The Break Is Not the Verdict

At some point, everything breaks. Sometimes it comes slowly, and you could see it coming from a long time. Sometimes it comes all at once. And for me, it was both. A job ends with a phone call, a marriage ends, your kids' faces change in a way you'll never forget. A stepmom dies in five days.

A faith you preach for twenty years goes quiet, and you're standing in the middle of it wondering who you are if you're not the person you thought you were. The break is not the end of the story. It's the end of the first chapter. And this is week two of Dream Again. Last week was stage one, dream. Today is stage two, break.

Jesus wept in John eleven thirty five. Two words, the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, and he cried. In Lazarus' tomb, he wept even though he knew what was about he was about to do. He didn't skip past the grief. He honored it.

My break came in 2020. COVID had shut Miami down. While everyone else was figuring out how to get groceries, I watched almost everything I had built come apart in five weeks. The phone call came in May 2020. The church buildings were empty. Budgets were bleeding.

Nobody was hiring anybody. And my phone rang. It was the head of the staff. Hey. We need to talk. And I knew at the sound of his voice, the second I heard his voice, something was wrong.

And I went to the meeting. It turned out to be my last day at the church. I was told not to tell anyone, not to talk about it, and they get back to me. No paycheck, no income, nothing coming. I didn't just lose a job. I lost the only place that I knew how to be myself.

Who am I if I'm not this, pastor Erik? I didn't have an answer, not that day and not for a long time. I didn't hit bottom I didn't hit bottom. Bottom hit me, man. And the hardest part was the kid was... Wasn't getting let go.

It was the quiet that came after. Pastors, I had served alongside people I've walked with in their worst days, nothing. No call. No text. I don't... I think most of them were...

Weren't being cruel. I think they just didn't know what to say to a pastor who had lost his place, so they said nothing. And this was hard, not angry hard, lonely hard, the kind that sits on your chest and doesn't move. Have you been there? Not the crisis itself. It's the day after the crisis when you look at your phone and you realize nobody's coming.

Nobody calling. Nobody cares. If that's you, I'm not gonna tell you it doesn't hurt. It does. It hurts a lot. But I'll tell you this.

The people who disappear in your break are not the end of your story. Some of the people who matter most in your comeback, you haven't even met yet. That same year, 2020, I lost my stepmom. My dad called me. She was in the hospital. They were running tests.

Five days later, he called again. She was gone. Five days from the hospital to God. I was a pastor. Comforting people was my job, and I didn't even know what to say to my own father. Her death felt like proof that the God I preached for twenty years wasn't showing up.

He was, I just couldn't I just couldn't see him yet. Grief hides grace. It doesn't remove it. June 2020, five weeks after the phone call, my wife decided to leave. She wasn't happy. She didn't wanna be married anymore.

We had been together almost twenty years. I'm not gonna give you the details. It's not my story to tell by myself. Their mother is their mother. So here's what I'll say about her. She was burned out long before it ended, and some of that was on me.

And I neglected my marriage. I neglected myself. I let the stress of keeping a church alive sit at our dinner table for years, and that didn't help us. I don't get to tell the story of my break and leave out my part of... In it. And it didn't just happen all at once.

I saw it coming. I knew before June, so I did what I knew to do. I went to counseling. I tried to save it. I asked God to show me what I'm doing wrong, and I meant every word. It ended anyways.

Telling the kids was the worst day of my life. My own parents divorced when I was three, and I spent my whole life running from that, and I couldn't outrun it. I'll never forget the faces of my kids. One of them just stared at me. One of them just cried, and none of them really got it. I was looking at three faces for some sign that we'd be okay, and they didn't have that to give.

They were kids. On the day their mom moved out, I took the kids to Orlando for the day. I couldn't let them watch furniture being moved out of the house. We came back that evening. The house was half gone. Empty spaces where things used to be, outlines on the walls where pictures had hung.

And one of them looked around, one of my kids, and said, it's an empty house. Four words and all of it landed at once. Here's what I want you to know. Though our family is strong today, my kids are in high school and in college, they're in church, they love me, not because I pretend the break didn't happen, but because they watch me get back up. Broken doesn't mean finished. Kids remember what you showed them.

Can I ask you something? Who's watching you right now? Who sees how you handle your worst days? Because they're not just watching you fall, they're gonna watch what do you do next. I walked into the break at three hundred and twenty pounds, a hundred pounds overweight. I couldn't control what she felt.

I couldn't control the church that let me go. I couldn't control COVID. But my body? That was one thing I could control. And all I could do is all I can do, and I need to do it now so you can control your effort. You can't control another person's heart.

I'm done. I'm done with ministry. I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't wanna be a pastor. I just wanna make money, and I just wanna be rich. Make that money.

And the silence that came was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. For six months, I ran. I was mad. And somewhere in those months, I told myself, you know what? I'm gonna do whatever I want. I don't care.

Breaking every rule felt like freedom, but it wasn't. I was just trading one cage for another. So you can run from church, but you can't ruin... You can't run from yourself. Month six all caught up with me. Rock bottom isn't the fall.

Rock bottom is what comes after. It's waking up in the morning and remember... Remembering it's all still real. There was days I didn't leave the house. Days I didn't even wanna shower. Nights I'd let in...

Laid in bed thinking, what does anything matter anymore? You ever been there? I wasn't trying to end my life. That's not where I was. My heart was just brutally broken. I was so crushed.

I couldn't even feel. My mind just stopped. If your nights have gotten darker and you've ever wondered whether anyone would notice if you didn't wake up, I need you to hear me. You're not weak. You're not alone. Tell someone today in The US.

You can call or text 9888 any hour, and a real person will answer. Your story isn't over. For me, the silence had an address. It was my house. One week, had the kids in this beautiful home, and the next week, this house was empty. And they were gone.

Same rooms, same furniture, but nobody in them. The loneliness in an empty house, the silence in an empty house was deafening. And under all of it, not knowing what I was gonna do or what was gonna happen next, that's when it all changed. I stopped waiting for his voice. I was lying in the bed in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling, and I stopped looking for an answer. I just sat in it, the silence.

Not waiting for the next word, just breathing. Still here on a night when nothing seems to matter. And that's when I knew he was there. Not in a feeling, not in a verse that suddenly made sense. He was in the silence itself. In the fact that I could lie there broken, angry, and something in me was still breathing, still opening the bible even though it hurt.

See, God doesn't shut... Shout over your despair. He sits down in it. A week or two after I lost my income, a man called and asked me to meet him at the Lone Star Steakhouse. Love that place. Love steak.

And we sat down, and he slid a check over across the table, the biggest check I'd ever received in my life. And he said, Eric, God told me to give you this. Then he looked at me and said something I'd never forgotten. Eric, God's gonna take the shattered glass of your life and make it into a beautiful masterpiece. I didn't believe him, not yet, but those two checks that he gave me saved my life. They saved my mortgage in the midst of a pandemic.

I didn't ask for them. I didn't see them coming. It was only God. I was hurting. I was angry at God. I was running from him, and he was taking care of me the whole time.

God's mercy doesn't wait for you to stop running. I'm not telling you a check is in the mail or a check is coming. That's not the promise. The promise is is that he sees you right now in the middle of it. He saw me at a steakhouse table when I couldn't see him at all. And one night, I opened my bible in bed, and I wasn't looking for anything, and I landed here.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalms thirty four eighteen. Saves those who are crushed in spirit. For the first time, I didn't read it like theology. I read it like a letter with my name on it. Not far away, not waiting for me to get better first, not busy with some important people, close.

The word sat on the page like a hand on my shoulder. But you're still here. You're still looking, and that is the seed of the whole comeback. So if you're in the break right now, hear me. You're not being punished. You are not abandoned.

You are not forgotten. You are not alone. This isn't the last chapter of your story. God isn't sitting in heaven disappointed in you and angry at you. He's sitting in the pit with you right now, and he knows the way out. Here's the truth.

God doesn't shout over your despair. He sits down in it. The verse, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalms thirty four eighteen. The work. Say the sentence that you've never say it out loud.

Say it out loud when you're alone in the car. Say it out loud to God. Don't explain it. Just say it. That's your one move this week. Say that sentence, and I wanna help you with the next step.

Get the free reset guide. It pulls all the seven stages on a few pages with one step for each. Comment the word reset, r e s e t, and I'll send it to you, or grab it in the link in my bio. Hey. And this is the book where it all comes from. Dream Again.

Your comeback starts now. It comes out December 1. Hey. I'll see you next week for stage three renew. Your comeback starts now. It's time to dream again.