I’m having trouble sleeping tonight. I’ve been told that I shouldn’t bring my work home with me. That was really easy when I was doing drywall for a living; I could leave that on the job with ease. Although the drywall mud I tracked through the house, and left on the couch, and embedded in the bathroom rugs, might say otherwise.

The Lord called me into ministry as a teenager. I preached my first sermon at 18 years old. At 19, I preached my first revival and it lasted 2 weeks. It was in these early years of ministry that I realized, I didn’t want to be just a preacher. I wanted to be a minister. I didn’t want to just come up with fancy words to proclaim from a pulpit…I wanted to be in situations where there were simply no words to say.

When I was 21 years old, my wife and our daughter who was 18 months old, packed our belongings and left the comforts of our California home, to follow a dream of building a church in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Just a few months into our stay here, I received a phone call late one night. A young man had committed suicide and his family was in the E.R. with his body. I got there as soon as I could. As I rushed into the emergency room, there was a chaplain who met me in the waiting room. His name was Rev. Mike Pounders. I had never met him before, and I didn’t see him again until 6 years later, but my brief conversation with him changed my life forever.

“Is this your first time doing something like this son?”

“Yes sir, it is.”

He put his arm around me and said something that has become the very foundation of my entire ministry.

“They don’t need your words. They need you. They don’t need the answers. They just…need…you. And that’s why they called you.”

After spending the previous 20 minutes racking my brain, trying to figure out what in the world I was going to say, I exhaled, cleared my head, walked into a horrible situation, and I was just there. I was there to pray, I was there to hug, and I was there to cry. No sermon. No revelation. Just me.

In a decade of pastoral ministry, what I would call my “best moments” weren’t behind a pulpit, or unveiling a new sermon series, or updating our sanctuary. My favorite moments have been standing next to a grieving widow, crying with someone who was just diagnosed with cancer, and banging on a door at the Shamrock Hotel at 2 a.m. to bring home a prodigal son. The moments when I didn’t have any words to say…

Managing a funeral home, I’m often faced with situations where I don’t have words to say. Sure, I’m a professional who can talk you through the funeral process, but what do you really tell a sweet little lady whose husband of 65 years is gone? Or a teenager whose mother has died with a terminal illness?

I can’t sleep tonight. I admit…I’ve brought my work home with me. Two different precious families left my funeral home this week, and went home without their little girls.   It doesn’t seem fair to sleep. Not when others are hurting so bad.

Something I’ve learned over the last year, however, is that when I don’t have words, I can help empower families to let the lives of their loved ones speak. Our staff has created avenues to celebrate life in ways that people never dreamed of. We are blessed to have owners who don’t put quotas on us. We don’t have to sale a certain casket…we aren’t earning vacations based on the packages our families choose. We have the awesome privilege of simply serving a family…learning them…discerning their emotional needs…without worrying about the size of a contract.

I work with people who put their hearts into everything they do. We don’t have words…but we have ideas. We don’t have answers…but we’ve mastered the first steps of healing. You know what? I think I am going to sleep tonight. We honored some amazing lives today…and tomorrow, we’ll do it again.