Learning My Lesson Again

I'm very humbled and grateful this week for many reasons. One of those reasons is that through the generosity of a couple of individuals, Jeremy Oehring, Darrin Griffin, and I got to go to the Brooklyn Tabernacle Worship Music Conference last week in New York. It was just what I needed in several ways.

There are several other things in my life right now that make my humility and gratitude increase all the time. But there is one thing that happened last week that sticks out to me.

I met with a young man last week who wanted to talk about his soul. He had lots of questions. (His biggest question was about the "unpardonable sin." Google it if you want to see a confusing maelstrom of opinion, dogma, heresy, and fanaticism. It's understandable that anyone would be freaked out about it. Pastor Joe and I talked to him and listened to his story. In the end, we assured him that it was highly unlikely that he had committed blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.)

But after this conversation, the young man came back to my office a few days later and we talked for some time about his desire to commit himself to God completely and break some addictions he was dealing with. As part of this very candid conversation, he revealed that although he had dealt with anger, bitterness, addictions, and other things, he had not been sexually active with the girl he had dated for several months. He said, "She was more than that to me."

This gave me a shock. Here's why.

A few months ago, I saw this teenaged couple together, and I thought, "Well, I've been working with teens for a while, and I know the signs. They're sleeping together." I thought long and hard about this, because I cared pretty deeply for both of them. At the time the girl was much more open to talking to me than the young man was, and she would occasionally ask me to pray for something. I thought I saw signs of her at least considering drug use as well. I was very concerned. So I wrote her a letter. It was a long letter, handwritten. I tried to say in as compassionate and caring a way as possible that it looked to me like she was making some wrong choices in her life, and urged her to reconsider those choices. I finished the letter, and showed it to Cindy and asked for her honest opinion. She very wisely said, "Wow. That's a really heavy letter. Maybe you should sleep on that before you give it to her." I told her that I thought that sounded like a good idea, and we prayed about it together. In the end, the letter sat on my bedside table for a month or so, and every time I saw it I thought about it. I never could find a peace about which way to go with it, so I eventually threw it away.

I've been doing this job for a while, and I think I'm generally a pretty good judge of teenagers. I can usually guess who is doing what, and how clued-in their parents are. But this last week I was humbled because of how wrong I had been. (I wasn't totally wrong - there had indeed been some unhealthy things going on in that relationship, including codependency.) I was also extremely grateful for the wisdom of my wife and for what I believe to have been the leadership of God in not sending that letter, which would probably have closed the door for any future influence in that young woman's life.

Last week at Brooklyn Tabernacle the emphasis was on following the leadership of the Holy Spirit in leading worship. (Not much there on technical aspects of worship music. It was just what I needed.) I've always been pretty cynical of people's claims that the Holy Spirit told them to do this or that. So many times it was obvious to me that He hadn't told them anything of the sort. But I'm so glad that He led me in this situation, and in a thousand others.

I tend to depend too much on my expertise sometimes, or my experience. Then something like this comes along and shows me that I really don't know that much. I'm humbled. And grateful.