Heritage of faith

April 11, 2006

By Gaylord Lemke

“Father to the fatherless, defender of widows — this is God, whose dwelling is holy. God places the lonely in families.” (Psalm 68:5,6, New Living Translation)

My life story is seasoned with our Heavenly Father’s compassion for the fatherless and His unwillingness to allow the cord of faith to be severed. The strands of His unfolding plan are woven throughout the tapestry of my childhood.

My parents divorced before my third birthday. Within a few years, my father was dead from an overdose of alcohol and drugs. Mother never fully recovered. In plaintive, longing tones she confessed, “Your father was the only man I ever truly loved.” I’ve often pondered how different our lives might have been if my parents had found a way to stay together.

I can’t recall a time when Mother went to church. However, for reasons that only became clear in later years, she sent me off each Sunday to a neighborhood church with the worship leader and his family. To this day, Mother’s link with them remains a mystery, but this connection became my lifeline.

The teaching I heard one Sunday in second grade is one of my most vivid childhood memories. Closing my eyes, I can still retrace my steps from the back row of the church, down what seemed like an endless aisle, to kneel and ask Jesus into my life. I was soaring with excitement as I ran up the stairs to our apartment.

Mother’s response sent me crashing back to earth: “That’s fine, son, but don’t let religion go to your head!” With no encouragement at home, my spiritual growth stayed at first base. In spite of this, my life would never be the same.

I inherited a love of music from my father and began playing the trumpet in fourth grade. Long hours of practice helped fill the void shaped by Mother’s frequent absences, and my growing ability became a source of much-needed recognition. Eventually, I became skillful enough to catch the attention of our high school band director. When I met him, I was an introverted loner desperately in need of a masculine role model.

Although I was unaware of his recent spiritual renewal, I knew that “Mr. B.,” as I called him, was unlike any man I had ever met. His entrance into my life signaled the next phase of God’s rescue plan. Through his influence, I grew as a musician and even toured internationally with a group of talented high school students.

Mr. B.’s greatest impact, however, was as a father figure and spiritual mentor. He and his wife poured countless hours of nurturing into my life and became my first real family. Once again, the father-heart of God was reaching out to me through caring people.

Not surprisingly, I chose a career in music and was accepted by a university thousands of miles away from home. I was unprepared to cope with the gnawing loneliness created by separation from family and friends. My natural shyness only served to aggravate the isolation closing in around me. Late one night, I reached the final knot on my emotional rope.

Desperate for help, I opened the Bible that Mr. B. had given me as a going away present and started reading Jesus’ words from the Book of John: “I am leaving you with a gift — peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give isn’t like the peace the world gives. So don’t be troubled or afraid” (John 14:27).

As tears began pouring from my eyes, the sense of belonging and security I had felt as a child in church came flooding back to me. It was as if unseen arms had reached to draw me close. I crumbled by my dorm room bed and asked God to come back to me. From the moment I invited Him in years earlier, He had never abandoned me, but I needed to cry out those words of surrender.

When we release control of our lives to the Lord, He straightens us out. So it was that my life-path started to change. The following year, I began sensing God’s call to serve him as a pastor. I transferred to a Bible college where I met my future wife. One evening, as we were sharing family history, her eyes began to sparkle with excitement when I spoke about my childhood.

She told me about her brothers-in-law who came from broken homes just like mine. Once again, the Lord was grafting me into a family that would cherish me as one of their own. My wife’s father, a veteran pastor, welcomed me into his home and accepted me as a son. Truly, “God places the lonely in families!”

The rest, as they say, is history. In the ensuing years, I didn’t always give the Lord my best. My victories were punctuated by seasons of inconsistency as I struggled against the anxiety and shame that often tortures children of substance-abusing parents. For years, I was baffled by a verse that Mr. B. had written in the liner of my Bible: “Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given” (Luke 12:48).

What have I been given that is so great? I thought. I grew up without a father; my family lived on the brink of poverty; my mother disappeared for days at a time, leaving me to fend for myself. I resented her for the humiliation I suffered as a child searching for her in the local bars. My striving to make sense of it all only led to gnawing questions and doubts.

During the early hours of a July morning in 1999, I was awakened by a telephone call from the hospital. Mother had died. Thankfully, she surrendered her life to the Lord a few years earlier. My wife and I returned to my hometown, where I conducted Mother’s funeral. The next day, we began the poignant task of sorting through her meager possessions.

My gaze narrowed as I came upon a newspaper clipping about her father, a man I had met only once. The article began, “Rev. Mose Campbell, Baptist Pastor, … ” I pored over the words, again and again, drinking in their revelation. My grandfather had been a pastor! Why did my mother keep this secret from me? As the shock of this discovery subsided, the pieces of her fragmented past started coming together.

All the years scarred by Mother’s stubborn refusal to accept Christ and her outright hostility to God’s call on my life began to make sense. The remorse of abandoning her spiritual legacy was an effective weapon in Satan’s plot to sever the cord of faith and deny salvation to my family, but God had an incredible plan!

Looking back, I began to trace the outline of God’s design. Long before I was born, He fashioned a plan of restoration. At precisely the right moment, the Holy Spirit reached out to a little boy in church. God saved and called me. Along the way, He nurtured me by placing spiritual fathers and surrogate families into my life. He gave me a beautiful wife and two amazing children who continue the heritage of faith founded by my grandfather.

At last I understand the meaning of that verse which the Spirit prophetically moved Mr. B. to write in my Bible. God has given me the best gift of all, a priceless heritage. The apostle Paul told Timothy, “I know that you sincerely trust the Lord, for you have the faith of your mother, Eunice, and your grandmother, Lois” (2 Timothy 1:5).

My constant prayer is that I may live a life pleasing to God so that, one day, others will say: “His grandchildren earnestly trust the Lord, for they have the faith of their grandfather.”

Gaylord Lemke attends Oak Creek (Wis.) Assembly of God. (Jerry Brooks, pastor).