The Prodigal Roamer-Thoughts From the Frontier

On the night of February 5th, 2008, a EF-4 tornado struck the campus of Union University. It destroyed a majority of the student residential complexes and caused damage to numerous other buildings on campus. The above picture was taken right outside of my dorm, my car was in that stack of cars. It’s been 2 years since that night and we have rebuilt and come back stronger than ever. I would like to reflect a little bit about how God used to the tornado in my life.

Page found in the rubble containing James 1:1-8

When the tornado hit, I was at the lowest I had ever been in my life. I was discontent with the Church, I was discontent with Union, and I was fed up with God. I was incredibly close to walking away from my faith altogether. I woke up on Tuesday morning and had no idea what was coming that night. In Jackson, we regularly have severe weather so no one thought anything of the dark clouds moving in by mid-afternoon. At around 6:00, my roommates and I were in our living room watching TV when we saw a tornado touch down in Memphis, about an hour and a half west of our campus. We knew our building wasn’t too sturdy so we decided to go to a safer building on campus to work on homework and wait out the storm. I remember as I grabbed my books from my bedroom pausing for a second at the door and looking back in with an odd sense that I wasn’t going to see it again. Around 6:55 the electricity went off. We were sitting in complete darkness listening to the haunting sound of tornado sirens. We walked outside to see the lightning. We were 18 and invincible and no one thought the tornado would actually hit us. A security guard ran up and told us to get inside to a room with no windows. We laughed because we figured he was overreacting. At 7:02 every door in the building was sucked shut at the same time and the candle that was lit in the student lounge was extinguished. Someone whispered, “I think we just got hit.” We all walked slowly into the hall and noticed the shattered windows. The next thing we heard will be forever burned into my mind. The same security guard from earlier ran up and urged us to start calling 911, “The girls dorms are down and there are still a lot of girls inside.” My stomach turned. I suddenly didn’t know who was alive, if I was ever going to see some of my friends again. I left campus in a car with someone I didn’t know, to this day I have no idea who took me to their house. I was still clueless about how many were dead, who I was going to see again in class, if we were even going to have class, and still ignorant about the extent of the damage. Everyone else in the house went to bed. I laid on the couch all night, unable to sleep, and watched local news reports about the damage. I found out that everyone had been accounted for and that not a single person was killed. A miracle to be sure.

Relief worker among the ruins of dorms.

The next morning I walked on campus wearing a borrowed sweatshirt to try to get to my dorm and get some of my stuff out. We were informed that the dorms were unsafe and we weren’t being allowed on campus. I could see the dorms from where I stood at the guard shack and was shocked into silence. My mom drove to Jackson to pick me up. On the drive back to Nashville a leaf hit the windshield and I remember being convinced it was going to come through and kill me. I ducked to the floor. I think that’s when I realized exactly how traumatized I was. To this day, when the wind is a little more than a breeze I still get insanely nervous.

For a few months after the tornado I got incredibly mad at God. I blamed Him for everything that had gone wrong in my life and wondered why instead of getting a break, I lost everything in a tornado. I finally got to the point where I was going to leave it all behind when I read these words, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” I began reflecting on the life of Paul, the man who wrote those words in Romans 5:1-5. I realized how much more suffering he endured than I had. I realized that he was able to come through it all with a trust in the sovereignty of God. That night I decided that I needed to begin taking my faith seriously and that I needed to trust God the way Paul had. Paul says in Romans 8, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” He even uses things like tornadoes for our good.

Without the amazing leadership after the tornado of Dr. Dockery, Union's president, I don't think we would be where we are today.

Two years later, I’m able to look back at February 5th and see God’s providential hand guiding me towards Himself. I never thought on that night that I would be praising Him two years later. I never thought that I’d see Him in the midst of devastation. I never thought that I would love Union University as much as I do now. I know now that He was using something like a tornado in hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways for students all over Union’s campus. For me, he was calling a prodigal son right back into His house. He was making sure that I knew He loved me, and making sure that I was relying on Him completely rather than temporal things around me.

In the weeks after the tornado, Union University’s rallying call came straight from the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, “We do not lose hope.” The entire passage says, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

I know that I am still far from the man that God has called me to be, but I know I am even farther from the man I was becoming two years ago thanks to 2/5/08. And I will never stop praising my God for that grace.

I’ve had a lot of questions about how my step-dad is, this seemed to be the easiest way to communicate with everyone.

Some of my readers will know that my step-dad was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer about a year and a half ago. We’ve been fighting the cancer hardcore ever since. Tom has had surgeries and been on 4 different chemo treatments. In the past couple of weeks, he has rapidly deteriorated. About 2 weeks ago he stopped eating. When he went to the doctor, we were informed that once the cancer reaches a certain stage it starts cutting off signals to the brain that tell it that the body is hungry. We were told to “prepare ourselves.” When doctors tell a family to prepare themselves, it’s not a good thing.
Saturday night, Tom was in an enormous amount of pain. My mom had been trying to get Tom in to see a doctor for 3 days but kept getting the run around. She finally got fed up and rushed Tom to the E.R. He was running a 104 fever, deadly for an adult. It turns out that Tom had a staph infection. We were informed that staph infections will kill you at day 4. Tom was on day 3.

After treating him with antibiotics, they are thinking that they will have to do surgery to clean the infection out. In the midst of all of this, they performed an endoscopy and discovered that Tom had an inordinate amount of acid in his stomach. This accounted for why he had not been able to eat.

All of this has somewhat turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He’s been weak because he was fighting off an infection we didn’t know about, he couldn’t eat because he had so much acid in his stomach. While the cancer is far from being healed or far from being okay, it may not be nearly as bad as we were led to believe by the doctors.

We are far from being out of the woods, even with the infection, but things aren’t nearly as dark as we thought they were just a few days ago. Tom is struggling, all of my family is struggling. Please be praying that Tom will be healed of this infection and that he will be able to eat again, and please be praying for our family as we continue this battle.

Today happens to be one of my favorite holidays, and no I’m not talking about Halloween. On October 31, 1517 a priest named Martin Luther changed the course of Christianity by nailing his 95 theses to the door of the church of Wittenburg. This is incredibly important for anyone who is a Christian, and these theses should be continually re-examined and studied. I won’t go into all of the theses here, however I will briefly speak of the five solas of the Reformation.

Sola Scriptura
Scripture is the only inspired Word of God and the only source for Christian Doctrine. We do not look to man to create new Spiritual laws, nor do we look to new books to define what our Doctrine is. Our authority is Scripture.

Sola Fide
Justification is received by faith alone, not through our works. Luther struggled with this doctrine quite a bit, even going so far as considering removing James from Scripture since it seemed to preach a works based salvation. While works don’t justify us, the believers life will be marked by good works.

Sola Gratia
Our salvation comes only because of God’s unmerited grace. We are bound by our sin and are only capable of being saved through the grace that God gives.

Solus Christus
Christ is the only mediator between God and man. He is our great high priest who intercedes for us before the throne of God, there is no need to pray to saints or have priests intercede for us.

Soli Deo Gloria
God alone is worthy of glory. All that we do should bring glory to Him since He is perfect in every way. Man deserves no glory because we have infinitely offended God.

This is a very brief overview of each of the “solas” of the Reformation. Meditate on them today and ask yourself if our Christianity today reflects these. Also, keep in mind another cry of the Reformation, Semper Reformanda, or Always Reforming. The Christian life is one of continual repentance, and through our repentance we should continually reform our churches and our lives. I thank God for men like Martin Luther and the other Reformers who literally risked their lives for the sake of the Gospel.

I am terrified.

When unexpected things happen in my life, my first response is inevitably fear. This week, two things that were very unexpected happened in my life, one was very good, and the other was not so good and my response to each was the same: I let myself be overcome with worry and fear.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is that I do not trust God. My fear is my response to the situations in my life and my feeble attempt at controlling them. I can speak of the sovereignty of God all day, but I live as if God had no control in my life.

Proverbs 29:25 says “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” I lay a trap for myself, and I always fall into that trap. When I begin to let myself fall into fear I will always become self-absorbed and shut myself off from everyone around me. I will always go to the worst possible scenario and convince myself that’s what will happen. And worst of all, I shut myself off from God.

One of the most beautiful verses to me is 1 Peter 5:7 where Peter tells Christians to cast all their anxieties on God because He cares for us. Even when we are prideful and anxious and trying to run our lives instead of letting God direct us, He cares for us. He desires for us to trust Him fully and throw our worries to Him, not because He’s angry at us for worrying, but because He cares for us. How beautiful! The God of the universe cares about us enough to desire us to cast our fear to Him so that He can comfort and sustain us.

I want to trust God. I want to overcome my fear. God help me.

Every other Monday at City Fellowship we have a men’s Bible study where we delve into the Word and discuss what it is to be a Biblical man. This past Monday, Lee Wilson said something that really sparked my thinking.

“Every man needs a father.”

All men have fathers, for better or for worse. Some of those fathers misuse their authority as a father and cause brokeness in a young man’s life, be that by abuse or abandonment or what have you. So what about those boys?

My first thought was that not all men need fathers. I haven’t had a father in years. I feel like I’ve turned out okay. But the more he unpacked what he meant, the more I realized he was right. Lee went on to say that American men lack a definite age of adulthood, we don’t have a certain rite of passage we go through to become men so what tends to happen is we look to a “father” for validation of our manhood. We want to be told that we are on our way to becoming men, that we are doing manly things, that someone is proud of us. And the more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realized that Lee was dead on. Men need that validation from someone they see as a man.

One of the most meaningful things that has ever happened to me is when I got a text message from Lee that said someting along the lines of him being proud of me the way that a father is proud of his son. This was validation of my manhood, validation that I had come from the depths that I was in when he first met me and had become a man who was pursuing God.

One of the most beautiful things about the Gospel to me is that God is our Father. That He is the Father I didn’t have, that He loves me and treasures me as a son. I’ve never felt good enough for my dad, but God loves me despite my imperfections, and I never have to feel like I’m not good enough for Him.

I praise God for men like Lee, men who have seen a broken boy who seemed beyond redemption and have decided to pour into that boy and help him on his way to becoming a man. I praise God for men He has raised up to be “fathers” to those who are fatherless, and I pray that I can be that man for someone one day, and I pray that I can be the Godly father I am called to be to my children one day.

I’ve had this blog for awhile now but I wanted the first post to be something meaningful, something profound, something that would immediately hook all of my readers and have them constantly checking to see if I had updated. I’ve thought of quite a few things I wanted to write about but none of them really stuck out. Then I came to this realization: If I am writing a blog to bring myself glory, to get a lot of readers, or to impress people then I do not need to have a blog. In all things I do I need to work to glorify my maker and savior Jesus Christ. So my prayer for this blog is to not think of myself as a brilliant student of theology or as a popular blogger (with maybe 4 readers) but to be a humble servant of God.
So, with that being said, welcome to my blog. I titled it the Prodigal Roamer because that’s what I see  myself as. Prodigal means having or giving something on a lavish scale and to roam is to move about or travel aimlessly or unsystematically. That’s what I feel like most of the time, a man who was gifted with an extravagant amount of grace who randomly wanders around in search of many things. Sometimes I wander in search of Truth, other times I wander in search of God (as if He ever leaves my side) and I usually find something along the way. I’ve found that my wanderings are not as random and aimless as they appear, but are being mapped out by God as He teaches me His ways and helps me see the word of the cross while I am being saved (1 Corinthians 1:18).

This blog is to share with you the things God is teaching me, to show the not-so-random paths God has me wandering, and to invite you to wander with me and discover the riches of the glory of Christ.