Scarred Faith

This is a story about how Honesty, Grief, a Cursing Toddler, Risk-Taking, AIDS, Hope, Brokenness, Doubts, and Memphis Ignited Adventurous Faith

Josh Ross

• Publisher: Howard Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781451688214
• eBook ISBN: 9781451688221
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

In an original and thought-provoking work, Pastor Josh Ross invites us to enter into the suffering around us—and to embrace our scars and God's restoring work. ARE YOU SCARRED? Tired of platitudes that don't heal your brokenness? Have you wondered if you're allowed to say things like, "God, this doesn't make any sense. Where are you?" Are you looking for the balance between honesty and faithfulness? This book is for you. Josh Ross lets you in on his own journey of grief as he discovers that faith is about experience, movement, and process. It is about adventure, adventure that demands honesty. God honors that. He is big enough and even willing enough to handle your questions, no matter how hard they are. Suffering can be ignored, or suffering can force us to reimagine a world where we are participants in Jesus' story of restoration. God is raising up people eager to run into the brokenness of the world to experience healing and new life. Are you willing to follow God into these places?

PART 1

WHEN SCARS RUN DEEP

One writer described Pope John Paul II’s journey like this: “Ripped out of the soil of his background, his life could no longer be what it used to be. He now began a journey to deeper communion with God. But it didn’t come without tears, and it didn’t come without what seems to have been a certain existential horror.” Suffering can do that to us. We’re jolted, kicked, prodded, and shoved into new realities we never would have brought about on our own. We’re forced to imagine a new future because the one we were planning on is gone.

—ROB BELL¹

1

DOES GOD MAKE WRONG TURNS?

Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark—not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? The songs I learned were all of praise and thanksgiving and repentance. Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence?

—NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF¹

Life with Jesus is full of twists and turns. Some roads make sense. Some don’t.

My close friend, Josh Graves, and I were both speaking at an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As we’ve done on a few occasions when we’re at the same event, we shared a hotel room and a rental car. We woke up opening morning of the conference, got in the car to drive to the Tulsa Fairgrounds, and then realized that we didn’t know how to get there. Two things would have saved us: 1) if one of us had had a smartphone, but neither of us had upgraded, and 2) if Kara had been with us, Josh’s wife, because she’s like Sacagawea—she has a knack for directions. But we were without both.

Neither of us were Boy Scouts, but we were confident that we could find our way. It was about 8:20. Josh was to speak at 9:00. We were supposedly only ten minutes away. And the good news was we had a map.

Fifteen minutes and a few wrong turns later, we were reminiscent of a married couple in need of counseling.

He’s yelling at me, “Do you not know how to read a map?”

I’m yelling back, “Do you not know how to listen to the person reading the map?”

He continues, “No, I’m not going to make an illegal U-turn!”

I’m responding, “Do you know what Terry Rush [the director of the event] will do to you if you’re late? Make the U-turn!”

Then we did the thing that breaks Man Law 101: we pulled into a gas station to ask for directions. I walked in, and there were two men behind the counter standing shoulder to shoulder. I said, “Will one of you tell me how to get to the fairgrounds?” They both turned and pointed—in opposite directions.

They looked at each other and began arguing. I was about to speak to a group of people about imitating the character of Jesus, yet at that moment I was close to ruining my witness with a barrage of dirty words and obscenities.

I looked at Josh through the glass door, shrugging my shoulders in disbelief at what was happening. His mouth wasn’t moving, but his nonverbals were a perfect depiction of a cross between nervousness, anger, and frustration.

In the end, despite a few wrong turns, we got directions and made it on time.

■ ■ ■

We live in a fast-paced world. It’s a world in which we need things to run smoothly, because we don’t do well with interruptions and unplanned events. No one plans for flat tires, stitches, or sinus infections.

So, when wrong turns happen in life, they can throw us a curve. They can disrupt our rhythm.

I hate wrong turns, because they take you off course. You’re left with either finding new routes or making crazy U-turns. They test your patience and your integrity.

We all have stories of making wrong turns in this life. There are turns that have led us into sexual addictions, deep depressions, financial strains, and feelings of extreme loneliness. Wrong turns result in stiff-arming God and neglecting our neighbors.

However, on this journey of faith, do you ever feel like God has made a wrong turn in your life?

■ ■ ■

We have this story of the triumphal entry in Luke 19. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt. Count on Jesus to choose a colt over a stallion or a first-century limo.

But the camera shifts to the crowd, because they weren’t just there to witness this event; they were there with expectations of this event. They expected Jesus to ride into Jerusalem and to make the turns that would lead him to Herod’s primary palace so that he could unseat the godless rulers to set up this thing he’d been talking about for a few years called the Kingdom of God. They expected Jesus to turn to the Temple so that he could establish a religion that would make things right.

In fact, Mark tells us that people were following Jesus, but he also says that people were ahead of Jesus.²

Why were the crowds walking ahead of him? It’s because they thought they knew exactly where he was going.

They were shouting, “Hosanna!”—a song of salvation. A song sung with expectation.

The message of deliverance that religious leaders had been proclaiming for centuries was happening right before their eyes. It was a “Hosanna!” that was loaded with all kinds of agendas and expectations.

They expected Jesus to make things right, to conquer the powers of the world. But Jesus made a different turn. He turned to the cross.

It was as if Jesus had made a wrong turn.

■ ■ ■

I’m the middle child in my family—two years apart from both Jonathan, who is the youngest and most inquisitive, and Jenny, who has always been your quintessential protective oldest child. I remember a time when Jenny was babysitting us. She was thirteen, and she heard the sound of a train outside and immediately forced us into a hallway, where we sat under a mattress because she had seen a television show discussing tornadoes as sounding like trains. The only problem was that it was a clear, sunny day outside.

We grew up in a close family. To this day, I’ve never been on a plane with either one of my parents. We always took vacations in the light-blue Astro van. It was back in the late 1980s, when the Astro van was kind of cool. It officially qualified a mother of three as a soccer mom. From East Texas, we took long trips to Nashville, Yellowstone National Park, and Los Angeles. Occasionally, on our road trips, we would take hour-long detours to take pictures at historical markers like Billy the Kid’s grave. Yes, we were that family.

This fullness of relationship was not something easily come by, though. My dad was a man who battled with depression, low self-esteem, and a childhood with an alcoholic father that left him scarred. However, he discovered that the heart of God was worth pursuing and that the resurrection of Jesus can raise people from the ashes, even before we die. He was committed to providing a childhood for all three of us that was unlike his own. He cultivated environments for us to discover the value of deep friendships and a close-knit family. The dinner table became a place to nurture a family more than it nurtured our bodies (and in no way is that a knock on my mom’s cooking). Because of this, my siblings became two of my closest friends.

■ ■ ■

My dad, mom, Jonathan, and I received a text from Jenny on February 3, 2010, that her fever had spiked to 105. It wasn’t too uncommon for a Ross. We don’t get sick much, but when we run a fever, we go all out. My concern for Jenny on that day was that she had been sick for over five days. Immediately, I fell on my knees in my office and prayed for God’s hand of mercy to touch Jenny’s body. I received a text within the hour that her fever had broken. We thought this was good news.

The next morning I received a phone call from my mom that Jenny was in the ICU. She had gone to a medical clinic early in the morning, and after checking her blood pressure, they told her to go to the ER immediately. A specific strand of strep throat, Group A Strep, had forced the infection into her blood stream, and by the time she reached the ER her body was in a full-blown battle with septic shock.

I drove to Little Rock the next morning to catch a flight on Southwest Airlines. Memphis is the largest city in Tennessee, yet we don’t have Southwest. Every time I fly out of this city on my own dime my retirement is pushed back two years. The drive to Little Rock was surreal. A few hours later I was on a plane to the Dallas/Fort Worth area where I was expecting to walk into a hospital, see my sister recovering, and be back in Memphis the next night just in time to preach at Sycamore View the following morning. Call me naïve if you’d like, but I thought that if you didn’t die from a car wreck, inexplicable tragedy, cancer, or a heart attack, scientific research and medical advancements would cure whatever ailed you.

I arrived as anesthetics were putting Jenny into a deep sleep. My mom, leaning over her sick body, said, “Jenny, Josh is here. Can you see him?” She managed to open both eyes and proceeded to nod her head yes. A few hours later the doctor met with my family in the hallway and spoke the words: “There’s a fifty/fifty chance. She’s the sickest person in any ICU in the DFW area.”

Our world was suddenly crumbling. It seemed like God had made a wrong turn.

■ ■ ■

Maybe you were raised to believe that you could never question God’s activity in the world or doubt his existence or he might just zap you with a lightning bolt. Maybe you think that the barrage of questions God deals Job toward the end of that bizarre book trumps every other moment of questioning and feeling of anger found in Scripture. In a context influenced so heavily by the Age of Enlightenment, which emphasized knowledge and intellect, the desperate need to believe with absolute assurance has suffocated the potential gift of asking hard questions.

You can keep your children from asking questions about life or even about God—until they get to college.

Are we allowed to say things like “God, this doesn’t make any sense. Where are you?”

More important, does God honor seasons of doubt? Does God honor the questions we might have that come from moments of physical, social, or emotional pain?

Does James 1:6–8 become the ultimate trump card in this conversation? “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. Those who doubt should not think they will receive anything from the Lord; they are double-minded and unstable in all they do.”

What about Matthew 28:17? Prior to the Great Commission, which is quoted in every Christian church, we are told that “they worshiped him; but some doubted.” And Jesus still proceeds to give the Great Commission to the entire crowd. In other words, he doesn’t separate the doubters from the worshippers. The worshippers include those who doubted. Jesus even commissions the doubters.

This adventure with Jesus demands honesty, and I think God honors that. God is big enough and even willing enough to handle our questions, no matter how big they are.

February of 2010 left me scarred. The scars would force me to ask questions. And I leaned into the sovereignty and grace of God, believing that Jesus would be able to carry me through a season of uncertainty. After all, the same one who spoke the words “Follow me” also said, “I am with you always.” I needed these words to be true.

2

THE FEBRUARY FROM HELL

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

—ANNE LAMOTT¹

When I was a freshman in high school, I asked a girl if she wanted to go to the movies with me. Like it is for most freshmen, a date to the movies meant that Mom has to drop off a minivan full of ninth graders who are embarrassed to ride in a minivan. I don’t even remember what movie we saw, but I remember that this girl had been on my radar ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Foreword by Ian Morgan Cron
• Introduction: Scarred Faith
• Part 1: When Scars Cut Deep
• Part 2: Living with Scars
• Part 3: Scarred Communities
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About Josh Ross
• Notes
• Copyright