THE PROBLEM: I CAN’T …
In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach … until one weekend when the sermon wasn’t going well and I started to feel anxious and dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the platform, looking into the concerned faces of the congregation. I had fainted in the middle
of my own sermon. What made it worse was this was not a Pentecostal church where you get credit for that sort of thing. These were Baptists, and they expected preachers to stay on their feet.
I was in the middle of finals, about to get married, and preparing to travel overseas for a year. I thought perhaps this was a one-time occurrence due to all the stress in my life. I went to get help from the dean of my program, Arch Hart, a psychologist who wrote books on stress management.
But
a year later, the very next time I got up to preach, I fainted again. I also fainted a third time in a stressful private conversation.
I went back to Arch. “This is not good,” I said. “I can’t preach if I faint regularly. It makes people nervous. The more scared of fainting I am, the worse my preaching gets, and the worse my preaching gets, the more scared I am. Give me more stress reduction exercises. I want a guarantee this won’t happen again. I will try harder not to faint.”
“Not
a good plan,” he said. It turns out that if you have a fainting problem, trying really hard not to faint actually makes you more likely to faint.
He went on. “Here’s an idea. Next time you preach, just set a chair out on the platform. Then, when you’re about to faint, sit down. It’s much harder to faint when you’re sitting down. Plus, you don’t have so far to fall.”
“But it would be humiliating,” I said. “People keep telling me to just trust God, to have more faith. This would be a
public reminder of my weakness.”
“Yes.”
So in my early days of preaching, I preached standing next to an empty chair. And when things didn’t go well, I would sit down.
Forty years later, I wonder now if fainting was perhaps a divine invitation to recognize that preaching, like life, is not something that can be mastered. It was only the beginning of the battle to resist acknowledging my weakness, which continues to this day. My final church job many decades later ended in a
much darker experience of weakness and defeat and humiliation than the first one. And there was no chair big enough to hold me up that time.
Human agency is a wonderful gift. We are not passive victims in life. We are called to courage and initiative. And yet …
I have experienced powerlessness in the areas of life that are most important to me. I have experienced deeply painful failure as a parent. I have experienced deeply painful failure in my calling as a pastor. This has
left brokenness around me and within me that I cannot solve and cannot fix.
This is my reality. My life must incorporate this painful, broken weakness if it is to be a life at all.
John Ortberg and John Mark Comer, Steps: A Guide to Transforming Your Life When Willpower Isn’t Enough (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2025), 1–3.
