All My Life You Have Been Faithful
In September of 2022 I walked the streets and sidewalks of Oxford, England singing the lyrics to a song I’d recently heard, especially early in the morning before the streets filled up with cars, buses, and pedestrians and I didn’t have to worry about people hearing and being offended by my off-tune voice.
And all my life You have been faithful
And all my life You have been so, so good
With every breath that I am able
Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God
Oxford was our last stop on a three-week trip to London, Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, Berwick by the Sea, New Castle, and Durham. Each of those stops is a story in its own that will have to wait until another time. After pastoring through COVID for over two years I was weary, tapped out, and more depressed than I admitted. I was excited to leave the country for three weeks and get some relief and rest. If the previous two weeks had been go, go, go, Oxford was going to be stay, stay, stay and rest.
As I pondered the last thirty months and wondered about what the next couple of years had in store, I found myself singing the chorus of Goodness of God over and over again. All my life God had been faithful and good to me, even during COVID. My heart was full of gratitude. This was my song of praise to God. Can you picture me walking down High Street lifting up my hands in song?! My journal of that time is full of these lyrics which were life-giving for months on end.
Once we returned from our trip I hit the ground running in October. I felt reenergized. I returned to ministry believing that my time at Canby Alliance Church was not over yet but I might have two more years to go. I shared this with the elders, staff, and board. Heather wasn’t so sure. By the end of November all my weariness and fatigue returned. My anxiety climbed to a moderately crippling level. I finally realized I couldn’t keep up the pace I had ran for years. My emotional capacity had diminished. I was the past not the future. My time had come. The finish line was just a few steps ahead of me. I was confused. How had I gone in two months from feeling revitalized and hopeful to now feeling I had run out of gas?
I still sang about God’s faithfulness and goodness and I still believed what I was singing even as we faced an uncertain future. I banked on the truthfulness of another lyric from another song, Be Still, My Soul –
Be still, my soul, thy God doth undertake,
to guide the future as he has the past
thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake
all now mysterious shall be bright at last
At our farewell service I requested that we sing the Goodness of God. The words I sang on the streets of Oxford were still true but now in a wholly new way. I projected them into the future rather than tying them to our past.
And all my life You have been faithful
And all my life You have been so, so good
With every breath that I am able
Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God
We launched off to a new life in a new state and a new city where we were started all over again without the friends, community, or church we loved and who loved us for almost four decades and provided the opportunity to serve God by serving them. We left behind the house and home we lived in for twenty-nine years which held countless memories. It was hard to let go.
Fast forward to January 19, 2025. Ryan, the new pastor at Canby Alliance Church, invited me to pray for him at his installation service. I felt honored by his invitation. This was our first time back to a CAC Sunday worship service since our farewell. The third song we sang was the Goodness of God. We sang it at my farewell and now at Ryan’s installation. Can you believe it?!
'Cause Your goodness is running after, it's running after me
Your goodness is running after, it's running after me
With my life laid down, I'm surrendered now
I give You everything
'Cause Your goodness is running after, it's running after me
Attending Ryan’s installation service brought a sense of relief and release I wasn’t expecting. Pt’s years faded even farther back in the rear view mirror. The people and place I had loved for so long and so deeply were now on someone else’s shoulders and beginning to root in a new heart. Though I had left twenty-one months earlier this felt like my final leaving.
Four weeks later, this past Sunday, I preached at First Presbyterian Church in Bellingham, WA., my first time to preach in a Sunday worship service since my last sermon at CAC. We got connected to FPC almost one year ago through an Art + Faith conference they sponsored. Pastor Doug and I share mutual friends, love some of the same writers, view pastoral ministry in much the same way, and both graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary. He started asking me to preach last summer but I wasn’t ready. As 2025 came to a close, he asked if I’d be open to preaching for him on February 16 and I said yes. I finally felt ready.
I arrived early to meet with the staff, pray, and go over the order of service and what part I’d play. As I watched Kerrie and Jocelyn scurrying around to take care of last minute details before the service started, I was reminded of how I did the same at CAC – if only the congregation knew what it took behind the scenes to pull off a worship service!
I took my seat on the hard wooden pew in the first row of the sanctuary built in 1884. The rows of pews are sloped upward on the first floor and are surrounded by a wrap-around balcony. A huge stained glass window looms large and colorful on the back wall above the balcony. The platform is five very steep steps high. I look ahead at a cross and the pipes from the organ. As the service started my anxiety increased, “Why did I say yes? What am I doing here? What have I got myself into? The majority of these people have no idea who I am and me they.”
The thundering sound of the organ belted out as we sang Crown Him With Many Crowns. Then we moved to Jocelyn and the worship band who led us in, are you ready for this?, the Goodness of God!
And all my life You have been faithful
And all my life You have been so, so good
With every breath that I am able
Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God
I stood stunned. The last thirty months flashed before my eyes from Oxford to Canby Alliance Church to resigning to retiring to Lynden to FPC to this Sunday and this song and this sermon. Some might call this a coincidence but I know better than that. I thought back to something I’d read years ago in Frederick Buechner about coincidences, “I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: ‘You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten.’”
When we started to sing the chorus to Goodness of God, it wasn’t just a ‘whisper from the wings,’ although it was that, but it was more like a strong tap on my shoulder followed by the words, ‘You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten!’
And all my life You have been faithful
And all my life You have been so, so good
With every breath that I am able
Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God
Yes, yes, yes. All my life God has been faithful and good. He’s been with us every step of our recent past from Oxford till now. And the same will be true for every step we take into our unknown future.