Blindsided by God

Peter Chin

Description

It took thirty years to build Peter's faith, but only three months to knock it down.When Peter Chin moved his family into an inner-city neighborhood to plant a church, he was sure he was doing what God wanted. But in the span of a few months his family experienced a heartbreaking miscarriage, a break-in at their home, a breast cancer diagnosis, and the termination of their health insurance. Why would God allow these things to happen? But God had one more surprise prepared for the Chins: a child, conceived in the most unlikely and dangerous of circumstances, through whom Peter would realize that although God's ways were wild and strange, they were always good.Filled with twists and turns, deep insights, and surprising humor, Blindsided by God explores the reality of suffering, the mystery of God's ways, and why, even in the darkest times, there's always reason for hope.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 27 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441265081
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

© 2015 by Peter Chin
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6508-1
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are 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
Scripture quotations identified ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2007
Unattributed Scripture in quotations is in paraphrase.
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.
Cover design by LOOK Design Studio
To my wife, Carol, and to our children, Sophia, Katie, Jonathan, Lucy, and Xavier.
A seventy-thousand-word book might seem like a lot, but it doesn’t even begin to describe how precious you all are to me.
Contents
Cover 1
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 4
Dedication 5
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 11
1. It’s Aspen , Not Old Spice 19
2. Prepare to Be Broken 37
3. Welcome to the Neighborhood 51
4. “It’s Cancer” 67
5. A Drop in Coverage 83
6. Triple Negative 97
7. “He’s Up to Something” 111
8. “I Don’t” 125
9. The Seminary of Suffering 141
10. The Mulberry and the Wisteria 159
11. A (Minor) Miracle 177
12. Nothing Can Hinder the Lord From Saving 191
13. Not Just Higher— Better 209
Epilogue: “What About My Happy Ending?” 223
About the Author 237
Back Cover 238
Acknowledgments
A huge thank you to my editor , Andy McGuire at Bethany House , as well as Jeff Braun . You believed in this book before anyone else did , and held to that conviction even when I was prepared to give up . This book would not exist had it not been for your faith .
Thank you to the congregations I have served over the past few years: Riverside Covenant Church of Washington, D.C., Peace Fellowship Church of Washington, D.C., and Rainier Avenue Church of Seattle. I will always be more of a pastor than a writer, and serving you has brought me deep joy and kept me grounded. Although it may not seem like it, this story is very much your story as well.
Thank you to the ministries and individuals who have helped me gain some sort of platform from which to share my experiences: Christianity Today , RELEVANT Magazine , the Washington Post , NPR’s Tell Me More , and CBS Sunday Morning —more specifically, Katelyn Beaty of Christianity Today , Michel Martin of NPR, and Sari Aviv of CBS. You helped this completely unknown pastor become, well, slightly better known.
Thank you to all the people who believed in me when I did not believe in myself, who kept on encouraging me through repeated rejections and disappointments—there are too many of you to name here. I would have never made it this far had it not been for your kind words and exhortations.
Lastly, thank you to my family. To my incredible wife, Carol, heart of my own heart and my personal hero. To my children, Sophia, Katie, Jonathan, Lucy, and Xavier. Nothing brings me more joy than to see your faces and to spend time with you all. And now that I’m finally done with this book, hopefully I can do a lot more of just that. Maybe we should go to Dutch Wonderland . . .
Introduction
I s this it ? I thought to myself.
I sat in my front-row chair, elbows on my knees, pretending to be deep in thought and prayer—an old pastors’ trick. In truth, I was resisting the urge to look behind me. After twenty seconds of courageous resistance, I finally succumbed and stole a glance backward at the congregation.
Oh, man, is this it ? Ten people?
I took out my phone to check the time: 10:35 a.m. Well, no point in telling our praise leader that she should start late, since we were already five minutes behind schedule. And so with resignation, I rose from my position of false piety to tell her to begin our service. Let’s get this started, I wearily thought to myself. That way, we can just get it over with.
Yes, sometimes even pastors feel this way about Sunday mornings.
The songs we sang that June morning in 2010 testified to the joy and hope that we have with God: “There is joy in the Lord. . . . There is hope in the knowledge of Him.” These were words I had sung many times before with great conviction. But not that day. My lips moved, but my attention was focused on the reality just beyond my peripheral vision: Nearly a year after planting this church, we had only ten people in attendance.
Even though I should have been thinking about God, I found myself doing something far less edifying: comparing myself to my peers. Across the country, I had half a dozen friends who had started churches around the same time I had, and they had more than ten times the number of people attending on Sundays. Their church websites were an elegant ballet of Flash animation and vintage photo filters, replete with liberal use of Helvetica font. Ours looked like it had been created in the 1990s and best viewed with Netscape Navigator. To my coldly logical mind, all of this could mean only one thing: I had failed as a church planter, and as a pastor. Perhaps even as a human being.
As the final song concluded, I plodded to the front of the small ballroom we rented to share the sermon. It was taken from a passage in Luke 7 where Jesus cares for a widow who has just lost her only son. Unlike other miracles in the Gospels, there is no great act of faith by or on behalf of this widow; she doesn’t press through the crowd to touch his cloak, nor is she lowered through the roof by faithful friends. Truthfully, she does not seem to even be aware of Jesus at all. Instead, it is Jesus who takes the initiative to comfort her, not with a grand sermon, but by simply saying, “Don’t cry.” How comforting it is to know that in the moments we lack the strength to come to Jesus, Jesus instead comes to us.
As I shared this, I looked out at our own tiny congregation and saw that widow in many of us: a young woman who had bravely struggled with bipolar disorder since her teenage years and counted every year that she did not commit suicide as nothing short of a miracle; a refugee from Iraq raising her young son while violence consumed her home country; a couple struggling with the loss of a pregnancy, a diagnosis of cancer, and then another miscarriage.
And then my eyes fell on my wife, Carol. She held our squirming younger daughter, Katie, in her arms, while our older daughter, Sophia, sat patiently beside them. Carol was bald. We had shaved her head a few months prior, in anticipation of the chemotherapy treatments for her breast cancer. Even from across the room, I could clearly see the dark-purple circles under her eyes, signs of extreme fatigue caused by those treatments. The chemo devastated her red blood cell count and necessitated regular blood transfusions. She had scars all over: the faint one on her cheek that she had had ever since I had met her thirteen years ago, and one near her neck, from the port through which anti-cancer drugs were pumped into her jugular. And invisible to anyone else, the jagged scar from her mastectomy, a thin seam of pale and shiny flesh that ran half the width of her entire chest.
But what was most striking about my wife’s appearance was her stomach: round and taut, heavily pregnant with our third child. Yes, she had breast cancer . . . but she was also six months’ pregnant. And so my struggle with the meager attendance at our church, as pressing as it was, was not the most serious thing on my mind, not by any stretch. No, I struggled with the horrifying prospect of life without my beautiful wife, and my children without their loving mother, and fear for the health of this precious unborn child who swam in a toxic mix of chemotherapy drugs. Our church was dying, and I was failing as a pastor, but those were the least of my concerns.
I shouldn’t have looked at Carol, not at that moment, and not while preaching. Because when I did, a question shot through my mind so distressing that I forgot where I was in my sermon—what I was even talking about—and stood in awkward silence before my congregation of ten broken souls.
God, why are you doing this to us ?

There are many reasons why it is important to address questions about the terrifying and difficult reality of suffering in human life. There is scarcely a discussion of Christianity that does not at some point broach this topic, and because of this, all Christians must put some thought into this issue. It simply does not do to cast about for right-sounding answers on the spot, because chances are, we will end up sharing something both unorthodox and unhelpful. This can have a devastating impact on others, especially if their faith is just at the point of beginning, or ending.
Moreover, of all people, Christians should understand suffering. From beginning to end, the pages of Scripture are filled with trials and hardships of all sorts, from the fall in the garden of Eden, to the enslavement and exile of Israel, to the persecution of the early church. We place our faith in a Savior who saved humanity through his death on a cross, and we regularly take time to remember that sacrifice through the Lord’s Supper. People who count themselves as followers of the suffering Ser