Why I'm running for office

“...seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” Jeremiah 29:7, NIV

In case you hadn't heard the news, I'm officially one of three candidates running for the position of mayor of Chetek. The primary in mid-February will narrow the field to two and the general election will be held in April. Whether or not I will be able to add “mayor” to my resume remains to be seen.

Since “going public” with my decision on Facebook a few weeks ago, I have had a regular stream of “attaboy!”s, “go for it!”s and enthusiastic support whether in person or by responding to my post or, surprising to me, many of my friends on Facebook re-posting my original post on their wall. This past week in the Chetek Alert, our local newspaper, it was front page news and several times since the paper came out I've been stopped by friends and acquaintances to wish me well and to ask me why. Why do you want to run for mayor? And the implied question as well, How did it come to this?

Here's a brief time-line of how I got to the place I now stand:

• About five years ago, Tom Stamman, an evangelist who ministers in the personal prophetic spoke this over me: “You should run for mayor.”
  (Those familiar with Tom's ministry know that Tom says a lot of things and not every one is "gospel truth". In fact, my understanding is that the New Testament function of the gift of prophecy operates far differently than it did in the days before Jesus. What I have come to do with his “words” is jot them down, hold them lightly and see what happens.)
• Six months or a year later he came through again and shared the same 'word' with me.
• During the last six-eight months there have been more than one or two conversations that we're eye-brow raising to me as I have not been spoken of this matter to anyone except my wife from time to time. For instance, I was at the funeral of my wife's cousin in Madison when the best man in our wedding chose to introduce me to his adult children in the following manner: “Jeff's the mayor of that town up there.” Or this past fall when our daughter Emma and I were speaking of our home town when she volunteered, “Dad, you should run for mayor.” It was, at the very least, curious and left me scratching my head a bit. Was God saying something or was I just seeing what I wanted to see?

• 

  I've played a mayor before at the Red Barn

  But what really put things into motion were two relatively recent conversations. In a town like Chetek, it's the town clerk that really runs the show. She keeps a low profile and diligently goes about her work but anyone who is paying attention knows that the reason things usually work as smoothly as they do is because of Carmen. Our girls had gone to school together so Linda suggested I speak to Carmen about this and so I stopped in at City Hall the week after Christmas and asked her to set me straight and pour cold water on this smoldering idea. Instead, I emerged 45 minutes later from her office with candidacy papers in hand. As she described just what the mayor does in Chetek she described someone with my skill-set – the ability to work with others to achieve certain ends, the ability to communicate with the public and to be the ambassador of our town, to name three.
• The second conversation preceded the one I just referenced and it is far more significant to me. In mid-December, our fellowship held a 24-hour prayer vigil simply because I felt we needed to hear from God. The morning the vigil began I turned my phone on and received a text from Duane. Duane is a career missionary with Youth With A Mission and someone I hold in high regard as a man of spiritual discernment. This is how his email read: “Got message from Greg and Rachel regarding prayer [for the mayoral vacancy]. I know nothing about the city and Knapp Haven issue. Their message triggered dream I had some days ago suggesting you consider running for mayor.” Understandably, that got my attention. When Duane and his wife, Lois, showed up to pray later that evening the three of us conversed about this matter. Until that moment, I had not discussed this with anyone other than my wife. In the midst of that conversation, Duane in his usual nonplussed manner shared this little nugget: “Jeff, you're history tells you where you are going.” I can't underscore enough how profoundly this affected me. Frankly, I had never heard it put just this way (apparently, as Lois explained, this is one of many common “Duane-isms”). I don't want to overstate it but it was something akin to Peter's rooftop vision in Acts 10 that freed him to begin pursuing the Gentile mission. The big net he saw was essentially a paradigm shift and nothing could ever be the same after that.

The way we were 1991

We have lived in Chetek for 24 ½ years now. When we moved here, we were a family with little kids. Now we're essentially empty-nesters. During this time, we've raised a family, bought and remodeled a 120-year old home, and led a local Christian fellowship through the seasons and the years. Our kids have marched in the Libertyfest parade as members of the Chetek (later Chetek-Weyerhaeuser) marching band and most of us have at one time or another have ran or walked in the Fishy Four. Over twenty-four years of pastoral ministry I have served on numerous boards (the Knapp Haven board, the Kinship board, the Chetek Food Shelf board and most recently the Community Center board), began and led a community youth ministry, was a founding participant of the Chetek Youth Center Project (aka The Garage) that for 15 years provided a safe, healthy place for kids to gather on Friday and Saturday nights, and chaired the Facilities Improvement Committee that helped bring about a successful school referendum in 1999 that brought 10 million dollars worth of new construction and remodeling to our school buildings. For 20 years I've read to kids at Roselawn. For 8 years I've coached high school Cross Country and middle school track. For 4 years I've been a sub in our district, mostly at the elementary school where I am still taller than most of the kids in that building.

All of these things don't necessarily mean I am qualified to serve as mayor but it does underscore the fact that Chetek is far more than the post I man. It's the home I love. 

The way we are today

“You're history tells you where you're going” said Duane. In that moment that he shared this with me, all the things I have been about since 1991 flashed before my eyes and suddenly it wasn't such a long walk around the block to imagine serving my adopted home-town as its mayor if that's what the voting public desired. So, that's how I got here.

Okay, the way we really are

Back in 1992, during a personal prayer retreat, the Lord spoke to me through Jeremiah 29. I had retreated to a friend's cabin in the woods in hopes of hearing from God for a sermon series. While I did get inspiration and (as I recall) got three good messages from it, in retrospect I really think what I heard was the word of the Lord for me, specifically verse 7: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile...” That, in a nutshell, is one way of summing up my ministry in this community all these years. I have consciously and intentionally sought to do just these things whether it was helping raise money for new playground equipment on Roselawn's playground through the PTO or writing gas and food vouchers on behalf of the Chetek Food Shelf for those in need.

I'm indebted to Eugene H. Peterson's comments on Jeremiah 29:7. The word translated “peace and prosperity” is the Hebrew word shalom. As Peterson puts it:

Shalom means wholeness, the dynamic, vibrating health of a society that pulses with divinely directed purpose and surges with life-transforming love. Seek the shalom and pray for it. Throw yourselves into the place in which you find yourself, but not on its terms, on God's terms. Pray...

Jeremiah's letter is a rebuke and a challenge: 'Quit sitting around feeling sorry for yourselves. The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible – to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love.' Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

This is one of the hats I've worn - the day we broke ground 

Early on in my ministry here I received another seminal 'word' from a guy who was speaking at a pastor's gathering in Duluth. At the time, Jerry Cook was something of a big deal in the Pacific Northwest and was making the conference circuit. I was enamored by many of the things he shared that day and bought his book, Love, Acceptance & Forgiveness: Equipping the Church to be Truly Christian in a Non-Christian World. I've read it a couple of times since then and one of the bucket-fulls I've drawn from this well is this:

I was praying one day for the Lord to give me the community and the Lord stopped me. “Never pray for that again,” He said. “I'm not going to give a community to you. Instead I want you to pray, 'Lord, give me to the community.'”

This was how I finally awoke to the fact that God didn't want us to be a separate subculture, He wanted us to penetrate every segment of the society in which He had placed us.

This counsel has kinda been my marching orders ever since.

I'm not telling people, “It's God's will that I run for mayor.” Rather, I'm simply telling people I'm persuaded, based on all the things I have just shared, that I should pursue this – win or lose. I'm not asking people to pray that I win. While I'm humbled that a lot folks (who, by the way, can't vote for me anyway) believe I'd be a great mayor, I want them to pray that the Lord directs my steps. “A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps” (Proverbs 16:9, KJV). If at the end of the day the citizens of Chetek choose another man to fill our present mayoral vacancy, well and good. I won't take it personally. It's not like I got nothing better to do. But for the time being, I'm running for office and feel a remarkable sense of peace about it. In fact, I'm actually having fun.

We'll see

A month or so ago, while eating at the Lake Buffet in Rice Lake, my fortune cookie that night read: “YOU ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK ON A MOST DELIGHTFUL JOURNEY!” At the time, I opined aloud to Linda if perhaps another trip to Africa was in the near future. Maybe a different kind of journey is now in store. I really don't take a lot of stock in these computer-generated pithy sayings but back in 1995, on the eve before my ordination, Linda and I were sitting in the little Chinese restaurant in Madison we used to frequent before we married. That night my fortune cookie read: “YOU TAKE A REVERENT ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE AND ARE MOST CAPABLE IN GUIDING OTHERS.” Divine guidance? I guess that's for the folks who frequent Refuge to decide but I sure find it scintillating.