday evening, March 4th, it came upon me quite clearly and powerfully over the course of a couple of hours that I didn’t need to be always doing something that felt important. I had been “laid aside,” and suddenly I knew I was content with it. I could say the Covenant Prayer and mean it. This was not something I figured out, but a soul-warming, transformative lesson from the Holy Spirit. I needed to be taught, and had experienced Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit will help you and show you what is true (John 14:16-17). As this transpired, I was overwhelmed with joy and thankfulness that I had ever been counted worthy to follow Jesus, and to do anything at all for the Lord. God certainly can make do without me, but not vice versa.
It next became quite apparent to me that if I truly wanted the opportunity to follow Jesus, there is no better place to do it than The Church of the Resurrection. In Revelation, John saw in heaven “a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” Jesus does not see strangers, but people he loves and died for. He does not see a church that is too large. His Kingdom is not small. Since that day during Lent in 2005, I’ve seen things differently. New opportunities for service have opened, and God has blessed our family abundantly through this church.
You can pray the Wesley Covenant Prayer during Lent this year by going to http://www.cor.org/about-resurrection/beliefs-and-values/. It is daunting to pray for God’s will to be done so utterly and completely, but God always works for our good, even when it means being laid aside.
