Pastor Ben's Testimony

I don’t have the testimony that so many of us sometimes wish we had, the earth-shattering, mountain-moving, undeniable story of God reaching down into the deepest pit and rescuing someone from an addiction, an abusive situation, or an incredibly traumatic event that completely changed the trajectory of their life. Those testimonies are absolutely amazing, and I love hearing them because there is something incredibly powerful about listening to someone tell the story of what God did when their circumstances seemed completely impossible. But I also think that sometimes those of us who don’t have that kind of testimony can quietly begin to believe that our story is somehow less impactful, less meaningful, or just less of everything, because we haven’t experienced the kind of dramatic rescue story that makes everyone in the room sit up and listen.

What I am learning, though, is that the power of our testimony isn’t ultimately found in how dramatic our story is, because the power of our testimony is found in who our story points to, and every one of us has a story that can point somebody else toward God. I know there is at least one person, and probably far more than I realize, who can look at some part of my story and say, “I’ve been there, I’m there right now, or maybe that’s where I’m headed.” And if God can use something He has done in my life to encourage somebody else in theirs, then my story becomes part of their story as well. Maybe that’s what makes a testimony powerful in the first place, because it isn’t ultimately about proving how extraordinary our lives have been, but about showing how faithful God has been in the middle of whatever our lives have contained.

When I look back over my life, the first thing I have to say is that I have been incredibly blessed. I had a wonderful mother and father, a beautiful little sister, and what I would describe as an amazing childhood. Looking back now, I realize that we really didn’t have a lot, because my parents chose to live pretty simply and frugally, but I never knew that, because I never felt deprived or like I was missing anything important. From the perspective of a kid who didn’t know what things cost or what other families had, life was just good. We had each other, we had a home, we had laughter, and I had parents who loved me, and when I look back now, I realize just how much of a gift those ordinary years really were.

Church was also a part of my life from a very young age, although I can’t honestly say that it was there from birth, because there was a period early in my childhood when church and a relationship with Jesus weren’t necessarily at the center of our priorities. I remember that period, but I also remember that it didn’t last very long. Before too much time had passed, faith had become a very formative part of our family and of who I was becoming. I didn’t understand at the time just how important those early years would eventually become, but now, looking back, I am incredibly thankful that the Lord was beginning to plant those things in my heart before I ever understood how badly I was going to need them.

It wasn’t long after that when my six-year-old sister, Noel, was diagnosed with liver cancer. My family was told something that I still have difficulty wrapping my mind around even after all these years, because we were told that she had an amount of cancer in her six-year-old body that was beyond a level they would have expected to see in someone in their thirties or forties. She fought so very hard for a little over a year, and during that time our family learned what it meant to live in a world where you can pray for something with everything you have and still not receive the answer you desperately wanted. Eventually, on Valentine’s Day in 1990, we lost my sister, and she was only seven years old.

As you can imagine, losing a seven-year-old daughter sent my parents reeling, yet when I look back now, one of the things that stands out to me more than almost anything else is how my mom and dad continued to care for me and continued to be a source of comfort and stability for me even when their own world was anything but comfortable or stable. They were grieving the loss of their little girl while still trying to make sure their son was okay, and I don’t think I fully understood, and probably still don’t, what that required of them when I was twelve, but I understand it much more now as an adult, especially now as someone who has experienced enough loss to understand just how difficult it can be to keep showing up for somebody else when your own heart is breaking.

Then, a year and a half later, everything changed again, and this time it happened so suddenly that there wasn’t even time to prepare for it. It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1991, my dad was outside playing touch football in the yard with me and some of my friends when, at forty-four years old, he suffered a massive heart attack. I was fourteen years old, and I still vividly remember trying to revive my dad with CPR, the very CPR that he himself had taught me and made sure I knew how to perform. There is something incredibly surreal about being a teenage boy who is suddenly trying to use the very thing his father taught him in an attempt to save his father’s life.

We lost my dad that day, and honestly, I don’t think my testimony would be complete if I didn’t tell you about something that happened that night. Although I recognize that dreams are strange things, and I understand why someone might hear this and think, “That was just a dream,” because dreams can be difficult to interpret; you can have a dream that feels incredibly meaningful, deep, emotional, and impactful, and then thirty seconds later find yourself eating a slice of pizza that is talking to you while you are running away from a hippo from the movie Jumanji. However, I remember the dream I had that night with an incredible clarity that has stayed with me for more than three decades.

In that dream, my mom and I were sitting in the living room, me in the spot where I always sat and my mom in the spot where she always sat, and then my dad walked in from the kitchen carrying his typical evening snack, an RC Cola and a MoonPie, just as he had done countless times before. He came over and spent time talking to my mom first, and then he came over and talked to me. Our conversation was incredibly ordinary; we talked about sports, about the house, and about life in general, which is probably one of the things that made the dream so powerful to me, because nothing about the scene seemed extraordinary or supernatural, it simply felt like my dad was home and we were sitting together again like we had done so many times before.

Eventually, the conversation came to an end, and my dad told me that it was time for him to go, and he told me that he loved me. I remember pleading with him, almost begging him to stay, because I wasn’t ready for him to leave, I wasn’t ready for life to be what it had suddenly become, and I certainly wasn’t ready to become the “man of the house” when I just desperately wanted him to stay. I asked him if there was any way that he could stay with Mom and me, and in the dream he told me that he could, that he could stay there with us and that we could continue living life together, just as we had tried to plan after losing Noel.

Then he told me what that would require, because in order to stay with us he would have to leave heaven, he would have to leave being with Jesus, the very place where he had spent so much of his life hoping he would one day be. Something about that conversation changed everything for me, because suddenly I understood that although I desperately wanted my dad to stay, I didn’t want him to give up what he had spent his life hoping for just so that he could come back and make my life easier. So I remember telling him that I wanted him to go, that Mom and I would be okay, and that somehow we would figure it out.

And somehow, we did figure it out, although I want to be honest enough to say that it wasn’t always pretty and it wasn’t always the greatest solution, the greatest decision, or even the greatest step forward, because we moved around, we bounced around, and we spent a lot of time simply trying to figure out how to land on our feet. One of the things my mom and I have always talked about looking back on those years is that we probably made a mistake when we became distant from our church family after moving away from the community where we had been so connected. Neither of us stopped believing in the Lord and neither of us stopped thanking Him for His faithfulness, but there were certainly seasons when we weren’t necessarily living for Him the way that we should have been. Even in those seasons, however, God’s grace continued to carry us.

My mom and I used to joke that during those years we basically raised each other. We survived junior high, we survived high school, and we took turns trying to figure out how to navigate life with just the two of us. But as much as we joked about that, the truth is I have always meant it when I have said that my mom becomes more of my hero with every passing day, because she didn’t just lose a child, she lost a husband, and she experienced both of those losses within a year and a half of each other, yet somehow she found the strength, determination, and stubbornness to keep herself together and raise a teenage son who, by the grace of God and her hard work, turned out at least halfway decent.

I met my wife, Kim, shortly after high school, and together we began building a life and a ministry journey that would eventually take us through multiple states and several different locations. Somewhere along the way God gave us a beautiful daughter, Rachel, who, by the way, was born on Noel’s birthday. My mom called Rachel her angel, and she saw her in some ways as a second opportunity to experience things with a daughter that she never got to experience with Noel. Watching my mom love my daughter and watching their relationship develop became one of the great gifts of my life.

Then, somehow, through no qualifications, through no earnings, and certainly through no deserving on my part, God brought me to where I am today. There have been plenty of moments when I have been one of the most unqualified and undeserving men to stand in a pulpit and talk about God’s grace and provision, and yet God has placed me in an amazing church, a church that is growing, active, and filled with people who love Jesus. I still wake up many mornings almost having to pinch myself because I genuinely look forward to seeing what God is going to do that day. I know how fortunate I am, especially because I know that a high percentage of people in ministry and a high percentage of pastors don’t necessarily get to experience what I get to experience moment by moment and day by day, and I never want to become so accustomed to God’s blessings that I stop recognizing what an incredible privilege it is.

I remember how proud that made my mom, and I remember how happy she was to see her boy with his wife and his granddaughter, serving as a pastor in a wonderful church surrounded by incredible people, and doing it all in our hometown. There is something about that particular part of the story that I still have difficulty putting into words, because when I think about where we started, losing Noel, losing Dad, my mom and me trying to raise each other, and then somehow ending up with my wife, my daughter, a ministry, and a church family in the place where we grew up, I can only look at that and recognize that I could not have written that story myself.

Then, on January 2 of this year, I lost my mom. Mom had been dealing with serious health complications for several years, and eventually her health declined to the point where there really wasn’t much more that could be done. Losing her was incredibly difficult, especially because she had been such a constant presence throughout my entire life, from being the mother who helped raise me after we lost Dad to becoming the grandmother who absolutely adored my daughter. But even in the middle of that loss, God gave us something I will always be grateful for, because Rachel was living in Hawaii at the time, and we were able to get her home so she could spend those final weeks with her grandmother. She had actually been scheduled to fly home on January 3, the day after Mom passed away, and the night before Mom died, Rachel sat beside her and braided her hair, they bickered back and forth the way they always did, they laughed together, and they shared a bag of Funyuns. Those are the details that have become precious to me, because even in the middle of something incredibly painful, God gave us moments that were still full of life, laughter, and love.

When I look back over my life, I can see that God has continued to shape my story, and if there is a recurring theme in that story, it would probably be unexpected loss at certain moments along the way. I don’t say that as though I have experienced more loss than anyone else, because I haven’t, and I don’t want to portray myself as some kind of victim or as someone whose losses have somehow been greater than the losses other people have experienced. Loss is part of living in a broken world, and eventually every one of us will experience it in some form, but what I can say is that God’s faithfulness to me in those seasons has shaped me into the person I am today.

And when I think about my testimony now, I don’t think the most important part of it is that I lost my sister, or that I lost my dad, or that I lost my mom, because those things are chapters in the story, but they aren’t the point of the story. The point is that God was faithful when my sister was sick, God was faithful when my dad died, God was faithful when my mom and I were trying to figure out how to live with what was left, God was faithful when I wandered, God was faithful when I didn’t deserve His grace, God was faithful when I didn’t believe in myself, God was faithful when He gave me a wife and a daughter and a ministry I could have never imagined, God was faithful when I lost my mom, and God is faithful now even in the middle of questions that I don’t have answers to yet.

I don’t tell this story because I think I have experienced more tragedy than anybody else, and I don’t tell it because I want anyone to feel sorry for me, because the truth is that I have been blessed far beyond what I deserve. I tell it because maybe there is someone listening who doesn’t have the dramatic testimony either, someone who wasn’t pulled out of an addiction, wasn’t rescued from an abusive relationship, or doesn’t have a single moment where everything changed overnight, but instead has a story that looks a whole lot more like mine, where life simply kept happening and there were moments when you didn’t know how you were going to keep moving forward.

Maybe your testimony is that God carried you when you didn’t have the strength to carry yourself, or maybe it is that He was there when you lost someone you loved, or that He stayed when you wandered, or that He provided when you didn’t know how you were going to make it, or that He surrounded you with people who believed in you during seasons when you couldn’t even believe in yourself. Maybe you look back now and realize that you didn’t understand what God was doing while you were living through it, but with the benefit of some distance, you can begin to see His fingerprints all over the story, even in places where you couldn’t see them at the time.

That’s my testimony. I don’t have a story about a God who rescued me from the deepest pit you could think of, but I do have a story about a God who never stopped walking with me through the valley. And when I look back over every mountain and every valley, every loss and every blessing, every failure and every undeserved gift, and even every unanswered question, I can say with complete confidence that God has been faithful to me far beyond what I deserve, far beyond what I could have imagined, and far beyond what I ever could have done for myself.

And if there is anything I hope someone takes away from my story, it is that you don’t have to have an extraordinary life for God to have done extraordinary things in it, because sometimes the most powerful testimony isn’t about the moment God pulled you out of the pit, but about all of the moments when you look back and realize that He never left you there in the first place.