What's Rankin been thinking about lately?

“What have I been thinking about lately?”

“Not much, apparently,” according to my mother, who reminded me that I haven’t updated this page since May. So much has been happening in our family and at the church that it has just slipped my mind.

Morgen is now 6 weeks from her due date (November 8th). She and the baby are doing wonderfully. We don’t know whether it’s a boy or girl, and neither does our doctor for that matter because the baby’s legs were crossed modestly during the ultrasound. It’s a bit old-fashioned but we wanted to be surprised.

A stranger we met at a wedding this summer gave us some advice that I think we’ll follow. She said to ask the doctor and attendants in the birth room not to announce the sex of the baby, but instead, to let me tell Morgen, “Sweetheart, we have a little ______.” Truth is, we have no idea. Some days we are convinced “BOY” and other days certain “GIRL.” We are thankful for either and simply praying for this little one’s health and for Morgen’s.

A friend of mine, father of 3, when I asked him what I needed to do to prepare for fatherhood, responded flatly, “Have you ever been hit in the face with a 2x4?”

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Have you ever been hit in the face with a 2x4?”

“No and I think I’d remember,” I said.

“That’s my point. There is nothing that can prepare you for the shock, the wonderful shock, but the shock that fatherhood will be.”

It’s terrifying, to be honest, as I know how ill-equipped and unready I am. But that’s been a theme: my lack of competence for the assignments the LORD has given me as husband and as pastor.

“Who is sufficient for these things?”

The Apostle Paul asks this question in 2 Corinthians 2:16, and the implied answer is clearly, “No one.”  I often forget this, and begin to think that the future of the church or our family is somehow in my frail hands.   I may not say it out loud, but my fears about the future, my worries, all betray my lack of trust in our Father’s control.

Yet, Paul’s words about our insufficiency can actually be a source of great comfort.  The work of the Gospel, indeed all of the Christian life, can never be done in our own power, but that does not mean we are powerless.  “Our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent,” (2 Corinthians 3.5).

A hero of mine, now out of the ministry for a personal failure, said to his congregation in his final sermon, “Do you know when you are ready to repent?  It’s when you want so desperately to change, but you know, perhaps for the first time in your life, that you are powerless to change your own life. And into that vacuum rushes the powerful grace of God.”

May this profound sense of our own “insufficiency” only grow and with it a hunger for the presence of God, and with that hunger, may the power and presence of God flow over into our lives. “Since we have such a hope, we are very bold” (2 Corinthians 3.12).