Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Romans 12:9-13
The older I get the faster time goes. Yesterday I was a very broken 16 year old. I blinked and I’m pushing 60. The older I get the more I appreciate the depth and purpose of the lessons God teaches me through experience.
Paul is describing the character and qualities of a genuine Christian in Romans 12:9-13. I don’t think the qualities he names can be defined, let alone understood through academic study alone. Rather they must be learned in the context of being transformed and conformed to the image of God’s Son via experiences that God uses to teach us. Given that marriage is the paradigm by which we can best comprehend the relationship between Christ and His church, it’s no coincidence that the qualities Paul names in Romans are also key to a successful marriage. The only valid competition between believers and spouses is in honoring the other. Otherwise, the wife submits to her husband. The husband gives himself up for his wife. Eph 5:22-27 Each submits to the other, thereby growing closer to the other and, by extension, to God.
Blink
Cathy and I met on Kauai twenty-one years ago. February 5th marks twenty truly wonderful years of marriage.
Words cannot describe the genuineness of my love for Cathy. I would go so far as to say that she has taught me what genuine love is. If you told me twenty-two years ago that I was going to marry the most beautiful woman I could ever imagine I would have told you are full of something other than hope.
Blink
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2 Corinthians 12:9
As I like to say, God pruned me down to a stump and fittingly gave me a job planting trees. I was living in my van and emerging from my own brokenness while starting a men’s recovery ministry when I met Cathy in our church. A decade before, the Lord gave her a heart for the incarcerated and a vision for prison ministry. One day, she asked a mutual friend who provided bibles for the local jail how she could get into the jail to minister to the female inmates. He pointed across the room and said,
“Go talk to that guy.”
“That guy” was me.
Cathy and I began going to the jail as ministry partners the following week. Neither one of us was looking for a relationship at the time. Her serial adulterer ex-husband had tried to kill her by choking her at 3am two years before. My serial adultress ex-wife had left me three years earlier. She later died of an opiate overdose. In any case, we quickly became the best of friends. Cathy said I talked better than any of her girlfriends.
Cathy was tougher than any man I knew.
The first recreational activity we did together was a 16-mile round-trip hike to Hanakoa Valley and back on the Kalalau Trail. For the sake of context, the Sierra Club has assigned the Kalalau Trail a difficulty rating of 9 out of 10. Cathy was ten days into a fast when we did it. I remember thinking to myself, “Now this is a woman I can hang out with!” I’d recently Kayaked the Napali Coast on a group tour with a woman partner who refused to paddle. I paddled her dead weight the entire 17 miles. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my friend was trying to set me up with her. Suffice it to say, I was as disgusted as I was exhausted by the end of the trip. The last thing I needed in my life was some high-maintenance, wannabe princess who thought weakness made her attractive.
Cathy I were married nine months later.
But, as it is written,“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him“
1 Corinthians 2:9
Blink
As I look back over the last twenty years, it is abundantly clear that I have learned the most about Romans 12:9-13 within the context of our marriage. We have faced some hard situations through the years. We have remained unified as one flesh through it all.
We both knew we were called to missions before we were married. That mission began with a coed faith-based transition home for furloughed inmates. We lived with 5-10 inmates and sometimes their children for twelve years.
Then God released us to the foreign mission field. We were standing on opposite sides of our bed when we looked at each other and said,
It’s time.
Do not be slothful in zeal took on a whole new meaning!
We were preparing to head to Honduras when the Lord spoke to Cathy. “We are getting ahead of God.” She said. Long story short, I listened and God pointed us to Harvest School. He eventually led us to Honduras. But He had work to do in both of us first.
Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.
1 Thessalonians 5:19-22
I am one to test everything, especially prophetic words. One prophecy in two parts, has been proven valid over time. It was given by a fellow student during our Harvest School in Mozambique. The first part was that our walk together would be like rock hopping across a river. We would hop from one rock to another and wait for the next one to appear. Some of that waiting would be longer than we expected. Check! The second part was a vision of the two of us scaling a cliff.
Each would take turns leading while the other would be on belay. Check! God always leads us together. Sometimes I get the vision first. Sometimes Cathy gets it. We have learned to trust that the other hears clearly. We don’t move until God confirms His word in both of us. It has been amidst the climb more than the river crossing that we have grown in our understanding of
Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.
Blink
Nualolo
Hawaiian Dictionary
A fluttering blaze, a strong place, a ladder, or a bridge.
The Nualolo trail is another one of our favorite hikes on Kauai. It’s just short of an eight-mile round trip, mostly through a rainforest. The first leg is marked by a 2500 ft drop in elevation over the course of 4 miles. To say the trail is muddy and slippery is an understatement. Twenty years ago, I ran it. It’s been nearly 15 years since Cathy and I last hiked it together. We thought nothing of hiking it again on this trip.
Boy were we surprised. We were as tired and sore when we arrived at the Vista as we used to be at the end of the hike.
We still had nearly 4 miles to go. Most of that was straight up. We spurred one another on Rejoicing in hope. “Let’s imagine we are on the Appalachian trail with five hundred miles to go instead of three,” Cathy said.
I was in pain. Cathy was in pain. She was so tired that she could barely manage a slow shuffle at the end. We wondered if we were fighting off a cold or a virus of some sort. At one point I thought I might have to carry her. Still, we were patient in tribulation, and constant in prayer. “Thank you Jesus for strenghting us!” “Thank you for the pain. May we identify with your suffering as you carried the cross for our salvation” It was nearing dark and I was tempted to fear. After all, people, die in the mountains of Kauai. But she pushed through it. We pushed through it. “Good job honey! I am proud of you.” I said as we finally approached the car.
“I think I need to go to the hospital.” She said.
She didn’t. Still, it occurred to me that this might have been our last hike on the Nualolo trail. There are a lot of lasts along the way – lots of transitions in this vapourous life on earth. We deny it when we are young. Alas, understanding comes with the length of days. Job 12:12 The truth is that we never know where or when those lasts will be. On the other hand there have been many times when we thought a chapter was closed, only to have God say,
“HA! Not so fast.
While I suspect that God has more to reveal, Nualolo was a ladder or a bridge – a leaving behind what is past and stepping into a new chapter with the Lord. It was a strong place in that we were forced to abandon our previous reliance on our youthful agility, toughness, and strength and instead prayerfully depend on the Lord for every step. It was a newfound depth of His strength, a fluttering blaze instead of a roaring fire, rooted in patience instead of explosive power. It was painful and confusing in real time.
It is now beautiful in retrospect.
Life is often like that.
Now that we are back in Greeneville we are prepping to do yet another thing we thought we were done doing. We are opening a transitional home on Mary’s farm previously known as The Glory Farm. This time, Cathy was in the lead, and I was on belay. Three years ago she said, “I feel like we are going to be on a farm. Someone is going to ask us to live on the land as caretakers.” “I don’t see it, but ok,” I said. Shortly after that, we met Mary. She saw Cathy and I doing something with the Recovering Hearts women on her farm. “I don’t see it, but ok,” I said. The Lord had some things to teach Mary and others. Two years later, Bradley, our CEO at Holston, called me into his office and told me that Holston had been given charge of the farm. He said he asked the Lord and saw Cathy and me running whatever it was to become. “It’s funny you should say that,” I replied. “I’ve heard this before. “I don’t see it but we will be obedient to the Lord.” “Just pray about it.” He said. I did. The Lord spoke to my heart a few months later.
“Honey I think we might have to open a house for the Recovering Hearts women,” I said.
There is lots of work to be done. But April 1st is the target opening date for a transitional home called
“The Garden”
We will be moved out of our current home on March 1st, which is the exact day we moved in three years ago.
The story of the Garden is already bracketed by more testimonies than I can fit here. Suffice it to say that Cathy and I will embark on another chapter in our marriage and journey with the Lord. While other believers will inevitably seek to honor us, and we hope that we will model what we have learned thus far, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God has us on this particular path because it is the best way to grow our understanding and obedience to His call to
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly (and spousal) affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal; be fervent in spirit, and serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Some Biblical doctrines and principles must be studied. Others can only be learned through experience and practice. Some can be modeled. We hope that we can model Romans 12:9-13 for the women at Recovering Hearts. As for The Garden itself, this is our vision thus far. Stay tuned.