Send Someone Else

The last time I preached, I was eleven years old.

A school chapel service. I don’t remember the text. I remember it felt less like a beginning than a misreading — like the whole room was listening for resemblance, and I already knew I wasn’t going to give it to them.

I’ve spent the twenty-plus years since then explaining, in one form or another, why I would not be doing that again. I even wrote it down. Twice.

Every word of both essays was true. They were also the most articulate hiding place I ever built.

Let me show you what they couldn’t.

A long time ago, I made God a promise. The kind you make young, before you know what it can cost. I told Him I would be obedient. Anywhere. Any assignment. Whatever He asked, the answer was already yes.

I meant it. I also spent years quietly making sure He would never ask the one thing.

The one thing was this: to stand in front of His people and speak. And worse — to be responsible for them.

I had reasons. Good ones. I’ve published them.

And the reasons were the respectable part. Underneath them was a man running. I said it out loud, and I wrote it in my own hand: I’m not called to preach. I enrolled twice and quit twice. I built exits into everything, so the question could never corner me.

I am not my father’s pulpit. I wrote that, and I still can’t be his. I argued I was some and not all — that the body of Christ needs the people who build and serve and carry the quiet load, not only the ones who stand and speak. All of it is true. I would teach it again tomorrow.

But being right about the theology is not the same as being honest about yourself.

Somewhere in there, a true sentence — not everyone is called to this — became a false one about me: so it can’t be me. I let the first one cover for the second. From the outside they sound identical. They are not the same voice.

One of them is discernment. The other is fear, wearing discernment’s clothes — and I had dressed mine in my very best exegesis.

Here is how I finally told them apart.

Everything else in my life, I’ve tried to hold with open hands. The marriage. The grief. The work I did claim — the kind that builds the platform instead of standing on it. But this one thing I kept in a fist — palming it like a kid hiding candy from a parent who can already see it.

I gave Him all of it. And kept one thing back.

If I’m honest, the fear was never really about preaching. It was about comparison.

I’ve written before about what it is to carry a name like mine — how people don’t always ask who you are, they measure how much of someone else made it through you intact. You can spend years being treated like evidence instead of a person.

You learn the shape of it early. “You sound like your father — do you preach like him?” When I was working in music, people would introduce me without a name at all: “Do you know who this is? This is Bishop Jakes’ son.” No name. No credentials. No context. Sometimes it only embarrassed the person making the introduction. Other times I could feel the whole conversation tilt in the first ten seconds — the relationship settling on whether I matched what they’d already concluded about my father.

So the fear had a specific shape. It was the terror of standing where my father stands, opening my mouth, and coming out an echo. A faint copy of a voice the whole world already knows. I could survive not being called. I wasn’t sure I could survive being a lesser version of him.

What I could not see — what fear will never let you see — is that the whole thing was built on a lie. The lie was that God wanted a copy.

He doesn’t. He never did.

My wife and I set aside a week to fast. We were asking God for direction. I should have been more specific about what I was willing to hear.

Larissa heard it first. She kept telling me I was supposed to speak at the anniversary. I told her it was too soon. She wouldn’t let it go. And then, at a family breakfast — my parents there, my sister Sarah across the table — Sarah looked up and said it herself, unprompted: “You should preach for the thirtieth.” Larissa had never breathed a word of it to her. I heard it twice.

But the thing that finally broke the fist open wasn’t them. It was Him.

It was the third day of a fast I’d named Set Your Face. I had just read Peter’s charge to the shepherds — feed the flock of God among you… and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown — and I stayed in the room to pray. The Spirit came in heavy. The glory in that bedroom got so weighty that I ended up face down on the hardwood floor, crying before I understood why. There, with my face on the wood, I asked God to use me. And as clearly as I have ever heard anything, He told me He wanted to use me to speak to His people.

The charge to shepherd them was still open on the page in front of me.

Shepherd. Not help. Not support. Not build the room the word gets preached in. Shepherd.

I know that word. I built an entire essay on the verse it comes from. When Paul lists the gifts in Ephesians 4 — some apostles, some prophets, some pastors — the word sitting under “pastors” is poimēn. Shepherd. I had used that verse, carefully and at length, to explain why that word wasn’t mine.

God used the exact word to tell me it was.

I reached for my no. And it came up lighter than I remembered. No conviction underneath it. No weight. Just fear, dressed up in good theology.

I’d like to tell you the hiding was original. It wasn’t. Open the Bible to almost anyone God ever called, and the same reflex shows up first — a reason they are the wrong one. Moses stammered. Gideon was the least of the weakest clan. Jeremiah was too young. It happens so often that scholars treat the objection as a fixed feature of a calling — the native reflex of someone who has just heard God ask.

I thought about Moses.

God called him out of a bush that wouldn’t stop burning, and Moses started stacking up reasons. Who am I. They won’t believe me. I’m not eloquent. And that last one was even true — the Hebrew says he was heavy of mouth. A real limitation. A genuine one.

Then he stopped hiding behind the true thing and said the real thing.

Moses wasn’t afraid of a sermon. He was afraid of the people on the other side of it — the whole weight of leading them. Send someone else is what you say when the assignment is bigger than a moment.

Here is the part that convicts me. God answered every objection Moses raised — I made the mouth; I will be with it; I will teach you what to say. Moses never took the answer in. He kept his eyes on the limitation and never once on the promise standing over it: I will be with you.

That is the line. God is patient with the doubt; He is not patient with the refusal. His anger doesn’t burn when Moses says “I can’t.” It burns when “I can’t” hardens into send someone else. You are allowed to be afraid. You are allowed to feel like the wrong choice. What you cannot do is stay unpersuadable while God is standing in the room telling you He will go with you.

I had my own heavy of mouth. I am not my father’s voice. That part is true, and it will always be true. I’d just been using a true thing to say send someone else.

Here is what the fear kept me from reading.

God said it first to a people in exile — a promise that He wasn’t finished, that a way was coming through a wilderness that had no roads in it. But the line that undid me was the question at the end. Do you not perceive it? The new thing was already springing up. And I couldn’t see it, because I was still bracing to be an old thing repeated.

I am not my father. I used to hear that as a disqualification. It is the whole point.

God is not trying to reprint a voice the world already has. He is raising a shepherd it has never met — one who happens to share a last name with a man I’ve spent my life admiring.

And here is the mercy I almost missed: God never fixed the thing I kept naming. Moses stayed heavy of mouth to the end — God just set Aaron beside him and said I will be with your mouth. He didn’t hand Moses a better tongue. He handed him His presence. I kept waiting to be made adequate before I would answer — to somehow become the voice I am not. That was never the offer. He was never going to turn me into my father. He was going to go with the son who isn’t.

Here is the arithmetic I’d been avoiding.

On one side: my fear. Being compared. Falling short of a name. Standing on that platform and sounding like less.

On the other side: His people. And somewhere among them, one person who came for an anniversary and walked into an appointment. One person on the edge of a yes to God they’ve been putting off for years.

Weigh a soul against your own stage fright and see if it’s close. It isn’t.

So let me say the thing my own essays talked me out of.

I am built to be a pastor.

Not a copy of one. Not a stand-in for one. One. Made for it, by the God who made me — and afraid of it for so long that I wrote arguments to keep the fear respectable.

Some is still true. Some are called to this, and some are not. I just filed myself under the wrong some — because the right one asked for more than I was ready to hand over.

On the Sunday The Potter’s House turned thirty — the house that raised me — I did the one thing I’d spent more than twenty years swearing I never would. I preached. Not the last thing I’d do before going back to the work I’m comfortable with. The first thing I did facing forward.

I don’t have all of it figured out. I don’t know the full shape yet — the where, the when, how much. Pastoring is a cost before it is a title, and I grew up close enough to it to have no illusions about the weight. I’m not romantic about it. I’m just done running from it.

I am not my father’s pulpit. I never will be.

But I think I’m finally willing to be my own.

God said He wants to use me to speak to His people and to shepherd them.

There is another man in that book who stood in a room too holy for him and said the honest thing — I am a man of unclean lips. True. Real. And when he heard God ask who would go, he didn’t reach for send someone else. He had already been undone; he had nothing left to guard. He just said: Here am I. Send me.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t say send someone else. I said the other thing. Here I am.