David:     The Year in Review. That’s the looking back season we’re in right now.

Karen:     We’re looking back over the stories of 2022 like the war in Ukraine.

David:     Okay, that was a big one, wasn’t it?

Karen:     It is a big one still.

David:     The World Cup, that’s in my mind the amazing French-Argentinian final.

Karen:     And I’ve been watching the January 6th committee review. All of their interviews.

David:     That’s been big all year.

Karen:     It has been.

David:     This visit we’re going to suggest that it might not be a bad idea for your own personal year in review.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     Before we say goodbye to 2022 Karen, let’s you and I do a personal year in review as a model of what we have in mind for others.

Karen:     So, what happened to us this year?

David:     There were a lot of things that were big in terms of our world. One of them would be – my heart problem was finally resolved. That was in July, and I haven’t even thought about how my life is so different since it’s been done.

Karen:     We’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but you had Supraventricular Tachycardia. How about that?

David:     I only know that for some reasons unknown to me at given times that were inappropriate like just before I’m going to preach my heart would start beating very, very fast. When it was at home and that happened, I knew that I had to stretch out in the bed and just rest for about a half an hour and slowly it would start to slow down.

Karen:     You often would go to sleep. You lie down and go to sleep.

David:     Yeah. And then when I would wake up, I would be fine. I’d gone to doctors on it. And then you have this terrible thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. And you’re trying to do the work that you’re called to do. You went on so many times for so many years.

Karen:     You had a specialist, a heart specialist. And they had you on medication. But when it kept happening, they finally decided that they would do a catheter ablation.

David:     Yeah, I had no idea what that was.

Karen:     No, we didn’t either.

David:     It was a procedure which was bigger than what I thought it was going to be. But since that time, it has been absolutely perfect. And I can even begin to express how grateful I tried to tell the surgeon. And I said to him, “I need to say to you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You have literally changed my life.” And he kind of brushed it off. But I said, “I don’t think you heard me. I want to say that.” He still didn’t mean too much to him.

Karen:     Thinking about the next patient.

David:     I don’t have time for compliments you know. But as far as I’m concerned that was a life changing event in this last year.

Karen:     One of the great things that’s happened here in the house is our son Joel moved home. His ministry that he was part of had to close much of it down. And so, he sold his house. And we said, “Well, just move in with us. Don’t buy another house. You don’t really know where you’re going or what you’re going to do.” So, he looked at the things that needed to be done in his parent’s household and began systematically to get them finished.

David:     That’s number one on your list.

Karen:     It was huge. The whole downstairs was completely renewed. We had friends who gave us a very large gift. She had sold some property she had inherited and so she distributed that gift around to whoever she thought was on her heart. And we were the recipients of part of it. At the same time that Joel moved in, we had money to make all of these remodeling and repairs in the downstairs. So, the downstairs is in beautiful, beautiful shape.

David:     The floors were all replaced.

Karen:     The old carpeting.

David:     All the floors taken up.

Karen:     Subflooring.

David:     Put in and that was incredible. Joel worked on expanding the kitchen. Got an extra foot and a half and opened up the whole kitchen dining room . The cabinets, all reworks.

Karen:     They were painted. We found a painter who came in just did a fabulous job. Wonderful.

David:     Brother-in-law Steve Bell says, “I know how to put that tiling on the kitchen. I did it in my own house.”

Karen:     He came and did them. Then Joel finished it up and then grounded it and new sink put in and new kitchen counters. It’s just unbelievable. I’ve not ever had that kind of renewal physically in our home before. So, this was fabulous. It was a great gift.

David:     In January, you’re going to turn 80. I’m 86 and we have now our end-of-life matters in place. I mean, if we die, no problem.

Karen:     Everything legally that needs to be done has been done.

David:     And that’s a good feeling.

Karen:     Yes, it is. One of our good friends researched lawyers and found us just a wonderful lawyer here in town who worked with us. On all of that stuff. I think it’s daunting to lay people because you don’t even know where to begin. How do you leave appropriate end-of-life papers and instructions for how you want to die? I mean, if you’re lingering and there’s no hope for a future, then go ahead and let that life terminate.

So, all those sorts of questions that now the kids don’t have to decide on their own. They have all of our wishes down, which is great. That feels really good.

David:     Yeah. So, that’s another big thing that has happened in terms of our lives and it makes life more enjoyable. Knowing that we have made certain decisions.

Karen:     There’s an order. There will be an orderly transition.

David:     I’m discovering, Karen, how valuable it is to have what I would call a spiritual advisor. And that was certainly proven to me, repeated times this last year.

Karen:     Or a spiritual director is the other term for that.

David:     It started the year before, but it was only a few months. And now I’ve gone a whole year meeting at least once a month with this gentleman. He’s a retired schoolteacher and a dear man and really has a walk with the Lord. And I’ve never taken advantage, say, of someone who would say, “I’m not going to give you advice. I’m just going to ask you a question. And when you tell me what you’re thinking, I’ll try to help you process it more.” In fact, a lot of times I find asking the right questions helps free me to come up with the answers that I’m kind of looking for.

Karen:     Spiritual directors are really a role that developed in the monastic communities in the Middle Ages. So that men who had given themselves to monastic lives within Catholicism always had a spiritual director they would work with as far as the process of their spiritual life in that setting.

But it’s become extremely popular in the last, oh, let’s guess, 30 years and jumped outside of Catholicism out of the professional priesthood. So that laypeople begin to discover that there was extraordinary benefit in this. Your spiritual director has been trained as a spiritual director. So those people are extremely valuable because they know the ins and outs, what’s good to do and what’s not so good to do. Plus, he’s just a lovely man. I feel like he’s as much a friend in some ways as he is your spiritual director. So, it’s been a great asset for you. I know.

David:     I wish I’d done it a lot sooner. I have someone that I feel that I can confide in. I don’t come home and say, “Well, this is what we talked about.” Basically, those are private conversations between me and Roger. I find myself thinking, oh, that’s good. That’s something I want to talk with Roger about.

Karen:     Oh, isn’t that wonderful, David? It is so wonderful.

David:     Yeah. So, all those are good. In terms of your spiritual walk, talk about it this last year.

Karen:     When you’ve been a Christian so long and I can’t remember when I wasn’t a Christian. I remember at about, oh, I don’t know, eight years old, Billy Graham early in his ministry came to Moody Bible Institute and was speaking in a classroom of all things that my dad taught at Moody. And I was down there with my mother. And he gave an invitation. And I stood up or something at that time. But I think I had been a Christian before that. So, I’ve always had this in my background. There are endless amounts of reverence in our extended family. I mean, there was at least 20 that I can name in past generations and present generations.

So, we’ve been in a ministering environment, ministering family. And one of the things I was thinking, I don’t want my faith in my later years to be pro forma. Simply you do simply because you do it.

David:     Or because people expect you to.

Karen:     Because people expect you to do it. This is the way it’s always been. I want to have the passion and the love and the adoration I used to have when I was younger for God. And so, I began to go through the New Testament and just look at the words of Jesus and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

David:     This is a yearly emphasis?

Karen:     It just began sometime in my devotional life. And it started and then I’m still doing it. Often, I go back and reread the things I’ve read already. And I’ve just fallen in love with Jesus again.

David:     Yeah, that’s wonderful.

Karen:     Just thinking, oh my word. This is some of the passages we know well, but we come so familiar. This is from Luke. “But I tell you who hear me. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.”

David:     Yeah, these are getting, they’re very strong.

Karen:     This takes your breath away, doesn’t it? “If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” And the scriptures go on reporting what Jesus said.

Well, this is what I call living by the power of the positive opposite. Instead of doing what our human nature wants to do is to get back, to have revenge, to be nasty toward that person we don’t like.

David:     The sack the guy who hit you, a sack him back.

Karen:     A sack him back. Jesus is teaching a powerful positive opposite here. Now this is particularly pertinent to these days when we have so much rancor in our society. And I have found that there are certain public figures I really don’t like. I just don’t like them. Certain politicians I don’t like. But this scripture applies to those, even though I don’t see them face to face and I don’t pass them in the hallway, or I don’t have discussions with them.

Even my attitude toward them as I watch them on television has to conform with this – love for those people you don’t like. So, as they come up on the television screen or… or as I hear things, I remind myself of this scripture and say, God, give me a love for this person. There’s one politician who I have had trouble doing this with. And every time he’s interviewed or I, as mentioned, I take this scripture and I say, “I’m supposed to love this person. And I pray that God’s love will extend to his life, even though I don’t like the words he says or the words he used, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I have found that God has given me a particular tenderness toward those people who react to them. I mean, it’s hard to even, you just think, “Oh, what a loud mouther.” You know, all the awful things we think about human beings. This is a human made in the image of God. God loves that person more than I can possibly explain or know.

Yeah, I have to be accountable to these scriptures. So, you move from what I call a pro forma, you know, being nice, nice, nice, but not toward those people you don’t like to something that goes into a realm of spiritual reality that we can’t measure. We don’t really understand, but we know it really exists. And to begin to step into that is a deeper level of faith for me to be that obedient to the things that Christ has said in his teachings.

David:     Yeah, there’s always that further understanding and further awareness of how unique Jesus was and is.

Karen:     I would recommend people as the reviewing their past year to start if they haven’t done it already. And we can’t renew this practice enough probably, to start reminding ourselves again, exactly of how Christ taught we were to behave with people who offended us.

And because if the church would do that, if thousands of Christians would do that, and I’m sure hundreds and hundreds and hundreds do, but let’s say thousands of Christians were behaving that way, society would be remarkably altered. So anyway, that’s my personal journey here as I look back on the year and then say, “What do I want to be in the next year?”

David:     We’ve had a spiritual journey as it relates to church. For many years, we were involved in church in the inner city that affected us in a profound way and still does. And we’ve had different church encounters. We were a part of an African American church for six years. And that was extremely beneficial.

Karen:     Yeah, it was.

David:     And that grew us up in a lot of ways. But we’ve decided of late, as we get older, especially, and it’s harder to travel as you’re older, that we would try to find a church home in what is called West Chicago. That’s the actual name of the town, West Chicago. So, we started visiting and either in West Chicago or very close in one of the adjacent towns to West Chicago. We eventually visited 18 churches.

Now, that doesn’t sound like very many and you start to visit all of them. And we finally came to the place where we said, “Could we be a benefit to a given congregation?” And Lord, begin to direct us to which congregation that would be. Now, the majority of the congregations were quite small. Churches with maybe eight people in the morning service.

Karen:     30, 40.

David:     That’s even larger. We kind of settled on an in-between number, this church, and we’ve been going there now for five months. And we’ve gotten to know almost all the people. I would say they would average maybe 40 on a given Sunday. But because of the age of the people, I happen to be the oldest person there, as far as I know, most of them are gray hair. And where they’re missing is the 20, 30, 40.

Karen:     Yeah, the 50s, they have high schoolers and that age. So, we just said, “Lord, this is the place, I think that you want us.” And so, as you said, we’ve attended for a month. They’re being led by bi-vocational pastor elders. These are men who have professions and full-time jobs in other areas. Interesting.

David:     And very responsible guys.

Karen:     Very responsible men. And so, we just said, “Well, what can we do?”

David:     So, that’s been a whole new experience for us. Just observing the various churches, I would say of the churches we visited of those 18, my guess is that half of those will be dead within a matter of another five years because they’re just not enough people to carry on ministry to pay for the building cost and so on. It’s an interesting day watching, and you come away with a feeling, if this is West Chicago and it’s indicative of where the churches are on the country, the church is in real trouble.

Karen:     So, what we’re looking for is a place where we can begin to dialogue with the church body and its leaders and say, “Let’s figure out together what we need to do to grow this church, to get it into a growth spurt again.” Because if we can do that and if we can do it well and we begin to attract younger couples, we have one or two families with kids in grade school. I mean, that’s all. Then perhaps we can come up with some principles that will help other churches to shift their momentum and then begin to grow. And if that can become a model, then out of our personal experience with these people, it could be something that would help a lot of little churches that, and I can say in five years, may not be in existence at all.

David:     This last week, I had one of the five occasional ministers say to me, “Let’s get together. I’d like to pick your brain as to what you’re thinking about the church.” And I said, “That was fine. Let’s wait until the new year comes because everything’s kind of backed up right now as far as trying to find time.” He said, “That was fine.” And I’ve thought about that since then and I’m thinking what I will say, I have to be very careful. People respect me and I don’t want to make anyone feel badly. But for example, if that church is going to attract people to come and be a part, they’re going to have to think in terms of shorter sermons. You can’t preach today to the average younger individual for 40 minutes. They just won’t sit there that long and listen. They’ll listen for maybe 15 to 20 and if they’re struggling to listen, they’ll just turn it off at that point. Now I have to say that in a very gracious way, but at the same time, I have to make that point very clear. “Are you able to do this?”

Karen:     To change your style.

David:     Not necessarily style, but just the length of service. And I have a list in my head of saying, these things will need to change if you want to attract new people. Now I’ve come to a place in my mind, Karen, with that church, they may not feel they need to attract new people. One of the strengths of that church is these are beautiful Christian people.

Karen:     And they love one another.

David:     They really do.

Karen:     They just have a wonderful community. They really do.

David:     And they’re very welcoming and warm. They’ve been extremely gracious to us, you know? But if they continue doing what they’re doing, the church will die. Just like many churches that maybe have eight people, one church had eight people, and that counted us, two of us. So, they had six people in the congregation and two people up in front leading.

In fact, one of the gentlemen came up afterward and said, my wife said, “If I don’t come up here and welcome you because we never get visitors, she’ll kill me.” You know, which was he was being funny. But at a certain point, you reach a point and no return. You can’t build it because people are not going to come in. They know how much work it’s going to be to make that church thrive again.

Karen:     So, the idea just to emphasize is that if we can be a part of a church that’s…

David:     That needs an infusion of people.

Karen:     Yeah, okay. And it can become successful as far as beginning to grow. Then there are principles that can be derived from that. That could be useful to a whole variety of other churches who are in a similar place. And as we know, in America, the church is dying. So, we feel like this is potentially a very crucial activity for us, particularly since we have a heart for the local church. You’ve ministered to thousands of them through the chapel ministries. And so, we just were there saying, “Lord, at the end of our life, this is what we would like to do. And is this the place that we should begin to do that? Is it open to a dialogue?”

David:     I have several more things on the list, but I’m not going to be able to get to them. For example, spiritual dreams can still come true. It almost comes to the place where I thought, “Well, maybe I’ve stopped dreaming.” But you know, the Tales books, now that story as far as others interested in putting them into film, that’s been a wonderful story. And it’s like, how in the world did that happen? We’ve talked about it in a program, so I don’t have to go back into all of it. But I could give more or less but let me give the principle behind what I’m talking about.

As another year comes to an end, it is enlightening to recall the many ways God has been good to you. I think it’s possible, not having just started a list of our own to say, you know, there’s been a normal year, nothing special happened, how you do it, I’m okay. This has been a good year.

Now I’m just going to go back to scripture. This is Psalm 103:2-5. “Praise the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Don’t forget about all these. List them, who forgives all your sins.”

I think that’s neat. I sinned this year. I don’t know if you did, but I did. And God has forgiven those. “Heals all your diseases.” Thank you, Jesus. “Redeems your life from the pit. Crowns you with love and compassion. Satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles” and such.

So, here’s the psalmist saying, don’t forget all of his benefits. Now that’s kind of what that year in review idea does. It says “You have been very, very good to us, Lord.” As another year comes to an end, it is enlightening to recall the many ways God has been good to you. It’s been a good exercise. And just mentioning it to our listeners, I think that they will find it’s a good exercise for them as well.

Outgo:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2022 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.