What Fuels Your Growth?
Gordon MacDonald
Nothing is nearly as powerful or more potentially beautiful than "quality of soul."
—Gordon MacDonald
It was a Saturday morning almost twenty-five years ago, and I had officiated in the burial of two homeless men during the past week. In both cases, I felt, their lives had been meaningless and wasted. I was overwhelmed with the sadness and emptiness of the experience.
Combined with several nights of inadequate sleep, no recent spiritual refreshment, and lots of nonstop ministry activity, their deaths left me in a state of emotional overload.
When I came to the breakfast table that morning, I had no clue I was on the brink of a crisis. Life had not yet prepared me for the fact that everyone has a breaking point. There at the table my point came, triggered by one innocent comment.
"You haven't spent much time with the children lately," said my wife, Gail.
She was correct. I hadn't. She had kindly avoided noting that I hadn't spent adequate time with her, either. And I hadn't done any better with my heavenly Father. Add to this that work was piling up, my sermon for the next day was unprepared, and I needed to make several hospital calls.
I felt like a baseball player who just bobbled the ball and the electronic scoreboard behind him begins to flash: error! error! error!
Suddenly I was engulfed with a sense of futility, and I began to cry. I lost control and wept steadily for four hours. That had never happened before. It was one of a limited number of "breaking experiences" in my life, which—more than any of the so-called successes—have been most responsible for whatever growth toward quality of soul I can claim.
What happened that day forced me to face up to something I'd either ignored or wasn't smart enough to realize: I had been ...
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