Tent Duty

Tent Duty
The crucible of leadership formation
by Alex Kirk

We seldom know in advance what God is going to do with our experience of “tent duty” — those times of seemingly wasted faithful service and waiting. Often, the work God does is subterranean and mysterious.


“Tie your boots impeccably.” —Post-it® note on my dad’s desk

My grandparents were missionaries in Brazil for forty years. The stories they tell are pregnant with the faithfulness and redemptive work of God as they took risks (and made mistakes) in their ministry with Brazilians. My grandfather went to Wake Forest University as part of his preparation for ministry. One summer break he eagerly sought out ministry opportunities to develop his skills and prepare him for mission work, only to come up curiously and frustratingly empty-handed. In the end he gave up his search, and took a job at a cigarette-making plant which was a primary employer in the area—a wasted summer. The next year he finished his schooling, married my grandmother and went to Brazil. Several years into their ministry, a government came into power that was skeptical of foreign missionaries. It cracked down on their operations, restricting them from access to the paper needed to produce Bibles in Portuguese. My grandfather’s experience at the cigarette plant provided this invaluable insight: cigarette paper was the same weight as the paper they were running through their press. The printing presses that the government had tried to shut down were cranked back up and they produced hundreds of Bibles on cigarette paper. As the Bibles were distributed throughout the country, a seemingly wasted summer was wasted no more.

The Place of Preparation
Exodus 33 describes a time full of tension and uncertainty in the story of the Israelites. They had just experienced major failure in the golden calf incident—God is angry, Aaron is foolish, Moses is the hero. As the dust is still settling, the Exodus account pulls back and tells us some things about life among the nomadic Israelites. Specifically, Exodus 33 tells us about the “tent of meeting” and how Moses regularly pitched this tent in order for the people to go to worship God. The tent was available for anyone to meet with God, but when Moses went in, it was particularly spectacular. There is one minor character in Exodus 33 that captures something pivotal about the preparation for leadership illustrated by my grandfather’s story: “The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent” (Exodus 33:11).

Tent duty. Joshua is guarding the tent, some distance away from the rest of the camp. Perhaps it was an honor to accompany the tent of meeting, but just as likely there were long stretches of boredom, many hours with no one coming and no one going. Moses is the one who gets to go inside, meeting with God face to face, speaking with him as a man would speak to his friend. Joshua is outside the tent, making sure that sacred things remain safe, that holy things aren’t mistreated. This is the first time in scripture that we meet Joshua, son of Nun. No one might have guessed it then, but soon this same Joshua who spent long days doing tent duty would lead hundreds of thousands of God’s people into the Promised Land. And his character will have been forged during tent duty.

God uses tent duty in the lives and hearts of leaders to develop integrity, to weave the fabric of faithfulness in their souls. Tent duty is unlikely training ground for a king/warrior/prophet, and on the surface it would seem far from practical. It’s not a management seminar, it’s not a military drill, it’s not a speech-writing class. It’s just tent duty. But tent duty will be used by God as he calls Joshua to follow after the leadership of Moses, the man the Scriptures describe as the most humble man on the face of the earth.

We seldom know in advance what God is going to do with our experience of tent duty. Sometimes, as in my grandfather’s story, tent duty is so amazingly redeemed it seems like fiction rather than fact. More often, the work God does is subterranean, meticulous, or, maddeningly, we’re never given a clear explanation of what he’s doing. In any case, we are seldom given a clear explanation while we’re in the midst of tent duty itself. In that respect it is always a faith-stretching exercise. And the string of questions will lead us to the place we nearly always end up if we have the courage or foolishness to follow the trail long enough: do we trust God to be good? Do we believe that he puts us exactly where he wants us? Have we genuinely given all our days to the Lord to have him order them as he sees fit? Do we trust that it’s all for our good and his glory? Embracing tent duty means looking at odd, discouraging or dry seasons of our lives and leaning into the grace of God. It is a reckless abandonment to the goodness and sovereignty of God. He is forever faithful or he does not exist at all; there are no other choices.

Embracing tent duty requires a significant paradigm shift in terms of how we view our lives. When we understand all of life as discipleship and all our various roles and contexts as venues for our discipleship, we find our goals and dreams radically altered. There is a glorious passage in Revelation that has captured my imagination in the last two years: “To him who overcomes . . . I will give him a white stone with a new name written on it” (Revelation 2:17). George MacDonald unpacks this brilliantly: “. . . it is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for only then can he first understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completion that determines the name. . . . Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name” (Unspoken Sermons, vol. 1). I, too, am in the process of becoming. Throughout the course of my life I have worn many names and titles. Some were earned, some were given, some were rooted in talents or roles: son, student, awkward, brother, friend, husband, sophomore, gifted, late-bloomer, employee, father, loser, leader. I can find myself becoming so enamored with these titles (or, in darker days, so self-hating) that I am tempted to take up my own stone and carve a permanent name for myself. But only God can give me my true name. All other names, all other titles, must either bow to the name on the white stone or they will be destroyed. Our God is a consuming fire. Tent duty is one of the many instruments of this blessed process of purification.

You may be married, dating, or single, in leadership or at tent duty, a student, working for a company, or at home with kids, all for the sake of forming Christ’s life in you. Jesus, like a good shepherd, leads us down the roads that we need to travel for repentance from our sin and into enjoyment of him. Every major hero in the Old Testament, from Abraham to Joseph to Moses to Joshua to David, experienced some space of life marked by struggle, loneliness, hardship, boredom or waiting. God is more interested in our character development than our career advancement. He is more interested in who we are becoming than what we are producing. He is more interested in our discipleship than our résumé.

Tent Duty in Cube World
The summer after my sophomore year of college, I was privileged to work at Camp Willow Run, a week-long Christian summer camp for grade-school kids. I worked with eight kids who shared a remodeled train car with me for a week. It was hard and rewarding work. The pay, however, stank. The next summer I evaluated my finances (or lack thereof) and decided that I needed to opt for a more lucrative summer job. I moved back to my parents’ home and signed up with a temp agency. Within a couple days I was in a cube going through call center training for a major nationwide bank. I had sold out. Instead of ministering to kids, I was in cube world making money.

My job entailed working with company employees who were having problems with their computers. Bob, a retiree who worked part time at the bank between shuffleboard matches in Tallahassee, would be having problems with his teller computer. He’d call us at the help desk and we would trouble-shoot. If we couldn’t fix it, we’d call the repair folks who would come out on site and do the repairs. I knew next to nothing about computers, but fortunately most of our work was pretty straight-forward: turn it off, turn it back on, good as new, thank you for calling network support.

My first two years of college I had been deeply impressed with several older guys in our fellowship who were quiet and wise. They were the type of servant leaders who listened well, spoke rarely, and when they did speak, everyone listened. I wanted, of course, to be just like them. However, a strange thing happened as I spent eight hours a day on the phone with stressed-out computer users: I discovered that I loved talking with people. I would chat with them about anything and everything that was happening in their worlds: “What was the weather like in New Jersey today?” “Someone from your branch called me about this yesterday; what are you people doing to your computers?” I’d often talk on the phone with them long after their computer was up and running.

I was, and still am, an extravert. This is how God made me, and while it needs redemption and transformation by the Spirit, it is good. Three months of tent duty at a phone bank in cube world taught me things about myself that I would not have learned in the Christian bubble, where I was still too busy trying to wear someone else’s armor.

What is your experience with tent duty? Almost everyone has had some space or season in their lives that at the time seemed pointless, plotless, aimless. How did you respond? What went on in your heart during your period of tent duty? Are you open, at times like these, to the surprising work of the Spirit to shape and mold you? Joshua would soon lead the stiff-necks into battle for the Promised Land. He would preside over the politically toxic task of dividing the conquered land among a group of squabbling malcontents. This work would require valor, integrity and grace. It would also require a deep sense of the direction, work and presence of the God of Moses, Abraham and Isaac. Tent duty was the place where these characteristics were forged in Joshua.

Built-in Tent Duty
Every task and every calling, whether it’s working in cube world or in ministry, has elements of tent duty woven into the job. No work sparkles all the time. I recently took a class on spiritual formation where we were required to keep a spiritual journal to reflect on our readings. I was in the midst of discerning my calling. I had been in campus ministry for eight years and I was getting antsy. Several job opportunities were coming my way and I was wondering if it were time to leave campus. One day I was reflecting in my journal on what God might be teaching me during this process, and I realized that it had very much to do with the tent duty aspects of my work:

I had a great retreat of silence two days ago. I was considering whether the explosion of job opportunities was so that I would see how well-suited I was for campus ministry. I wondered whether this was to lead me to repentance for my “grumbling” about some parts of my work. The scripture I’d been reading talked about lessons from Israel’s history: no idolatry, no sexual immorality and no grumbling. I circled back to that word; there was something for me there. I’ve grumbled most about my parking situation and the long walk to the Virginia Commonwealth University campus. The only way for me to park for free all day is to park and hike a long, long way. I started to consider my response to this walk. The Cary Street walk makes me feel like my work on campus is marginal. The walk through broken glass and beer cans makes me wonder if what I’m doing is valuable. I begin to think that not only is my work marginal, but also that God’s work and his story are secondary. Nothing about the day-to-day operation of the campus administration or faculty seems to take into account either the work of God, or me, his wonderful emissary.

And so I find that my heart is again wrapped around all the wrong things. This walk has cast its spell on me—I think the things of God are peripheral and that I need to be recognized. This is a vital lesson for me no matter what I do. Either I must learn to delight in the humble parts of ministry that serve to ground me, or I will become absorbed in tireless and tiresome self-promotion. Every job has its long walks down Cary Street. There have been times when creative ministry on campus has been more about my own plans and potential glory than God’s will and his praise. I long for my creative energies and big dreams to be drawn from deeper wells. I long for the walk down Cary Street to be the seedbed of humble and holy creativity. Can I learn to embrace the humbler parts of my job—of any job? Can I delight in God’s purifying me as I walk down Cary Street?

For many of us, God enforces a period of tent duty to protect us from an intoxicated love affair with ourselves. For some it is longer than others, in order to deepen us, steep us in perseverance, prepare us for the real work ahead. This kid Joshua, he leads, and does so with great anointing and great power. Joshua is among the few Old Testament heroes who end up untarnished by moral failure. Perhaps Joshua’s near-flawless record is rooted in years and years of tent duty. We need to learn to trust, to wait, to work, to be faithful in the places where God has us. Tent duty is a gift, not only to us but to the people that we will be fortunate to have the opportunity to serve.

When nothing seems to be happening, keep moving. Guard the tent impeccably. You never know what God might be doing with you at the cigarette factory.
_____________
Emphasis placed in the above article are mine.
Graduate school=tent duty. This is exactly what I'm doing. God keeps saying WAIT. And in this waiting, I am growing incredibly frustrated. The temptation is to rush God's timing and to go off and do something crazy. However, the harder temptation to resist is to deny the hope that he has me waiting for a reason. I know a bundle of reasons why: to teach me patience, humility, servant leadership, and radical dependence upon him. To give me space to explore my gifts, to refine my motives, to continue to heal areas of sin. However, this does not make the waiting easier, as this does not keep the temptation to give up at bay. However tempting it was to not return to MSU and stay at Hope doing InterVarsity things, I'm not reckless enough to do something unthought-through, something drastic without a very good reason (ie, walking into my advisor's office and telling him I quit or just not showing up for days in a row). For me, the harder challenge is to trust God's call. For the first time in my life, God has opened such a door for me. For the first time in my life, my heart makes sense. For the first time in my life, I'm excited about something that is not academic--and that's valid. For the first time in my life, my heart matters--my heart, not my brain or my achievements, and for the first time in my life, I have permission to use it! The temptation, in this time of waiting, is to ignore it and toss it all into the garbage can and chalk it up to emotion and naivete.

Peace came today when this scripture was sung in the IHOP prayer room: Indeed, let no one who waits on You be ashamed. (Psalm 25:3)

Hosea/Thornbushes and the Desert

I feel like I'm kicking against my goads, so I'm tired and hurting.

Yet, still, I am grateful for them.

There is a God...and I am not Him

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne... (Isaiah 6:1)

My grace is sufficient for you... (2 Cor 12:9)

Jesus is LORD. I am not. I am not God, and I never will be. No matter how good I've been, how good I am, or how good I ever will be, however hard I try to be perfect, NOTHING I do will EVER make me good enough to be God. I need to remember this. I need to remember to breathe and to let go of my death grip!! that I have on controlling my life.

This is my identity. From page one of Genesis to the last page of Revelation, this is my identity: There is a God. And I am not him.

Be a sinner, and sin boldy. But believe more boldy that Christ is victor. Martin Luther