What Was it About Hank—That Changed Our Lives?

Saturday at Riverbend Church here in Austin, TX, a large number of people gathered to say a formal “Goodbye,” and “We love you, Hank!” to our dear remarkable, unpretentious friend, Francis Leo “Hank” McNamara.

It was a strange mix: some 50 or 60 family members; many Austinites who had known Hank since grade school; at least as many who had known him in recovery programs—some only for a few days or months.  The atmosphere seemed to be permeated by…love, at least that’s what I kept thinking as I met dozens of them.

The day after he died, his wife, Trish, asked me to speak at his funeral.  I nodded my thanks, went home and cried. 

Ten months earlier, Hank had broken his neck.  It would not heal, which meant that if he tripped or bumped into a wall wrong the second vertebra would shift and he’d be dead—or paralyzed.  Since he already had a bad heart and several other serious physical issues, his prognosis did not look good. 

One day several months ago I asked Hank if he would like to tell his family who he really was and what he thought of them (he had a very large family).  He said he really would.  Shortly after that, using a tape recorder, we started on a joint trip through his whole life that for me was a life-changing journey.  I swore to him that I would never reveal what he said on tape until he had edited it and given me permission to reveal it. 

After only a couple of sessions, I realized that he had raised or co-raised thirteen children who lived in various places around the country.  After we had finishing a taping session, I asked him if he would like to say something specifically to them.  If he would, we could structure that into our sessions together.  Hank said he would.  He told me (not on tape) that although he’d been married three times before he wanted each of his children to know that he had loved their mother, that he loved each one of them and his grandchildren especially, and he was glad he’d gotten to be their old man.  And he wanted to tell them before it was too late.  Unfortunately Hank died before we had any more recording sessions.   But because he had told that to me in a personal conversation when the tape machine was off, I could pass that part of our conversations on to them at the funeral.  Also I could tell Trish that she was the love of his life—even though I’m sure she already knew that.

Although I never can type and share the information on those tapes now, I learned a lot about Hank McNamara in the last few weeks before his death that I could and did pass on to those who are his friends and family members at the funeral.

Hank was a remarkable man.  I can still see him coming up the sidewalk.  He had to wear a kind of neck support made up of four rods (two at either side of his face and two at the back corners of his head) going up several inches over his head and connected by wires—like some sort of futuristic scaffolding.  He had oxygen tubes in his nostrils, was pulling an oxygen tank, and as I recall, carrying an aluminum cane.  And yet he was smiling and gracious to everyone he met.  He was going through some of the most scary and painful things a human being can experience, and yet he was filled with gratitude—gratitude for his beloved Trish (he was very much in love), but also I never saw him when he wasn’t grateful “for another day.”

The “magic” Hank brought with him everywhere he went was amazing.  The day he died I heard a young woman say that she had come for help to a meeting Hank had started, feeling shame and worthlessness.  But the way Hank shook her hand, smiled and greeted her—as if she were a fine worthwhile person—awakened a belief in her that maybe she could become those things someday.  I heard many similar stories during the next few days.  

As I thought about Hank’s life over the twenty years I’ve known him, I realized that he had changed the focus of his approach to helping people in trouble.  For the last several years he had begun to “stand by the door” of the places where people in trouble were frantically searching for God.  He had begun to spend more and more of his time helping “newcomers” to get started on a spiritual journey that could lead them to become the people they had lost hope of ever becoming—or becoming again after a life of failure and running from reality and God.

That night before Hank’s funeral, I remembered a poem I had read years before.  It had been written by a man who I consider to have been one of the most outstanding men in the 20th century regarding helping people into a life of faith.  The man had sent it to me in October of 1961.  I decided to read a couple of stanzas of this poem at his funeral because I recognized Hank within in the lines (although I am almost certain that He did not know about the poem).

SO I STAY NEAR THE DOOR—An Apologia for My Life.

I stay near the door.

I neither go too far in, nor stay too far out,

The door is the most important door in the world—

It is the door through which men walk when they find God.

There’s no use my going way inside, and staying there,

When so many are still outside, and they, as much as I,

Crave to know where the door is.

And all that so many ever find

Is only the wall where a door ought to be.

They creep along the wall like blind men,

With outstretched, groping hands,

Feeling for a door, knowing there must be a door,

Yet they never find it…

So I stay near the door.

The most tremendous thing in the world

Is for men to find that door—the door to God.

The most important thing any man can do

Is to take hold of one of those blind, groping hands,

And put it on the latch–the latch that only clicks

And opens to the man’s own touch.

Men die outside that door, as starving beggars die

On cold nights in cruel cities in the dead of winter–

Die for want of what is within their grasp.

They live, on the other side of it–because they have found it.

Nothing else matters compared to helping them find it,

And open it, and walk in, and find Him – – –

So I stay near the door.

There is another reason why I stay there.

Some people get part way in and become afraid

Lest God and the zeal of His house devour them;

For God is so very great, and asks all of us.

And these people feel a cosmic claustrophobia.

And want to get out. Let me out! they cry.

And the people way inside only terrify them more.

Somebody must be by the door to tell them that they are spoiled

For the old life, they have seen too much;

Once taste God, and nothing but God will do any more.

Somebody must be watching for the frightened

Who seek to sneak out just where they came in,

To tell them how much better it is inside.

The people too far in do not see how near these are

To leaving—preoccupied with the wonder of it all.

Somebody must watch for those who have entered the door,

But would run away. So for them, too,

I stay near the door.

The startling thing about this poem is that it was written by the man who was “standing near the door” when Bill Wilson’s friend Eby brought Bill to Calvary Church in New York.  That man, The Rev. Sam Shoemaker, put Bill Wilson’s hand on the latch of the door.  Sam showed him how to commit his whole life to God.  And then, at Bill’s request, Sam helped Bill to frame Alcoholics Anonymous and to put the spirituality into the “Big Book”, and The Twelve Steps and the Twelve Tradition’s.  And this anonymous movement became the fastest growing spiritual movement in the 20th century during a time when many organized religious organizations were shrinking or floundering.

It was this incredible realization about Hank that made me realize the deep significance of his life:  Our friend Hank McNamara (who did not consider himself to be “religious”) had realized—as Sam Shoemaker had half a century before him—that the future of the movement that saved Hank’s life and the lives of so many of us, might be continued only by loving persons willing to stand near the door—wherever they live—to guide the hands of a few lost people onto the latch of the door through which they may find Life—and God.

I am very grateful that I got a chance to know Hank McNamara, a real man of God.

“If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to supper with you.”

-Revelations 3:20, The Message

Finding a Vocation after Surrendering to God

Finding a Vocation after Surrendering to God

Keith, After I decided to surrender my life to God, how should I go about finding my vocation?

 

Good question.  At first I didn’t know what to do.  I was a land man for a major oil company.  It was a good job but hardly considered to be a training ground for Christian disciples—which I definitely wanted to be after finally trying to turn my life over to God.

I prayed about what to do and at that time there seemed to be only one way for really serious players to go:  go to theology school and become ordained to be a full time Christian minister.  So I studied the Bible and theology and the history of the church and preaching under some good professors.  Along the way I sat with my parents when my older brother was killed and with my father when he died of a heart condition and with my mother when she died of cancer—all before I was 30.  All during this time I was praying and reading the Bible and the lives of the saints—the people in the past who had given their lives to God.

I decided that the playing field I was called to in which to help people find hope and real love was in the ordinary life I was trying to live as a businessman.  I made a decision that God had my address.  Instead of spending all my time “deciding what I would become for God,” I would treat my own ordinary life as a father and husband who commuted in a car pool twenty miles one way to work five days a week—that I would commit that life to God and to learning how to live for him all day long.

I made that decision because I simply didn’t know any ministers at that time who talked, preached or shared individually about having real problems in their own lives and relationships with their spouses, children, parents or fellow clergy.  I was still in my thirties and just couldn’t believe that I was the only committed Christian who wrestled with lust, jealousy, and the many faces of fear of failure.  None of these pastors seemed to have that terrible three-day silence warfare with their spouses or had to be right in arguments with a spouse or feel like a wimp, or worry at night about developing a retirement plan or squeezing in vacation time.  In fact, since I did wrestle with all of these things, for a number of years I thought I must not be a good Christian.

But at another level I was learning that the way out of the fears for me was not courage, which I’d prayed for, but love.  When I was worried, I discovered that if I helped someone else, my fear left me—and that maybe Jesus was right (J) when he said that it is “love that casts out fear.”

At twenty-two I had met a man who encouraged me to keep a journal about the things in which I was interested.  He helped me write a small book of ballads.  And after a few years of talking to lay people about the hope I was finding in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, I began writing books about the simple yet agonizing discoveries concerning what it might mean to try to live one’s whole life for and with God.

As I’ve written in blogs before, I kept trying to be open to finding out the truth about my own character defects.  And that process has made me face many of the denied self-centeredness and control issues with which I had never before been confronted—either in church or school.  But because I’d learned a lot about Jesus and his life, teaching and self-limiting love, I knew that when I learned about my sins and character defects, to confess them to some Christian men also trying to live for God.  And I began to see how I’d hurt many of the people I love most.

The incredible thing to me is that in spite of my flaws—many of which didn’t surface until I had become a best-selling author and lecturer and had traveled in many foreign countries around the world, teaching about how God can change our whole perception of what it means to live intimately with him and other people.  The bottom line about the discovery process is that I would have bet anyone that I would not do the immoral and hurtful things I wound up doing.  And they happened to a man who was very disciplined and had “kept the rules” all his life.  I was baffled.  And when I faced and admitted what I’d done, it was too late to mend some of the fences I had charged through.

What does this have to do with finding a vocation?  For me, a great deal.  After having a number of best-selling books translated into many languages and having trained with and learned from many powerful and wealthy people as a young man, I finally realized I am just a person.  And that I can sometimes love and help people who are struggling with the questions of life and who have discovered the hard way that they are powerless on their own to change their lives at a deep level.

I go to group meetings of people, some of whom I have known for twenty-five years, with whom I share the pain and joy of trying to live for God.  When guests and new people come, we discuss our scariest and most fearsome problems.  I was writing books and lecturing in different places in foreign countries, but for twenty years I didn’t find it helpful or necessary to tell them that I was a writer and lecturer.  But lately, since many of the people who read my books are very old or deceased, I have told some of these people I love and meet with that my vocation is being a writer and a sort of talent scout for God—helping a few people discover the vocational dreams they buried along with their self-centeredness and control issues.  That’s come to be the focus of my vocation.

The short answer to your question about choosing a vocation as a Christian is that since God seems to want loving representatives in every culture and every financial, political, educational and medical field, it doesn’t much matter what you do vocationally as long as you love God and surrender the center of your life to God.  So I’d advise you to pray about it, ask God’s will, and then pick something that you really love to do.   Then go and find out if you can do it.

Will there be pain and sorrow?  Of course, but you will find that in the long run your ability to navigate through pain and still be loving will have more effect in spreading the Good News into other people’s hearts around you than all of the sermons you could preach and all the books you could write. 

Lord, help me to keep listening for your voice in the pain of other people’s lives and in my own.  And thank you that you let me fail enough to wake up and see that I don’t have to “win” to be the person you will love “someday,” but just to open my eyes and see your loving presence in Andrea, our families and the other people we get to walk with on your crazy adventure.  In Jesus’ name, amen.

 

“This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it.  It’s best to start small.  Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance.  The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice.” 

-Jesus to the Twelve in Matthew 10:42

“But I do more than thank.  I ask—ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for his followers, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!”  

-Ephesians 1:18-19, The Message

 “Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.”

    -Ella Wheeler Wilcox—American Writer (1850-1919)

“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

     -Theodore Roosevelt—26th President of the United States (1858-1919)

Finding a Vocation after Surrendering to God

How to Get Out of Pain

Keith, what does Jesus say about the fact that good Christians often have serious pain? 

 

I don’t know where the notion came from that committed Christians shouldn’t have pain.  But for me pain has been the most important way that I find my way back to God—again and again. I remember hearing Dr. Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician and author and also a Christian, give a lecture on this topic.  A physician in the audience asked him a similar question:  “Dr. Tournier, how do you get your patients out of their pain?”  I was shocked at his answer, as was everyone else in the room.

“Oh, I don’t,” he responded.  “Not until they know the meaning of it.”

For most of my life I was very anxious to get out of pain—that is until I tried to surrender my whole life to the God Jesus called Father.  It had not occurred to me that personal pain is virtually a necessity for one who hopes to live as a serious citizen of God’s Kingdom/Reign. In fact, as I’ve said before (see this post), pain is like a fire alarm system to help us pinpoint issues we need to recognize and deal with. 

There are many kinds of personal pain:  pain that results from physical injury or various kinds of pain involving loss of self-esteem or from troubled or broken relationships.  

When Jesus first drew his disciples apart from the crowds to teach them, he listed some of the most painful personal experiences or losses people can experience and said to them, “You’re blessed

  • …when you reach the end of your rope.
  • … when you feel you have lost that which is most dear to you.
  • … when you are content with just who you are, no more, no less.
  • … when your commitment to God provokes persecution.
  • …every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me…You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.  (Matthew 5, The Message)

I think he was saying that until the disciples and I realize that we are powerless on our own to control our lives, our circumstances and other people’s acceptance and approval of us, we will not really believe that we actually need to surrender our whole lives to God.

When I became a Christian, I surrendered my “overall” life early on with a statement to that effect. But as time went on my behavior (and my family) finally told me that first surrender had evidently not included my insistence on being right in arguments, and over time my ambition that caused me to neglect my family (although I made valiant attempts to make it up to them, etc.).  But clearly I was powerless and hurt my family because I was over-focused on succeeding at everything I did—even as a Christian.  And I failed as a husband and a father.  Only then in the despair and rejection resulting from a failed marriage that I had caused did I hear Christ saying to me that unless I would go back to square one and become like a child in my relationship to God as my intimate Father. I could not see and change my life-long mostly unconscious compulsion to control circumstances and people to get them to act the way I wanted them to. I needed to recognize clearly that inside where no one can see, I am a little child calling out to his intimate Father (abba=daddy).  I am asking Him to teach me how to live and relate to other people as loving siblings instead of getting them to be actors in the drama I am producing and in which I am the star. 

This stance of putting ourselves on center stage in our daily or professional lives and subtly or openly trying to get the others around us to be supporting actors in our drama is a powerful word picture of the self-centered Sin that we Christians believe only God can overcome.  The problem is that God’s process of transforming us into the wonderful, loving and creative people he created us to be cannot, it seems, begin without our giving God permission (to the best of our ability) to teach us who we are and what our role in life will be that can bring happiness and fulfillment to other people and ourselves.  And this evidently begins with awareness, confession and surrender.*

One of the greatest mysteries about God’s process of transformation is that we cannot see in our own lives and behavior that we are in fact trying to control the other people around us (however subtly and “lovingly” we may be doing the controlling).  Some people who have the most serious problem of controlling their wives, husbands, children or siblings are consciously so “gentle and loving” with their hints and suggestions that they are astounded when accused of controlling.  They may even cry or rage and say things like “Controlling?!  Good grief!  I’m only trying to HELP you!!”  Or weep and say, “I’m trying to help you avoid making some terrible mistakes!!”  And that may be how they experience their behavior.  So solving these difficulties may take some counseling to unravel.

In my case, rejection by family member—when they couldn’t get through to me about my self-centeredness and control issues—caused me so much pain that I went to a treatment center, and there my denial finally cracked open.  (I described how this happened for me in The Secret Life of the Soul.)  Now I try to listen to the pain in my own life and see how I can relate to it as Jesus did and see what it may have to teach me about how to be more loving the way Jesus loved.

The experience of inter-personal pain is often a shock—whether it is experienced by being rejected by a person or group or the pain of a degenerating spine.  The good news is that as I surrender the pain and my future to God I can learn how to walk through the pain of living and understand better how to love people as I’m going through it.  And looking back I have realized that the areas of personal pain in my own life are like drawbridges I can put down into other people’s lives and walk with them as I learn how to take their hands and help them know at least one path through their particular kind of pain.

So it is often through our experiences of pain that we become “specialists” in helping people learn how to deal with their experience of that same kind of pain—or at least to know that it is possible to make it through that pain, because we made it through—or are still making it through.[1]

And my journey as a Christian has led me to realize that it is the experience of personal pain that can lead us to see new values in the world and to be more caring and loving to people who are alone in their pain.  And since that is one of the purposes of citizens of God’s New Reign in Jesus—to love people and be a part of their healing, we can actually use our painful lonely experiences to become the loving people we were designed to be—if we can learn to look for and notice when other people are in pain…and when appropriate, to walk a few steps with them.

Dear Lord, thank you for realizing that the various kinds of secret pain in my life can be sources of wisdom as to how to love you and other people specifically when they are going through the loneliness of solitary pain.  Help me to learn to listen and let people tell about their pain instead of rushing in with fixes and all kinds of “answers” (before they are even asking for help).  Thank you that you didn’t promise us “answers” in the usual sense but said you would be present with us in our pain—and that would somehow transform us to learn how to love others in their pain.  Help me to be willing to go and sit with people in their pain—as you have done through those who have visited me.  In Jesus’ name, amen.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:  take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. 

-Romans 12:1, The Message

 

Don’t run from suffering; embrace it.  Follow me and I’ll show you how.  Self-help is no help at all.  Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. 

-Mark 8: 35, The Message

 

 Let me tell you why you are here.  You’re here to be salt seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth…and another way to put it:  You’re to be light, bringing out the God colors in the world … (and the way you’re to be light is) to shine…be generous with your life.  By opening up to others you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven. 

-Mt. 5:13-26, The Message


* I’m not being “Pollyanna” here.  I still want to get out of pain as quickly as possible.  But I’m not quite as frantic about having pain because I have realized that all I have learned by going through a good bit of pain has helped me to become more sensitive and loving to other people—and more aware of God’s presence in my real life.

[1] If you have had this experience, you might consider taking a look at Facing Codependence.

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