Tim—or Bro T, as the college kids knew him—listened to me preach the day after I met Kandi. It was a Tuesday worship service at BCM. The following week, he told me he’d like me to be his protégé for a summer of ministry in New Mexico. I’d be investing my time in 130 college students—an amazing opportunity. I think Tim may have seen in me a rough lump of clay that God was ready to mold into a useful vessel.
It sounded great, and I immediately liked Tim. But I still had an open invitation from CentriKid—I’d gotten myself excited about that one, too. Crunching the numbers, I knew I could preach five times a week for CentriKid, but only once in New Mexico. I went back and forth between the two choices. I prayed but received no clear direction.
I happened to grab lunch with my friend and fellow seminary student Byron Townsend after church at Edgewater Baptist the next Sunday. Byron had been discipled by Tim at Nicholls State, and he said a few simple words that changed my life. “Robby,” he said, “I know you think you’d get five times as much preaching experience with the younger kids. But spending a summer with Tim LaFleur will change your life. I’m not exaggerating. You’ll come back a different guy.”
The counsel of a friend, as Proverbs tells us, can be powerful. I marinated in Byron’s words for the next two days, and the whole issue became crystal clear. I told Tim I would accept his offer to be camp pastor for the High Point program in New Mexico. I’m not sure I ever made a better decision, other than the day I gave myself to Christ, or the day I said, “I do,” to Kandi, ten months later. Those moves would be hard to top.
Like Kandi, I felt like I was with an old friend the first day we spent together. Alongside our official duties, Tim and I began meeting once a week for intentional discipleship. I performed my first baptism in the creek at the camp under his guidance. He showed me how to organize a Bible study, how to properly prepare a sermon, how to grill steaks to perfection, how to cook 200 hamburgers on a stone grill, how to over season them with Tony’s Chachere’s, and even how to play a mean game of Spades (gambling excluded).
Probably the most valuable lesson had to do with relationships. I watched how he interacted with his wife at just the time I had begun dating Kandi (from March to June, we were together every weekend). Then I saw how he dealt with students who were grappling with their future, with what and whom they wanted to become.
Tim’s life-on-life approach was phenomenal. I’d never seen someone so caring, so hands-on, and so adept at changing someone’s life in one hour of conversation. It instilled in me a drive to be the kind of catalyst for life-change that he was.
We had incredible late-night conversations, free-wheeling chats about everything from the Second Coming to our assurance of salvation. I was a sponge soaking up every tiny drop. He made little throwaway comments such as, “You can’t expect from others what you aren’t living out in your own life,” and, “The Christian life is easy or impossible—impossible in your own strength, easy if you allow Christ to work in and through you.” “If you aim at nothing,” he said, “you will hit it every time,” and “Ministry is received and not achieved.” Years later, we started calling them “Tim-isms.”
He’d just toss them out there, and I’d grab them and try fitting them into my brain, which was like a suitcase after a long vacation, where you buy far too many souvenirs to pack. I was loaded down with new ideas and perspectives.
I began to notice a theme in some of these phrases. Impossible in your own strength . . . received, not achieved. Finally I told him in one of our discipleship group times, “Tim, you just blew up my whole philosophy of life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I used to go around saying, ‘If it’s meant to be, it’s up to me.’ My phrase and your phrases don’t fit together.” I told him about my business networking experience, and what I thought I’d learned about personal success—that it was all about outworking the competition.
Tim said, “Robby, you can’t do anything in your own strength—not anything eternally significant. Not anything that gives God glory. The best you can come up with is a righteousness that is like filthy rags before God.”
“So my actions are meaningless?”
“Of course not. Hard work is a good thing, but everything should be done in his strength. Jesus says, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ Think of it this way: you have to allow Christ to work in you and to work through you for his glory.”
I heard about a pastor who told the story of enjoying a late afternoon swim in the ocean, down on the Gulf. He lost track of the time, looked back at the shore, and realized he’d gotten way too far away from dry land. He started to panic, realizing he lacked the endurance to swim all the way back to the beach. As his anxiety spiked, he began to struggle. Then he thought about it and realized that the waves always move toward the sand. If he simply relaxed, looked up to the sun and floated on the tide, he would be carried back toward safety.
Tim helped me understand the difference between trying frantically to move in my own strength, which is exhausting, and relaxing into the arms of a loving God, whose strength is infinite, and who wants to guide us toward our best destination. This was an incredible eye-opener
