In 2013, when I was 25, I took my first ministry position. I was the Director of College Ministries at a medium-sized Charismatic non-denomination church in south central MN. I had known I wanted to pastor for years and now, through a string of unforeseen events, here I was, pastoring college students at Minnesota State University, my alma mater.
My first few months of ministry were spent remodeling the church’s youth room. Instead of prepping for sermons and canvassing the campus, I was laying sheetrock and painting 30-foot ceilings. By the springtime (I started January 1st), I had settled into a normal schedule and had to navigate the rhythms of my new role. What did it mean to be a pastor? How should I spend my time? What was important? What was effective?
On one particular gorgeous late spring afternoon, I headed out of my office to drive to campus to meet with a student. As I left the church and walked across the parking lot to my car I saw my grandpa sweeping up the parking lot.
My grandpa had been a missionary in the interior highlands of Papua New Guinea in the 50’s and 60’s. He and my grandma and their four kids lived among cannibalistic tribes working as church planters. They lived there for 12 years before coming back to the US where they planted the church I grew up in and was now pastoring at. By this time he had been retired for over a decade but still showed up to the church every day to putz around. He’d mow the grass, paint a random wall that no one else thought needed to be repainted, organize the storage closet, or help set up for an upcoming event. You couldn’t slow the guy down. He still showed up to every service, every prayer meeting, every event, not because he had to but because he loved the church and was still, 50 years later, giving his life for her well-being.
He did all this despite having endured unending misery at the hands of the church. He had endured multiple church splits, more than one betrayal by a friend or ministry partner, had his entire life savings stolen by a congregant through a Ponzi scheme, and had his name publically slandered on more than one occasion.
My grandfather was the kind of guy who didn’t talk about any of it though, the highs or lows. If you wanted to hear a story from PNG you’d have to ask him because he wasn’t going to divulge anything on his own. It was all normal to him even though there is nothing normal about moving your young family to PNG in 1955 to live on the side of a mountain in a grass hut village. But he also wouldn’t ever talk about the pain of the past. You never heard him reminisce about all the terrible things he endured at the hands of the church he started and loved so dearly. Instead, he just swept the parking lot of garbage and gravel in paint-splattered pants, a tattered straw sun hat, and repurposed dress shoes that he kept spray painting grey to make them look new even though they were 20 years old.
And so, on that beautiful spring day, I walked up to my grandpa and tried to pull some of that ministry wisdom out of him. I approached him and simply, but with all seriousness, asked, “Hey, now that I’m pastoring do you have any advice for me?”
He paused, and without skipping a beat, as if he knew the question was coming, replied with a subtle shake of his head and the faintest chuckle in his voice as if he was telling an inside joke to a friend, “Just remember, people are funny.” And with that, and a light quick smirk, he lowered his head back down towards the pavement and continued sweeping up gravel.
That was it.
Just remember, people are funny.
That was his advice to me in 2012.
As the years have passed those words have proven to be almost prophetic in their accuracy. People are funny. But what has stuck with me all these years is how he uttered those proverbial words to me. It was the smile, the chuckle, and the look in his eye as he spoke.
And it was the fact that he said such words in such a manner while sweeping the church parking lot. Behind that smirk and wry smile were an untold number of stories. Beneath that battered white t-shirt were scars that he still carried with him. Scars of betrayal, scars of misunderstanding, scars from being called names, insulted, mocked, scorned, taken advantage of. Scars that no one but he even knew about. He carried in his body, as Paul once wrote, the marks of Christ.
Now, as an old sun-wrinkled man, those stories of pain were carried along in one single word, “funny”. My grandfather was not bitter, not hardened, not resentful, or vengeful in his old age. What came into his heart and mind at the thought of all he had seen and endured was godly comedy and guileless laughter.
People are funny.
So is that statement.
That small comedic moment has also been transfigured in my memory. That was an encounter with God. I was entertaining angels and didn’t even realize it. Those words, and how they were said, were the words of God to me.
I came face to face with God in a parking lot. He looked like an old man with a broom in hand, a smile on his face, and a chuckle in his voice laughing at the absurdity of God’s preserving grace and human frailty all at once. Not bitter. Not disillusioned. Just sweeping away all the gravel so it doesn’t get tracked inside when people arrive in a few hours for midweek service.