Why is My Self-Therapy Needed?

This morning I felt like a failure.

We had a good Sunday service, a first-timer attended and a group of us took him out to lunch. Afterwards we did our monthly volunteer work at the local nursing home singing hymns with them and they sang like birds (more like geese than nightinggales - but birds nonetheless). So what was my problem?

My problem was that the group I was preaching to was much smaller than I had hoped it would be at this point.

My problem was that, though we have baptized two during my tenure here, they were both family members of church members. We have done outreaches- both servant and door to door evangelism; we have done community events; conducted several Backyard Bible Clubs; the members of my church are doing personal evangelism and we have joined together to pray for those we are reaching out to; I have shared the Gospel at Starbucks with co-workers and invited customers to come to church. And yet, the baptistry is empty.

Epic Fail.

At least that is the way I felt for a few fleeting moments today until I, gratefully, snapped out of it through some self-therapy.

The question that I am now wrestling with is "Why?"

"Why is it that these feelings of failure creep in in the first place?"

There are times when these feelings are legit. I realize that.

For example, I have really been convicted about how I did not devote enough time to visiting my folks (particularly the college students) this past spring. I had a group of them over our home each week, but there were some that I spent very little time with. Fail? Yes, fail. I intend on fixing that.

But this is not one of those times.

There is only so much control we have over the number of people who show up on Sunday and who get saved (did I say "so much control"? Maybe more acurately "no control?").

Last CPN, you may recall that Tom shared his own feelings of failure although he has seen two women saved out of Mormonism here recently.

How is that a failure?

How is it possible that we label ourselves as such?

Some thoughts on this would be helpful. Maybe if we diagnose the problem, we could be on the way to the cure.

-Doug