One night after preaching, I couldn’t sleep. A very strange feeling came over me. I’d start to drift off and suddenly feel as if I were falling off the end of the bed even though I wasn’t. I returned home to my family and went out to play with my church hockey team. I loved playing hockey, but all of a sudden I couldn’t catch my breath. I was a very fit thirty-seven-year-old man, so this was very strange for me.
When I went into church on Sunday to preach, my head felt as if it were splitting open. I was still short of breath, and I had no energy. Sunday after Sunday, the massive headaches continued. It took me a long time to realize that I was having a physical breakdown.
When I felt I couldn’t take it anymore, I went out onto a country road and threw my head back. “Is this how you reward those who serve you?” I screamed. I railed against the Lord until it was all out. If God had said to me in that moment, “I’m going to turn you to ashes,” I would have said, “Go ahead.”
Instead, I heard God say softly, “I love you.”
That wasn’t what I expected. “What do you want me to do?” I exhaled.
“Carter,” the Lord said to me, “I only want you to do what I ask you to do. You’ve done many, many things that I didn’t ask you to do.”
It was as if a thirteen-year burden was lifted from my shoulders. I recall one man in our church who was up and down, up and down, sober, drunk, sober, drunk. I used to grab him by the shirt and get in his face, saying, “I stopped drinking; you can stop drinking.” He would cry that he couldn’t do it, and I would insist that he could. About three weeks after God set me free from my own zealousness, though, that man came up to me and said, “Pastor, I feel so much hope in your preaching now.” He was sensing that I had turned my striving over to God.
The psalmist’s words had come true for me: “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him” (Psalm 28:7, ESV).
Carter Conlon joined the pastoral staff of Times Square Church in 1994 and was appointed Senior Pastor in 2001. In May of 2020 he transitioned into a continuing role as General Overseer of Times Square Church, Inc.