Napkin 6: To My Church

37,000 feet. 6:15 AM.

In one hour, we'll land, and I don't know if I'll ever preach from your pulpit again. The cancer is eating what's left of me, but before I die, I need to confess something to you.

Dear sheep of my flock,

For twenty years, I've loaded you with burdens that Christ never asked you to carry. I've given you yokes that broke your backs instead of the easy yoke that heals the heart.

I taught you to walk on tiptoes before God, always terrified of not being enough. I turned Sunday morning into a performance instead of a celebration.

I made you believe that God was a stern inspector who counts your mistakes instead of a Father who counts the days until He can embrace you again.

Remember that sermon series I did last year on "Authentic Christian Living"? For eight Sundays, I bombarded you with biblical standards, spiritual expectations, and believers' duties.

I gave you forty ways to be better Christians and zero ways to be loved just as you are.

That Sunday evening, Mrs. Henderson came to my office crying. "Pastor," she said, "I really try. I pray, I read the Bible, I try to be a good wife. But I can never feel good enough for God."

I answered her with what I thought was pastoral comfort: "Sister, sanctification is a process. We must persevere in spiritual growth and trust that God will complete the work He began in us."

She thanked me and left. But in her eyes was the same sadness as when she came in.

Only tonight, on this plane trembling between clouds and eternity, I understood what I should have told her:

"Susan, God doesn't love you because you're good. He loves you because He is good. You don't have to earn His affection. You already have it. Always have. Always will."

But there's something even more beautiful I discovered while writing on this napkin soaked with tears:

Your struggle to feel enough wasn't the problem. It was the symptom that I, your pastor, was teaching you a God too small.

But you know what happened in these years while I loaded you with impossible burdens? Many of you found God despite me. You discovered real grace precisely because what I preached was too narrow to contain your broken hearts.

Susan Henderson, for example. After that evening in my office, she stopped coming to services for three months. I thought I'd lost her. Instead, I discovered she was meeting God in afternoons spent helping the nursing home residents. "There," she told me when she returned, "I understood that God doesn't count my prayers. He's moved by my presence."**

Dear sheep of my flock, even my greatest mistakes became roads to grace for many of you. You learned humility from my arrogance. You discovered mercy by fleeing from my judgment.

If I return - and I pray I will - I won't preach to you anymore about what you must do for God. I'll tell you stories about what God does for you every day, every breath, every heartbeat.

I'll remind you that Christ's yoke isn't made of expectations that suffocate. It's made of love that liberates. It doesn't crush shoulders. It heals hearts and teaches you to fly.

You are already loved exactly as you are in this moment. You don't need to become better Christians. You just need to remember to be Christians happy to be loved without deserving it.

Your pastor, who learned that grace is stronger than pastors' mistakes

The napkin is soaked. Like my heart that's finally melting.