under the spotlights for everyone to see. And the larger the church grew, the less of a role he seemed to have up front. There were people who’d attended The Community for months, for years, who did not even realize he was on staff. Only the men got to know the Men’s Pastor, and even then, just a fraction of them.
At Jim’s church in Richmond, the stage would be Rick’s. His voice would be the one people heard every Sunday. Instead of shrinking, his reach would extend mightily.
“That was the problem,” he says. “Somebody puts a megaphone in your hand, and you better be sure you have something to say. I didn’t know if I had anything. Jim put me on the spot in a big way. Was I ready for that? To be honest, it scared me.”
One of the leadership blogs Rick kept up with had recently run an article about something called a “digital fast.” You unplugged your phone, stopped checking e-mail, shut down Facebook and Twitter. The idea being, we’re so bombarded by these media and feel so much pressure to stay on top of them that our focus becomes second-by-second instead of eternal. I remember him talking about this, though at the time I wrote it off as yet another trend-of-the-month. But Rick took it seriously and decided to go one better.
“I didn’t want to make this decision on my own. I wanted to hear from God. And to do that, I thought, ‘I need to unplug.’ With all the noise coming in, I was afraid I’d never hear him if God did try to talk to me. So I started with the idea of a digital fast, and the more I thought about it, the bigger the idea grew. I went out to the shed thinking I would keep a vigil, that I would wait until I heard the answer. I laid down on the floor, Beth, and I started praying.”
“I know.”
His eyebrows raise. “You saw me?”
“Honestly? I thought you were praying, but you were really asleep.”
“Ah.” He ponders this. “Can I level with you? I’m being completely transparent here. I’m not sure I know how to pray, not really. Up on stage, under the lights, I can spin a prayer out as long as anybody, but when I tried that night, I just ran out of words. They dried up on me, and that made me more scared. How could I be talking to people about God if I couldn’t talk to him?”
As he speaks, a well of sympathy springs up inside me. I never told Rick about my own struggles with prayer because I thought he wouldn’t understand. The first time I saw him, he was deep in prayer, and ever since he’s always been quick to chat with God like they were best buds, like they were brothers in the same fraternity. Now I know better, and it makes me love him a little more.
“When I woke up that morning,” he says, “I knew the vigil wasn’t enough. You thought I was crazy, and maybe you were right, but when the idea came to me, I had to do it. If I’d gotten anything from God, that was it. Not a digital fast, but an everything fast. That’s what I called it in my head, the Fast.”
Rick’s Fast wasn’t about abstaining from food, though that was to come. It was about abstaining from life, other people, the outside world. The satellite dish, to get reception, must be perched on top of the roof. In the same way, Rick had to elevate himself, get above things, if he was to receive the signal he wanted.
“The thing is, I never expected it to take so long. You were pressuring me about the birthday party, about Florida, and in my mind, I kept thinking all of that might still happen. If I could get this Fast done with, hear from God, and make the decision, then life could go on as normal. I wasn’t expecting the Fast to change things permanently, not like they have.”
So things have changed permanently? I let that hang in the air for now.
Not being the reflective type, Rick wasn’t sure what a Fast like this should look like. At first, he imagined an intensive self-improvement course. He would read books, he would watch videos, he would fill himself with influences in the hope that something would flow out of him in prayer. The first couple of days, he tried his