As I think about significant moments in my life I am struck at how many of those moments did not seem significant at the time but became so over time.

One of those moments happened to me in the summer of 1969 at the Story City Bible Camp. Today I would call that moment life-defining for me as a preacher. But at the time it was just a few seconds in an evening worship service at an ordinary Bible camp in central Iowa.

Actually the Story City Bible Camp was not that ordinary to 17-year-old high school students like me. This camp was on the “must attend” list for the tribe of covenant youth in southeast Iowa that attended Pella Christian High School. Held in mid-August, this camp was where the herds for the coming school year began to form. 

Most of my memories of that camp are a blur. I remember a couple of long walks with Juanita. I was walking on air. But I don’t remember much else — except the final evening worship service. 

Rev. Lugene Bazuin was our camp speaker for the week. Everyone loved Rev. Bazuin. For 75 percent of Pella Christian students, Lugene Bazuin was the first preacher they had ever seen smile. Rev. Bazuin made preachers seem human. He had a way of making things so clear and real and simple. He was joyful. And he told stories. 

On this last night, Rev. Bazuin was talking about the love of God.  I’m not even sure how this story he told tied into the love of God, but he told us a story about a boy from his church who had just been killed a few weeks before in the jungles of Vietnam. He told us how the boy died, and how the Marine representatives came to the home of the parents. Again, I don’t remember how he tied that sad story into the love of God, but I remember feeling like I was sitting right there in that living room with Rev. Bazuin and those parents. And I remember feeling held in the arms of a caring God.                     

And I remember, in the middle of that experience of being enveloped by the love of God, a moment of total silence. It’s crazy what you remember, but I remember that it was so dead quiet in that room that the crickets in the darkness outside were deafening. That silence couldn’t have lasted for more than a few seconds, but I remember looking out of the corner of my eye, first at some people sitting beside me, and then out over the audience, and realizing that we were all one, caught up in something bigger than ourselves, held together by something . . . or someone.  

The last thing I was thinking about that night was becoming a preacher. I was far more interested in Juanita and a million other things swirling around in an insecure teenager’s mind and heart. But I realized, years later, that I made a mental note that night, deep in the subconscious of my soul, a note that this was a splendid moment, that this was something bigger, something magnificent, something divine. And it was a moment that God had used the lips of a preacher to mediate.

What’s amazing is how this moment shaped my life and my perspective over time. Subconsciously I relive it every time I experience that deafening silence either as a preacher or a listener, almost always through the medium of a story.

That moment came back to me a few weeks ago in Chicago when I was meeting with teachers of preaching from various seminaries in the Chicago area. Brought together by the Compelling Preaching project of Lilly Endowment, each teacher shared the seminal idea of their project. My favorite was the person who observed that “transformation through preaching is not first of all ideas changing minds but is emotions changing hearts.”

Which then reminded me all over again of Jonathan Edwards’ point in Religious Affections that the center of the Christian faith is not first of all a set of propositions but the correct passions, religious affections; not first of all a matter of the mind but of the heart, but the heart now encompassing not just emotion but Spirit-created delight in God and lasting obedience.

Indeed a brief moment at that Bible Camp became the lattice upon which God’s Spirit formed my deepest convictions about who God is and how God changes people.

Every preacher has their own idea of a fulfilling career. My cup runneth over at the thought that perhaps God mysteriously worked through my preaching, just a time or two over the last 50 years, to create in someone the kind of life-changing wonder and delight that I experienced that night at the Story City Bible Camp.

Summer camp photo by Terren Hurst on Unsplash
Hand holding photo by Joe Yates on Unsplash