Author Archives: Brad Hepp

Listen Here:

An Honest Conversation

I recently had a conversation of the sort best reserved for wise and intellectually honest friends. It went something like this:

Friend One: I have spent thousands of hours praying for things that God did not grant.
Friend Two: Prayer serves to conform us to the Son’s character.
Me: That’s a palliative. From what Jesus declared in the Gospels, we should expect the Father to grant our requests.
Friend Two: Don’t get me wrong. My requests are often granted before I rise from my knees.

Before I Could Forget His Words…

Susan and I are in a remarkably tight-knit and loving small group at church. This morning I was composing a group email to remind us all of the prayer requests we shared at last night’s meeting. My request had been that I need a little more work… Not a huge amount. Just a little.

As I wrote my email to the small group, other emails were coming in FROM CLIENTS. Those emails were requests for at least two day’s worth of website maintenance work. Good, pleasant work, for excellent clients.

So, this evening, I texted our group about how our prayers had been answered before we rose from our knees.

Additional Thoughts

Another of my very wise friends suggested one of her favorite quotes on prayer:

Sometimes when we say “God is silent,” what’s really going on is that he hasn’t told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.”

― Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

Listen to this story here:

A friend recently asked, “How can you tell if your congregation is growing in discipleship?” Being a contrarian, I immediately thought of one sign that a congregation is NOT growing in discipleship: NOT seeing love in action? It’s NOT growing.

My mind went back to a trip I took around Europe right after graduating from college. When I got to Vienna, Austria on a Saturday evening, I called a family who were missionaries with the same mission board as my folks, and got directions to their English-speaking church. I was secretly hoping they’d invite me to lunch, but that didn’t happen during the phone call.

The next morning, I left the youth hostel and made my way to their church. The service had already begun, so I slipped into the back row and set my backpack on the floor. Strange… everything was in German. I don’t speak German. An old lady on my pew could see I was confused, so she asked in broken English if she could help. I showed her my map, and the name of the church I had written down. She smiled and pointed on the map to where I should have gone. It was two blocks away. I had picked the wrong church.

“Oh well,” I thought. “It would be rude to leave now. I’ll just slip out as soon as this service is over. Maybe I can make it over to the English church before they let out.” The preacher ended his sermon and slipped out to where he could shake hands with the congregation and with visitors as they left his little chapel. So much for me escaping quickly. The preacher shook my hand and engaged me in a brief conversation. I don’t recall the content of that conversation; I do recall the warmth and evident love in his manner.

I shouldered my backpack and walked briskly over to the “right” church, the English-speaking church where the missionary family attended. Whew! They had not let out. I entered the lobby and set my backpack down beside me. It was a large pack, containing everything I needed for traveling around this strange land for two months. So there I stood, left hand steadying my pack, right hand ready to shake hands with my missionary contacts, or with anyone for that matter.

The service ended. People began filing out. They were speaking English! By this point in my travels, that was a welcome sound. I didn’t know what the missionaries looked like, and I was too shy at that point to ask the people who walked past me. They didn’t seem to notice me standing there, and I didn’t want to interrupt their conversations. Well, surely the missionaries would notice me! Given that I had talked to them on the phone the evening before, they’d surely be on the lookout for me…. The sanctuary emptied. Not a single person walking by me acknowledged my presence. The lobby was empty. I left. Empty, hungry. I had picked the wrong church!

Surely someday, the Lord will introduce me to the people in that little German-speaking Viennese church. Perhaps He’ll seat me with them at a banquet. The banner overhead will be “LOVE.”

[August 15, 2021 Note]
Recently, when I posted this story on Facebook, a friend pointed out that the piece seemed accusatory and unfair since some people are introverts. The friend gave me something I’m still considering. Nonetheless, here’s how I responded:

Was I rebuking that English-speaking church all these years later out of anger or a sense of entitlement? Hopefully not. As I said in the post, I am on a “long journey from THINKING right to DOING right.” The Israelites were admonished to learn kindness to strangers from their own history. Likewise, I must learn to BE kind (not just think aright) from MY history. Thinking about how it felt to be the shy, powerless, hungry, disconnected stranger all those years ago is instructive to me. Those of us who have struggled with shyness or extreme introversion KNOW how far a little kindness and hospitality can go. We, of all people, know that we should make the effort to be hospitable.

THIS is one of the most influential truths I have experienced in my 58 years. (I have checked out MacDonald’s claim…. Look at where “doctrine” is mentioned in the New Testament. Almost always, you find descriptions of BEHAVIOR, not abstract head knowledge):

“I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word “doctrine,” as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.

– George MacDonal

And it’s beautiful. The best head knowledge comes as a result of practice, not the other way around. Are you not very “smart”? DO what God requests and you’ll be far smarter—where it REALLY counts—than the most intelligent God-denying individual ever, anywhere.

I have begun thinking about greed. It occurs to me that it is at the base of many other sins. Next step: catalogue and observe how it is mentioned in the Bible. My vague recollection is that it heads up several lists of vices, and is the subject of various stories and parables. It is one of the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Would it be greedy to ignore the thinking of Christians over the centuries and concentrate solely on what I personally can derive? Probably so. And stupid.

“When greed builds her dam,
The river becomes a cesspool.”

from The Politics of My Heart: A Book Not Yet Written by Brad Hepp