Ir-rev-rend

"In the beginning…"

If I were God, I'm not sure I would have chosen me. Or my family, for that matter.

One of my favorite Bible stories is the choosing of Gideon found in Judges 6. God had something he needed to do and someone had to do it, so he chose Gideon. An angel of the Lord finds him scratching out a living, just trying to keep his head above water but below the radar of a powerful enemy called Midian that was making life miserable for Israel.

"The Lord is with you, mighty warrior!" the angel calls out to Gideon.

"You got to be kidding me, right?" comes Gideon's response (my paraphrase). "If God is with me, why are things so hard? To be honest, I'm feeling a little abandoned here."

Good question. Have you ever felt like that? If this is how it feels when God is on my side, I'm not sure I want to be there when he's not. I feel as if he has forgotten me. Maybe he doesn't really care. Or maybe he doesn't really exist. Or maybe— I shouldn't be thinking these thoughts.

We all have those kinds of thoughts. Some of us just don't want to admit it.

So the angel says to Gideon, "God's got a plan. He's about to do something big. And guess whom he wants to use? That's right. You. So get after it, big guy. Go in the power that he has given you."

I love Gideon's response. I love it because it's the story of my life.

"Are you sure you've got the right guy?"

I asked that when I first sensed God's call on my life. I asked it before we planted Seacoast Church. I ask it every weekend before I get up to speak. I'm asking it right now as I sit down to write this book. God, you know my doubts, my failures, my insecurities, my great starts, and my challenges in following through. Are you really sure?

Gideon reminds the angel that there are much better candidates to be used by God. In fact, he makes a case that he may in fact be the worst possible choice.

"My clan is the weakest in our tribe, and I'm not exactly the shining star of the family."

I can imagine God saying, "Really? I had no idea. I must not have done all the background checks."

Sometimes life can feel like that.

But remember, it's not just about you. God really does know what he's doing.

It doesn't matter how many chariots the other guy has when God is on your side.

Gideon responded to God, and the world became a better place for it. God is still looking for unusual candidates to change their world. Who knows? It might just be you.

Stranger things have happened, you know.

The meanest man in town

My story (and also my family's) began on the day my grandmother talked my grandfather into taking her to an outdoor "brush arbor" revival meeting in a small western Oklahoma town in the mid-1930s. Two women from Louisiana had set up meetings in the dusty little community in hopes of bringing some of what they had experienced at a revival on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. They had been asking God for a breakthrough, focusing their prayers on the "meanest man in town," a title that happened to fit my grandfather.

Grandpa was a small but powerful man, handy with a gun, and a bit of an entrepreneur. His occupation was providing bootleg liquor to thirsty souls on both sides of the law. No Man's Land—as that part of Oklahoma had come to be known—had seen its share of outlaws, thieves, and robbers. Five countries had laid claim to the area. Spain was the first, but after a couple of expeditions decided that it would best be left to the "humped-back cows" and their pursuers, the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians.

Spain gave it to Napoleon, who flipped it in twenty days to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. After a resurvey, it ended up as Mexican territory until the Republic of Texas claimed everything north to Colorado seventeen years later. When Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845, it was on the condition that no new slave territory would rise above 36.5 degrees in latitude. That left an orphaned rectangle of land that was not attached to any state or territory, thus the name No Man's Land. They couldn't even give it away in the great land rushes that produced instant towns like Norman and Oklahoma City. It was the last land to be settled, when there was no other left to be taken. Only the hardy survived. And Grandpa was among the hardiest.

His business was driven by the perfect storm of the Great Depression, a severe drought called the Dust Bowl in mid-America, and a national attempt to limit alcohol consumption called Prohibition. He was doing what he could to provide for his family, and business was good.

He had no time for God, but he loved his wife and she wasn't well. Sickness had diminished her once healthy frame to less than a hundred pounds. It was all she could do to get up in the morning, much less tend to the three young children who scurried about their small wooden home in the windblown dusty western Oklahoma town. Grandma heard that they sometimes prayed for the sick at the meetings down at the "brush arbor," so she asked Grandpa if he would take her there. Finally, reluctantly, he consented.

He pulled the old Model T Ford onto the dirt field that surrounded the crudely constructed temporary structure. It was just some tree limbs and a few small branches woven together to provide shelter for the outdoor church services. The twenty or so worshippers sat on rickety plankboard pews suspended across carefully spaced old wooden barrels. Actually, there wasn't much sitting being done. Mostly singing and clapping and testifying about the "goodness of the Lord," interspersed with joyous shouts and calls of "amen" and "preach it, sister."

Grandma never got out of the car that night. Parked in the shadows, she watched and she listened. Grandpa propped her up with a pillow, trying to make her as comfortable as he could. Toward the end of the evening the woman leading the service asked everyone to close their eyes and reflect on their own sinfulness. She issued an invitation to turn from that sin and follow Jesus. She then asked for brave souls to raise their hand if they wanted to receive the salvation that Jesus offered.

In the quiet of that dusty car, on a hot, humid summer night, Grandma lifted a frail hand that no one saw. No one but God, that is. And with that one small act of faith, she found healing not only for her body but also for her soul. For Grandpa it took longer. He was a natural skeptic and delighted in making fun of the new "holy rollers" in town.

One night he came home drunk and abusive, and the woman he loved locked him out of the house, telling him not to return until something changed. That night he had an encounter with God not unlike the one Paul had with Jesus on the Damascus road. Instantly sober, he committed to follow Christ, and his life changed, as did the destiny of his family.

The Surratts became a part of the new little Pentecostal church in town, and not long after that, "the meanest man in town" and his wife became ordained ministers. He dedicated his life to preaching the good news and planting churches all across rural Oklahoma and parts of Southern California.

My father, Hubert, became a traveling evangelist when he was still in high school. He negotiated with the administration for the maximum number of school days one could miss and still graduate, and then spent as much time as he could on the road with his brother, Norman, traveling from church to church holding weekly revival meetings. He actually turned down law school scholarships to continue his pursuit of ministry. (I would love to talk about how much fun it is to be the son of a national debate champion, but that's the stuff of another story. Let's just say I didn't win many arguments growing up.) Dad and Mom ultimately pastored several Assembly of God churches and did some missionary work with the denomination in India.

My family's faith was very naturally passed down to me. To say we were raised in church would be an understatement. Often we literally lived in the church building, for lack of a proper "parsonage." Mom was quick to remind us that we didn't "have to" go to church, we had the "privilege" of attending. Schoolwork was never an excuse to miss, and if one of us kids would try to pull the sick card, Mom would remind us that church was the best place for sick people to be because you never knew when God might heal someone. We used to joke that a signed death certificate was the only surefire way to get out of going to services, and even then you'd end up in church eventually, so why bother trying to avoid it?

Being of good Wesleyan/Arminian spiritual stock, we believed that you could "lose" your salvation for any number of worthy sins. I can remember as a boy waking up in the middle of the night to a too-quiet house, wondering if the Rapture had taken place and I'd been left behind. Belief in the Rapture means believing that in the last days, all true Christians will be gathered together in the air to meet Christ at his return. The word "rapture" isn't actually used in Scripture, but the concept is alluded to in 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17:

We believed that the Rapture could occur at any time, to be followed immediately by an intense seven-year period of extreme tribulation for anyone left behind. At the end of the tribulation, Jesus would return with all the Christians and kind of mop up what was left of the mess that Satan and his minions had made of the world.

One thing I knew for certain: You did not want to miss the Rapture.

A whole series of "Rapture" movies were made in the 1970s (A Thief in the Night, A Distant Thunder, Image of the Beast, The Prodigal Planet). They were shown regularly at youth groups and rallies, and were designed to literally "scare the hell" out of wayward teenagers. Even Christian rocker Larry Norman had a hit called "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" about the perils of being left behind.

So I'd wake up in the quietest part of the night, tiptoe into my parents' bedroom, and check to see if the Rapture had taken place. If Mom was still sleeping, I was pretty certain I was okay. In my mind, Dad was a less reliable indicator of Rapture readiness.

With that as a background, I committed my life to Christ early and often, and probably for good cause. It would usually happen at a revival meeting during the altar service.

Revivals were a big deal in our church. Dad was always more of an evangelist than he was a pastor. His style of preaching was common among the revivalists of the 1950s and '60s. He would walk back and forth as he preached, starting slowly and then building steam until he was almost shouting his words to make a point. He would shake his full head of hair, use a big white hanky to dab at the sweat accumulating on his forehead, and exert enough energy in one sermon to account for at least a three-hour workout. And he could do that for several nights in a row.

As I said earlier, before he settled down to pastor a church, he was a traveling evangelist. We would go as a family from town to town, with Dad preaching for several nights, and then we'd move our little traveling caravan on to the next city to start a new revival meeting. Our home for the week was usually a small hotel or sometimes an extra room or two in the host pastor's home.

Mom was amazing. She would come to church every night and sit on the second or third row and attentively take notes in the margins of her Bible as Dad preached sermons that she had no doubt heard dozens of times before. Her love for God and admiration for her husband were obvious. Her purse was always full of goodies to keep my siblings and me entertained. There were no nurseries or kids' ministries back then to keep the kids quiet; just creative moms and the threat of facing Dad's wrath when the service was over if you acted up.

Sometimes my dad didn't wait until the service was over.

I remember one time, for some reason Mom had stepped out of the small little sanctuary where Dad was preaching, probably to take my sister to the restroom, and I was left alone on the third row. I must have been four or five years old at the time. By the time she left, Dad had reached a full head of steam, hair shaking, sweat flying, walking up and down the aisles, mesmerizing the crowd that had gathered in the church building that night.

Whatever I was doing at the time became a distraction, so Dad looked around, saw that Mom was gone, and in midsentence snatched me up for some immediate corporal punishment. Somewhere between Acts chapter 2 and Acts chapter 3, he wore my behind out. And he never missed a beat in the message.

Dads were different then. They could use words like "shut up," "stupid," "idiot," and "useless" without fear of injuring their offspring's inner child or being accused of verbal abuse. Dads were expected to be strong when I was growing up. Their fathers were a war-toughened bunch called America's greatest generation. They didn't wear their emotions on their sleeves and certainly weren't in touch with their feminine sides. That didn't happen until the Beatles made long hair acceptable and John Lennon told us that "All You Need Is Love." (Lennon wrote that just before the Beatles went their separate ways and started suing each other.) Dad thought I needed a little something stronger than love. "Tender" was not a word I associated with my father. "Tender" was more apt to describe my backside following a session with Dad during his version of a "time out." He was no different in that regard than most dads of the time. Fathers of the 1950s and '60s inadvertently created a whole new industry that began to spring up in the 1970s and '80s. It's called "family therapy."