Matt Chandler - A Community of Life

If you have your Bibles, I would love for you to open up to that passage. We are going to look at certain parts of it, and I want to pull some of it out and lay it in front of you. Just so you know, right out of the gate, I’ve got two— I don’t want to call them competing emotions, but I’ve got two things happening in me at the same time. I think you’ll be able to appreciate it once I explain. I am really passionate about the subject matter today, and what ends up happening to me is I feel extremely—the part of me that’s meant by God to be aggressive is wanting to expose and destroy evil. You tracking with that? It’s like I want to expose and confront evil; I want to use the grace that God has given me to confront it and destroy it. However, because I’ve been pastoring for 20 years, I can, at the exact same time, feel my heart being really tender to those who have been affected by and have participated in evil in such a way that the shame and guilt have nearly crushed their capacity to be all that God would have for them. I have found all week, trying to prepare for today, those two emotions flaring up at different times as I walk through this message. So if you feel alike, that’s what’s happening. If you’re wondering how this week is different from most weeks, well, I think I just feel it a little bit more in a pronounced way this week in particular—maybe because of some experiences I’ve had, or maybe because of some spaces I’ve been in. I’m not sure. Let me start with this. When Lauren and I were hired here, it was 2003. We had no kids, and we were pregnant with Audrey, who just turned 18 in February. So she’s kind of this living barometer. This is the first time in my life that I’ve lived in a white-collar community. Y’all are different, man— and that’s not good or bad; I’m just saying that Daddy was in the military, and then he became a long-haul truck driver. So I grew up in blue-collar spaces, and one of the things that jumped out at me very early on here was how y’all treated your dogs. I mean, it was crazy! I was confused about what was going on. Maybe you’re a member of our church now, but there was a woman who would push her dog in a stroller. Did anyone else see this woman around town? She was taking her dog for a walk, but the dog was in the stroller! And then y’all’s dogs had clothes. Like, why does your dog need clothes? God clothed them; they don’t need a jacket! God gave them fur! This stuff weirded me out, man! Shoes for a dog? They don’t need shoes; God gave them pads on the bottom of their feet! So I made jokes about that. We didn’t have any dogs. I mean, Lauren’s rule from day one was, ‘If I’ve got to clean up anyone’s poop, nobody else gets to poop in this house! ’ So we just had Audrey—she pooped, then we had Reed, and then we had North. So dogs were way out there for us. Finally, we got our first dog as a family, an Australian shepherd. We named him Gus because that’s an awesome name, and because we’re «Lonesome Dove» fans. Let me say this: Gus was an awesome dog. I really loved that dog! He was brilliant—smarter than some people I know! Maybe you feel that way about your own dog. I thought this dog was smarter than a couple of dudes I know. You could say to Gus, «Hey, go get Audrey, ” and he would run to Audrey’s room, jump on her bed, and nip at her to get her up—that’s what shepards do! Then you could say, „Go get Reed, ” and he would run and hop into Reed’s bed. It amazed me—when I got up in the mornings, he would lay by my feet while I read the Bible and journaled. Now, Lauren was his person—Elsie was his little ‘g’ god, right? He worshiped at the altar of Lauren Chandler. Wherever she went, he would follow. Here’s what happened: as Gus got older, he started to have some health issues. The way we’ve handled it, because we are emotive people, is to go ahead and set an early limit on what we would spend on a dog, period. You don’t want to be emotional in the moment—you don’t want to be saying, „He needs a liver transplant!“ right? You don’t want to be those people—maybe you are, and that’s okay—but at the end of the day, he’s just a dog. As awesome as he was, he was still just a dog. He had a series of health complications, and we had to make the decision last year to put Gus down. So we went to our vet—our vet is incredible—and they had this little room. We got into this little room; Gus had no clue what was going on. It was me and the girls, and I was just trying to stay strong.