Reignite

Fresh Focus for an Enduring Faith

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• Publisher: Bethany House Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493427987
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Even pastors struggle to keep going sometimes. When Dr. Jack Graham had a major surgery ten years ago, he knew it would take a physical toll, but to his surprise, he also found himself wiped out emotionally and spiritually. He wrestled with depression and a lack of spiritual energy, and he struggled to find joy and growth in his walk with Christ. Maybe you've been through a crisis of your own. Or maybe the busyness of life has overwhelmed you, or your faith has grown stale over the years and you've just been going through the motions. So how do you get back to being spiritually energized?
In Reignite, Dr. Graham shares the powerful lessons he learned during his own dark night of the soul. He shares biblical insights on how to keep your relationship with God from growing cold, how to focus on what truly matters, and how to make the most of your years on earth, creating a legacy that advances the kingdom of God. For those who follow Jesus, God has promised a triumphant life and an eternity of joyous celebration. But we also need to embrace this joy and victory right here and right now. Let Reignite help you recapture what you've been missing.

PART ONE
Fundamentals of Our Faith

1
Truth That Never Turns

Like a finely tuned engine, our brains are designed for only one fuel—Truth. The Truth that comes from God. The Truth that pervades His creation. The Truth found in His perfect character and infallible Word.

Robert Morgan, Reclaiming the Lost Art of Biblical Meditation

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:14–17

Clearly, I had underestimated what the process would involve. It was 2009—and springtime, no less, the quintessential season of newness and hope. And yet there I stood, on the edge of a dark chasm, the ground crumbling beneath my feet.

My longtime doctor, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, founder of the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas, had been watching my PSA numbers for quite some time—the better part of four years, in fact—and was growing increasingly concerned. In healthy males, prostate-specific antigens are supposed to remain relatively few in quantity. Mine didn’t register as “few.”

“It’s your prostate,” Dr. Cooper had told me, early in the game. “Something’s off . . . but let me do a biopsy before we get ahead of ourselves.”

We did the biopsy in 2009. Dr. Cooper processed the results. And then I got the phone call nobody wants to get. “I’d like you to come in again, Jack,” the good doctor said, which told me everything I needed to know. A doc doesn’t need to see a patient to deliver favorable news. The diagnosis I received during that in-person visit was a sobering one: “Prostate cancer.” And this for a guy who rarely catches a cold.

Back to that “process” I mentioned. Once I had the diagnosis, I asked about a treatment plan. Evidently, surgery would be required—the equivalent of a hysterectomy, I was told—but I was fine with that. We’d cut out the offending agent, in this case my prostate gland, I’d hang out at home for a bit, and then I’d get back to the people I loved serving, the congregation of Prestonwood Church.

But God had another plan.

My surgery took place on May 14, a Thursday, which was three weeks and two days before an important milestone in the life of our church. During our worship services on the weekend of June 6 and 7, we would be celebrating my twentieth anniversary as senior pastor of Prestonwood, and I figured that if I “rested hard” for ten days, I’d be in great shape again, just in time for that glorious event. What I couldn’t have foreseen was that not only would I be basically crawling into the pulpit to receive my commendation that first weekend in June, but I also would be spending the next many months disoriented, deflated, and suffering a diagnosis that felt equally grave: anxiety.

Anxiety?

Me?

My reflexive reaction was to wave it off. But I’m Jack Graham! I thought, incredulous. Turns out anxiety didn’t care who I was.

I experienced panic and fear during that season unlike anything I’d known before. I had prayed prior to my surgery, “Lord, don’t let me flinch in the fire,” but I had no idea the flames would be that high or that the burn would be that deep. In Proverbs 12:25, we read that “anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down,” and that’s exactly what happened to me. Anxiety gave way to depression, and suddenly I was in the fight of my life.

Dead Man Walking

In his brilliant book on all sorts of mental illnesses, Caring for People God’s Way, American Association of Christian Counselors President Tim Clinton, a friend of mine who has more letters behind his name than almost anyone I know, named depression the “common cold of emotional disorders”1 and wrote that while the potential causes of depression are still debatable—Is it caused by a poor diet? By a lack of exercise? By chemical imbalances in the brain? What role does lack of sleep play in a person’s propensity to deal with depression? Can you overwork your way into this state?—what’s not debatable are the symptoms that inevitably occur.

“For Major Depressive Disorder to be diagnosed,” he said, “one or more major depressive episodes must have occurred. This means the depressed person must have experienced at least two weeks of depressed mood (or irritable mood in children or adolescents) or loss of interest or pleasure in almost all activities, together with a minimum of four other symptoms of depression . . . such as: (1) marked weight loss when not dieting, weight gain, or change in appetite; (2) insomnia or excessive sleep; (3) slowed movements or agitation; (4) decreased energy or fatigue; (5) feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate or excessive guilt; (6) indecisiveness or decreased ability to concentrate; and (7) recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.”2

The way I would characterize my experience was that of a dead man walking—or crawling, as the case may be.

Hopelessness.

Sadness.

Helplessness.

Despair.

Numbness.

Listlessness.

Despondency.

Loss of appetite.

(That last one was most concerning to my family. Man, how I love to eat.)

And then there was the insomnia. The insomnia was the worst. I’m the type of person who regularly logs six or seven hours of restful sleep. Sure, maybe it’s not the eight or nine hours I was once able to net, but if you’re from my generation or older, then you understand how aging affects us all. (If you’re younger than I am and can still sleep like that, then you should fall to your knees and thank God right this moment. Things won’t always be this way.)

“For my days pass away like smoke,” the psalmist wrote in Psalm 102:3–9, “and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is struck down like grass and has withered; I forget to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my flesh. I am like a desert owl of the wilderness, like an owl of the waste places; I lie awake; I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop. All the day my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse. For I eat ashes like bread and mingle tears with my drink.” Were we to title the various entries in the book of Psalms, this one would be called simply “Depressed.”

Because I was not sleeping much during that awful ordeal, I found other ways to occupy my nights. Such as fretting. Slipping into full-on panic attacks. Inviting in anxiety like it was an old friend and asking it to stay awhile. “We’re not sure we caught it all,” the surgeon had informed me after I’d awakened from the anesthesia. Every night, as I lay in bed wide awake, I pictured the cancer filling my body to overflowing, water in a balloon that one day would burst.

For many months I was exhausted all the time, which made life feel like a weighted slog through a pool of mud—taxing, inefficient, slow. Emotionally, in a slide that this buoyant guy had never once experienced, I also developed a certain disdain for happiness in all its forms. Life was hard. Very hard.

Recently I came across the reflections of a distance runner on a particularly awful marathon he had competed in. The temperature outside was blazing hot, and despite his love for and his vast experience with the activity, that day he just didn’t “have it.”

“At around twenty-three miles I start to hate everything,” he said of the race. “Enough already! My energy has scraped bottom, and I don’t want to run anymore. I feel like I’m driving a car on empty. . . . I’m dying of thirst but lack the strength to even drink water anymore. As these thoughts flit through my mind I gradually start to get angry. Angry at the sheep happily munching grass in an empty lot next to the road, angry at the photographer snapping photos from inside the van. The sound of the shutter grates on my nerves. Who needs this many sheep, anyway? But snapping the shutter is the photographer’s job, just as chewing grass is the sheep’s, so I don’t have any right to complain. Still, the whole thing really bugs me to no end. My skin’s starting to rise up in the little white heat blisters. This is getting ridiculous. What’s with this heat, anyway?”3

My equivalent of being irritated by sheep happily munching grass happened when I no longer wanted to be around my four-year-old grandson, Ian. This was a real low point for me, because as my only grandchild at the time, Ian was the light of my life. And yet I distinctly recall being ill-equipped to match his energy, his optimism, his spark. I’ve never been one to become upset to the point of tears, but the day I made that realization, I sobbed. Shortly thereafter I placed a call to a Christian counselor whose number I had been given. I was certain that nothing and nobody could help me, but something inside of me at least had to try.

Emerging from the Pit

It would take me a full year and a surfeit of resources to get out of the pit I’d unwittingly slid into, and among those resources was time.

Time Heals (Some) Wounds

I’m not sure the adage about time healing all wounds has it right, but time does indeed help. The only problem with that reality is that I’m not exactly a patient man. I have about a fifteen-minute-long tolerance before something needs to move. I distinctly remember lying in bed on a workday, sequestered there in Deb’s and my master bedroom, willing the clock to tick faster, all but begging time to hurry along. During those weeks and months, a whole slew of smart people told me it would take a year for me to recover from my setbacks, but did I believe them?

Uh, no.

Still, I tried to be a good patient and even agreed to a two-month sabbatical on the heels of that twentieth-anniversary celebration at the church. If time was what was needed, then I would give this thing plenty of time. Ironically, exactly two weeks before my prostate surgery, I’d released a book I’d been working on for the better part of a year. Powering Up it was titled, despite its author now living powered down.

The Life-Giving Power of Touch

Just as important as the resource of time to heal my mind, my heart, my life was the resource of touch. As much as I hated to admit it, I was in a real mess that year. I needed support, encouragement, and care. Plenty of friends and family members called and texted and even stopped by from time to time, but in addition to those generous acts, I took the initiative too. My friend O. S. Hawkins has been like a brother to me since we met as teenagers at Sagamore Hill Baptist Church in east Fort Worth, under the mentorship of Pastor Fred Swank, a true hero of the faith. We were called into ministry at the same time, we served in the same states at the same times—Texas, then Oklahoma, then Florida, then back to Texas—and we remain the closest of friends to this day. Having him close by as I wrestled through that dark season was a balm. “Remember, Jack,” he told me in the heat of my battle, “there has never been a sunset that wasn’t followed by a sunrise. Joy comes in the morning. Just hang on.”

How I needed that simple, straightforward reminder. “Bear one another’s burdens,” Galatians 6:2 says, “and so fulfil the law of Christ.” What a relief it was to have so many lovers of God agree to bear my burden with me. “Weeping may tarry for the night,” Psalm 30:5 says, “but joy comes with the morning.” Yes, the morning would come again.

Giving Thanks to God

And then there was the practice of thanksgiving. Each day, even on the days when I could barely string two coherent thoughts together, I would force myself to write down something I was grateful for. My goal was three things, though on some days there would be only one. Still, I held fast to that one thing, being sure to say “thank you” every day. I once heard that a negative attitude is like a flat tire; until you fix it, you’re not going anywhere. I knew that was true for me then.

Study after study has confirmed that the moment you choose to express gratitude, your brain begins to change. Because the brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and because the brain has a distinct confirmation bias when you ask it to focus on something positive—say, something for which you’re grateful—it goes in search of more things to be grateful for and won’t stop until you tell it to. Thanksgiving begets thanksgiving until eventually all this positivity has an incontestable medicinal effect. It is the healthiest of all emotions.

The late Ed Dobson, who pastored in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease—in 2000 and died fifteen years later from the muscle degeneration caused by the horrific disease. Three years before his death, in his book Seeing through the Fog, he noted his current gratitude list as something of a prayer. “Lord, thank you that I can still go to the bathroom by myself,” he wrote. “Lord, thank you that I can still brush my teeth. L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• PART ONE: Fundamentals of Our Faith
• PART TWO: Swaps That Support Reignition
• PART THREE: Results of Going with God
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ad
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover