Our Christmas Letter

Christmas 2016

Dear Friends,

Sometimes life is pretty ordinary.

Today, is a lazy Saturday. We just ate breakfast.  Logan made pancakes and eggs.  We shared jokes.  I explained my fitness plan for the New Year.  I am going to a nice restaurant and ordering mussels.

Linda worked at the community garden again this summer.  Planting things, watching them grow, and helping the 32 gardeners feel comfortable – ordinary stuff common to the human race since Adam and Eve negotiated where to plant the next pomegranate tree.  We’re thankful for the ordinary beauty and simplicity of this special plot in our community.

I, Lowell, had a chance to work with local employers to form a business association.  We are expanding our job training program to include other business services.  As part of the project I participated in a leadership training course during which I reflected on my leadership style.  I found myself coming back to ordinary things like character and just doing the next right thing.   I sat with other community leaders like someone from the Times Square Alliance, the Downtown Alliance in Lower Manhattan (where the World Trade Center is), and other world class neighborhoods.  I on the other hand represented Cypress Hills, a somewhat forgotten neighborhood tucked in a far corner of Brooklyn.  All we have is a long row of small businesses with an average of 4.2 employees each.  Small businesses with emphasis on the word small – scrappy, immigrant-owned, mom and pops where folks work 14 hr. days to keep the laundromat, or take out restaurant, or barber shop open.  These are ordinary sort of folks, and I am blessed to work with them.

The big event of our autumn was sending the boys back to Followers of Jesus School.  Somehow this ordinary routine repeated by millions of families across this country seemed to be an accomplishment for us.  Starting a new normal with unpredictable tweens proved to be a feat.  Linda began an ordinary job as middle school part time teacher, and I volunteered to teach PE.  We are now very familiar with teenage eye-rolling.

Yesterday was an ordinary, brisk day.  I walked 2 ½ blocks to work and stopped in at a local merchant, Juan Diaz’ corner store, one of the participants in the business association.  I found him opening the business like he does every day.  Looking closer I saw he had stitches in his lip and forehead.  He had been robbed the evening before and spent most of the night in the ER.  I asked why he is at work after such trauma. In his thick Dominican accent he said, “I had to take my son to school, so I came on in.  It could have been worse.  I am grateful.  There is no sense him missing school because of me.  That is what America is all about.  You keep working to be successful.”  An ordinary man doing ordinary things like working every day and taking care of his family.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Juan all day.

It turns out there is a fine line between the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Juan reminds me of another ordinary/extraordinary father,  “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).  Could it be that the Father has ordinary feelings of compassion, pain, and thankless sacrifice?  I am not sure if anyone noticed that Juan had his store open again less than 24 hours after a gun was put in his face.  Did anyone notice his gutsy, painful, vulnerability?  If it were not for the angels, would anyone have noticed the Father’s own ordinary-looking sacrifice on the first Christmas? 

I pray that we can all notice the ordinary/extraordinary gift of God this season in the middle of our ordinary lives. 

How do I live a life that matters?

Three years ago today, we were getting ready to fly North in a snowstorm for the funeral of my father, David Herschberger.  I can't think back to that day without reflecting a bit on what makes a life that matters.  Like many of us, my dad's life was one of big dreams and "small" accomplishments. He never quite did what he dreamed of doing, but ironically some of this greatest accomplishments came in the middle of his deepest pain.  Dealing with his own hurts helped him to enter others' hurts.  Isn't this the irony of Christmas as well?  Big events in small stables.  Amazing love among common people.  I pray I can live a life like that, a life that matters.

Here's an excerpt of the Eulogy I wrote 3 years ago.  Perhaps it will be an inspiration for you today as it was for me. 

David’s life was one of service.  As a young man he served briefly in Chicago, Arkansas, Germany, and Austria before settling in Northwestern Ontario where he served as pastor, counselor, and bookstore manager for 49 years.

Several months ago, David said he would not consider himself to have been a successful person.  He always had dreams far beyond what he accomplished. By some measures, he was not successful, but I think he was a great man. His greatness was not in buildings, or money, or organizations. After having worked on David’s life story this past Fall, I am convinced that David’s greatness was in his brokenness and his response to pain. He did not run from shame, hurt, guilt, and loss. He didn’t try to distract himself or blame others.  

He was pushed by his pain through brokenness all the way to the Gentle Healer. He learned who alone could bear the full weight of his heart, and he allowed many of you to be God’s agents of healing in his life.

It happened over and over and over again.  

Beginning with abuse, mental illness, and spiritual emptiness in his childhood, his first 18 years included much brokenness.  His father told me that sometimes David would just lie down and cry and cry as a child. In his pain, he became hungry for God and began seeking spiritual wholeness.  While he was working the night shift at a mental hospital in Chicago, he read all types of Christian books.  After that, he knew he wanted something more.  He traveled to several different states until he found God in a little band of Christians in Northern Indiana. This led to his first stint of Christian service in Arkansas, and that is where he was truly discipled for the first time. His brokenness had led him to the Healer.  The core message of grace that he found there would become the mantra of his life.

Several years later when his dreams of church planting seemed to fall apart, he felt broken again and wanted to give up.  Amazingly, God met him in his little cabin north of Lac Suel. “That was where it all happened,” he told me once.  The Gentle Healer arrived and showed him a glory that surpassed all of the brokenness.  Soon afterward, a dear friend went with him to attend the Canadian Revival where he could continue his journey to wholeness.

At age 60, he went to college.  “I have a good twenty years left in me,” I remember him saying.  Now, over 20 years later, we know how right he was.  Once again, though, this journey brought a lot of pain and revealed brokenness. He almost didn’t graduate, but, again, his pain pushed him closer to the Healer, and, in turn, he became a conduit of healing in the lives of others.

Then on a cold night in January, all his plans came to a crashing halt as Esther passed away.  He wanted to give up, curse God and die, but again he didn’t cut corners. He walked the valley of the shadow of death, and again, the Gentle Healer brought healing and love into his life again.

On my last visit, Dad said that he was working on one more message.  He said that Jesus died to forgive our sins, but the way that He died illustrated how he wants to heal our shame.  He was spit on, publically rejected, and exposed -- a death of shame to take away our shame.  The Bible says, ^“Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows . . . with his stripes we are healed.”

For dad, those words weren’t just nice words for a song or liturgy.  He had been to the bottom. He knew pain, shame, loneliness and hurt, but the Gentle Healer had come and that was what made all the difference.