My wife and I met at a church where the preaching was worth showing up for.
It was a place where scripture was treated as something you could work through — where God was rational and supernatural at the same time and nobody made you choose. The community was real. We were known there. That’s where we found each other.
I took a music minister job two weeks before our wedding, in December of 1998, at a church across town.
We left all of it behind on the same day.
I had no business doing that job.
I was a junior. Music performance had been my major, not music education, which meant I had never taken a conducting class in my life. I knew how to sing. I knew how to be respectful of people. I knew roughly how to move my arms in front of a congregation and look like I meant it.
I did not know how to build a choir. I did not know how to teach people to sing in parts. I made almost all of it up as I went, and I was so certain I was where God wanted me that I put my head down and kept plowing.
I aggravated people. I wouldn’t put someone in front of the church who couldn’t sing. There was a couple who insisted on hauling in their own sound system and setting it up for their numbers, two weeks after the church had spent real money rehanging speakers to fix the acoustics, and I did not handle that with anything like grace.
Some of the people there loved us well. We made friends we still have. I want that on the record before I say the next part.
The sermons were the same sermon.
It didn’t matter what passage he opened to. I could look at my watch and tell you almost to the minute when he’d arrive at the reason you needed to get saved. Every week. Any text.
We had come from a place where the Bible was alive, and now I sat in a room where it went flat in front of me for two years.
And I stopped. Not dramatically — I didn’t decide anything. I just stopped praying, and I stopped opening my Bible for any reason except to have something ready for Wednesday night.
I was running the machinery of a spiritual life with nothing moving through it.
Then a bigger church offered me a youth ministry job, and I interviewed extremely well.
Here’s the part I’ve never said out loud. I had every skill that job required. I could speak in front of a room. I knew the Bible cold — I’d grown up in it. I genuinely wanted to be good to those kids and I still do. Anyone assessing me on paper would have hired me, and they did.
I was also empty, and had been for two years, and nobody asks about that in an interview. There’s no line on an application for is anything actually running.
So I performed. For a while performing works, because I was good at the visible parts and there are a lot of visible parts. Then it stopped working, the way it always does, and I was standing up there with nothing behind it.
You know what happens when a performer can’t perform anymore. You get booed off the stage.
I got booed off the stage. For a guy who’d spent his whole life being the one who was good at this, that was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
What I understand now is that God had not gone anywhere. I’d quit doing the things that took me to Him, and then I was surprised when the distance showed up.
The fix, when it finally came, was not dramatic either.
We found another church and sat in the back of it. On purpose. We didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t sign up, didn’t put our names down. We went and we listened, week after week, for a long time.
Eventually I got into a discipleship class. And somewhere in there I started praying again, badly at first, the way you do when you’re out of practice at something you used to be able to do without thinking.
That’s all it was. Show up, listen, start again.
Nobody had to come alongside me for that part. It was available the whole time.
David Willis 