Missional postmortem: some personal struggles, part 2
This has been a tough post to write.
As I previously mentioned, the past two years have brought two of the toughest personal challenges Jenell and I have ever faced. Last time I wrote about my two-year struggle with joblessness. That was tough.
This was tougher.
On September 30, 2009 Jenell’s mother, Nolie, died after a multi-year battle with cancer. I wrote about her at the time and I don’t want to be redundant, but there are some things that haven’t been said.
Jenell grew up in southern California as an only child. She and her mother Nolie were quite close. Even after we married in 1991 (she was 19, I was 20) Jenell visited her mother nearly every day and if she didn’t actually see her, they at least spoke on the phone.
Then, in 1993 I abruptly moved our fledgling family to Utah in pursuit of a new direction for my life – and we didn’t look back for 15 years.
Jenell missed her mother badly. I remember how much my wife struggled those first few years in Utah and, to make matters worse, over the coming years we didn’t see her parents more than once or twice a year because we were always several states away (first Utah, then Ohio). Over time this contributed to a growing distance between Jenell and Nolie and I saw how it took a toll on my wife.
I didn’t do much about it.
In late 2005 Nolie was diagnosed with cancer – about a year after we moved to Ohio. Jenell struggled with the fact that her mother was coping with the illness after we’d moved even farther away. But Nolie fought the disease and, thankfully, went into remission. However, by November of 2007 Nolie’s cancer returned and we knew it was more serious this time. We’d already decided to move back to California, but now we knew it was more important than ever.
Of course, I wanted to plant a church. A crazy, grassroots, missional, quit-my-career, screw-the-system, it-will-never-pay-our-bills-in-a-million-years kind of church. So I bundled the two together (moving back near family/planting a church) and sold it to myself and everyone else as a package deal. We moved in the summer of 2008.
The first year was a Godsend. We settled into the Oceanside community, enjoyed the beach, and built new friendships. Jenell re-connected with her mother as much as possible. It was tough for Jenell to see Nolie’s health deteriorate, and, I think in an effort to protect Jenell emotionally, Nolie was rather guarded about her condition – but Jenell pushed through the awkwardness. It was a very good thing.
It was right smack in the middle of all this that we attempted to start Ikon Community.
Actually, Ikon went very well initially. Our group started heating up in the Summer of 2009 – right when Nolie took a turn for the worse. Jenell started spending more and more time helping her dad with Nolie, and I began to wonder if we could maintain both efforts. Jenell said we could, and I ignored my better judgement.
When Nolie passed away in September 2009 I thought to myself, Jenell is going to need at least a year to really grieve so we should probably hold off on moving Ikon forward. But again, I ignored that impulse. Instead, I tentatively brought it up to Jenell, but she quickly dismissed the idea. She seemed to be handling the loss extremely well.
But Jenell didn’t know what she needed and I heard what I wanted to hear. I should have known better. I should have pushed through her dismissals and really cared for her. But, mired in my own emotional crisis, I was desperate for some kind of win in my life. Jenell knew that and she suffered silently.
The truth is, Jenell was in emotional shock. Outwardly she remained the rock she always has been, but inwardly she was processing her grief in complete isolation. I wasn’t there for her and, to be perfectly frank, we hadn’t allowed ourselves to grow close enough to the Ikon group to lean on them like we should have in a genuine community of faith.
So, for the better part of a year – from the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2010 – Jenell and I were each struggling with our own very serious individual grief. We weren’t completely available to each other or to the people of Ikon. As our frustrations grew on several fronts (personal, professional, financial, missional), we increasingly withdrew.
Things are better now.
Nearly 33 months after moving to California, 18 months after Nolie’s death, 6 months since I finished grad school and landed a stable job, and 4 months since closing Ikon Community, our lives are just now beginning to feel somewhat healthy. My perspective is better than it has been in a long time and Jenell has allowed me to share in the processing of some of her grief. I’m grateful for that.
I don’t know what lies ahead. But I don’t ever want to go back.
This, of course, is a testament to Nolie – a woman who’s unshakable hope and quiet tenacity became a benchmark for me of what it means to have faith. And Nolie’s gifts were powerful. She was creative, hospitable, and wryly intelligent. She never treated me with anything less than respect, even though I was, for a time, the worst possible thing that could have happened to her only daughter. She treated me as more than her son-in-law, somehow deciding at some point to treat me as one of her pastors – even though her mastery of the Bible certainly exceeded mine and would have rivaled that of any minister I know.
