Sermon Transcript
Joshua 10:9-11. So Joshua came upon them suddenly by marching all night from Gilgal, and the Lord brought them into confusion before Israel, and he struck them down in a great defeat at Gibeon, and pursued them by the way of the ascent to Beth-horon, and struck them as far as Azekah and Makkedah. And as they fled from Israel, while they were at the descent of Beth-horon, The Lord hurled large stones from heaven on them as far as Azekah, and they died. There were more who died from the hailstones than those whom the sons of Israel killed with the sword.
Thank you, Andy.
Have you ever, like, gotten into a Netflix show or a show you’re streaming? You’re, like, binging it, and then you get to the end No more episodes. No, that’s all there is now. And you got to wait for that next season, right? And then you get into some other show for a while and you’re like, this is okay.
And then one day you open up your TV, your computer, your streaming device of choice, and then there’s that icon of that show you were watching and it says, new season available now. Yes. Oh, that’s today in church. Uh, last week Dan mentioned that we were going to be pausing our study in the book of Romans for this summer. And today we start This Is My Story, Season 3.
Those who have been around— yeah, there we go. Those who have been around Bridges for a while might remember that the past 2 summers we have had a series that we’ve titled This Is My Story, where we’ve heard from various ministry leaders in our church about how God has worked in their lives. Our goal for this series is to show that God still works in the lives of people today in very similar ways to how he worked in the lives of the people we find in the pages of Scripture. So we’ve asked some of our ministry leaders to identify a particular biblical figure or passage that mirrors or resonates with their story. We’ve probably all had the experience while reading the Bible and we’ve come across a verse or a chapter or a person or principle and we think, I know exactly what they’re talking about.
That same thing happened to me. I lived that. And sometimes we feel like it’s our story written there on that very page. And we want to share those experiences with each other because whatever God has written into our lives, it’s not only for our benefit but also for the benefit of everyone else who hears about it. What God does in your life encourages me, and what God does in my life encourages you.
So we need to tell each other about it, and that’s why we’re doing this series this summer. So today we will hear from Fritz Mueller, who serves as one of our elders and has been connected to our church for decades. Can we welcome Fritz up to the stage? Would you help welcome him with me?
Welcome, Fritz. Hey, I’m gonna pray for you and then they’re all yours. Okay. Yeah, let’s pray. Lord God, I thank you, uh, for this opportunity to share our stories this summer.
God, I pray that you speak through Fritz today, that, uh, his story, uh, we can see how you have worked in his life and we can see how that is related to the scripture that you have provided for us. God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your story. And it’s in Jesus’ precious and holy name I pray. Amen.
Thank you.
I’ll talk about those verses in a minute. They might seem a little unusual. If this was a movie about my life, I’m going to start with a flashback to my childhood and a question. Would you let your 3rd grade child get on Caltrain and say the Mountain View station and go to a Giants game accompanied only by the 4th grade boy from next door At a time before cell phones existed.
Yeah, you’ve already answered that, right? This was the question my father had to consider when my friend and I asked if we could go to a Cubs game in Chicago on the train from our suburban home. My dad responded with a question and a piece of advice. The question to the neighbor boy is, which train do you get on when you switch trains at Howard Street, the A or the B train? The neighbor knew the answer, so permission granted.
Then my dad gave us a piece of advice: keep a dollar in your sock in case someone takes your money so you have train fare to get home. That thoughtful, primitive— permissive attitude was shared by my mom and guided my free-range childhood with my friends. Before I get into how this fits into my story, I need to explain the verses that were just read. So I chose those from Joshua because it illustrates how God was the main force behind Israel’s victory. Joshua and the army had a role, but all they had to do was show up and do their part.
God would provide the victory. And I have seen that same dynamic in my life, as you will hear.
This is my story, but it’s also a series of life lessons. Hopefully many of you can benefit from them. So for my story, I decided I needed to select a few of the challenges I faced and the blessings I’ve received. If I didn’t talk about the challenges or bad times, it would not be a true life story because everyone faces challenges. But I’m focusing on ones where I can comment on God’s presence in those challenges.
If I did not talk about the blessings or good times, you could reasonably ask, if all good things come from God and God is in your life, where are the good things? However, God causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous, from Matthew. So I’m going to focus on the blessings where I can specifically point to why God gets credit for what I personally received. So there’s a slide with some photos up here, family photos. These are a few from my life.
You can see the wedding photo there. I sort of noticed Kathy hasn’t really aged, but I seem to have.
That’s my parent— that’s from our wedding. Those are my parents. They are both deceased now. And I found that last picture in an album and had to include it because I’m, I’m still doing that at the climbing gym every week. So I guess some things never change.
So first I’ll give you the current situation for our family. A quick summary of my family: Kathy and I got married on this stage 36 years ago during my second year of business school and briefly lived in Chicago until I finished school and we moved back here and continued attending BCC. We have 4 children, a daughter who is a middle school math teacher, lives in the Denver area with her husband who works in IT, and he’s responsible for security and AI for his firm. They both graduated from Biola and then subsequently got master’s degrees. We have a son who works for a software company writing software in the blockchain industry, which is related to the crypto industry.
Lives in Medellín, Colombia, and is engaged to a talented Colombian woman who is an artist. A daughter who has a degree in landscape architecture lives in Sacramento and is a professional landscape designer working on a variety of public and private projects. They’re all doing great. We’re happy, happy for them. Our oldest son who worked in IT passed away in 2022 at the age of 31, so he’s in heaven.
All of our children grew up in this church and were baptized here. So you can go to the blank slide next. So starting with my childhood, I have one younger sister. I grew up in a suburb north of Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was a great place to grow up, similar in many ways to Los Altos, but with a beach on the lake and serious snow in the winter.
My neighborhood had an amazing number of boys my age who all liked sports, And my memory of that time is that we were always playing our own games of football, baseball, basketball, riding bikes to the beach. We had a block— we lived a block from the Northwestern University athletic campus, and we considered those facilities an extension of our backyard. My mom’s degree was in elementary school education, and as far as she was concerned, if I was not in school, then running around playing games that improved strength and coordination was what I should be doing. I feel like my parents gave me a lot of freedom, as told in the story about going to the baseball game. In many ways, looking back, it was an ideal childhood.
My parents were committed Christians. We went to church every Sunday. My dad worked for a big bank and managed the pension fund investments of a large union. He was basically a mutual fund manager. I attended church, believed what I was told.
In middle school, I went through confirmation, and afterwards my parents said I could make my own decisions about church. I stopped going to church after that, not because I rejected God or Christianity, but because I did not have a relationship with God that was my own. I think it was just willful ignorance and a sin nature, and I wanted to manage my own life. Church did not seem very compelling at that point. I liked the idea of having my Sunday, Sunday mornings to do all the various activities with other boys in the neighborhood.
I think on some level I viewed God as a possible cosmic killjoy, and if there was a life path I wanted to follow, God might say, I need you to follow some miserable path that he had picked. It was completely misguided, a completely misguided understanding. My experience has been the opposite. So I need to provide some context to the next part of the story, which gets into high school. The next part of the story on parenting and the lesson I learned from that.
My grandparents, my father’s parents, loved their children and grandchildren and wanted the best for them, but they were critical people who generally did not provide the sort of approval that their children and all children want from their parents, and it deeply affected their children who had mental health challenges their whole lives. My father and mother recognized this parenting flaw and probably overcompensated in the other direction. So I always felt loved, accepted, was told I was special, talented, wonderful, lots of positive messages. It’s hard to remember an incident where I was criticized in a disapproving way, though it was always known that there were standards for how to act. You might think that could lead to arrogance or entitlement, but I did figure out that there were plenty of people more talented than I was.
The lesson in all of this is to show approval of your children And I believe God had a hand in how my parents did not repeat the mistakes of my grandparents. During my freshman year in high school, a legal dispute arose over what I’m told was someone in the union taking money from the pension fund that my dad invested. My dad agreed to be a witness for the bank. A union employee in the accounting department was a second witness for the bank. Shortly before the trial, a bomb was found in the car of the second witness when his daughter was driving the car and a gas station attendant opened the hood.
Nobody was physically hurt, but this made a stressful situation worse for my dad, who assumed he was the next target. This stress added to his existing mental health struggles led to a nervous breakdown from which he never recovered and went on long-term disability. My mom had to go back to work and had a remarkably successful second career late in life. Needless to say, our life changed a lot. And I reacted by throwing myself into sports and academics.
I was on the high school gymnastics team, which basically practiced year-round. I went to a first-rate academic high school, so I knew if I did well, I would have opportunities. It was a big competitive high school, the size of Los Altos and Palo Alto High Schools combined, so it was easy to get absorbed into it. I think God’s presence in all of this was the strength he gave my mom to keep everything in the family working. I then went to the University of Michigan, majored in computer engineering.
I knew I wanted to work in Silicon Valley because my cousins had moved from the Chicago area where we saw them at all the big holidays to Los Altos, and I had come to visit them during a Chicago winter and decided this was the most wonderful place on earth, and I still believe that to this day. They took me to Santa Cruz, Lake Tahoe, the Redwoods, other highlights of the Bay Area. At school, I only interviewed with Silicon Valley companies. Got an offer from a big computer company who paid for me to move here. My grandparents paid for my college education, an expense my parents could never afford.
And it shows how God works through anyone. These are the grandparents who were dimly viewed for their parenting skills but were generous and cared about their family and wanted to help us. High school and college were a positive experience But what I learned spiritually during those years is that even if you achieve personal goals, without God there is a deep-down emptiness. I had the feeling that when I got to California, I would reexamine Christianity, so my childhood experience raised in the church was not wasted. I arrived in California, and my general plan was to work for a few years for a large company to get experience and then look for a cool, interesting startup.
That was the dream for somebody with an engineering degree in Silicon Valley. Within a week of arriving in California and before starting my job, I got a phone call that changed everything. The company I was to work for called to tell me there was a layoff and my job was eliminated before I had started. That night, I laid in bed staring at the ceiling and constructing a worst-case scenario that seemed possible. This was before the internet.
So getting a job was a whole different process. It was hard to even find out about companies that existed. I had no industry experience. I did not know that headhunters and recruiters existed. I did not have my university career center to fall back on.
I could easily imagine my engineering skills eroding so that interviews would get more difficult. I might need to get some unrelated job just to feed myself, and I would slowly become unemployable. That was where my mindset was going. I was good at creating the hopeless view of the future and then panicking. I did not know about Philippians 4:6, be anxious for nothing.
That night I decided it was time to dramatically accelerate that plan to reinvestigate Christianity by throwing myself at the mercy of God. I tried to make a deal. God, if you find me a job, I will follow you.
The company that had laid me off had put together a job fair to keep the laid-off employee— to help the laid-off employees find work, and I was invited to attend. I showed up with a stack of resumes, and my plan was to give a copy to every company. Did not matter what they did. I probably gave a copy to the security guy at the door when I walked in. Soon after, I got a call from one of the companies to come in for an interview.
It was an interesting startup, and amazingly, they were looking for someone with my education. And since I was a new grad, I was cheap. They were a startup. The interview went well, and I got an offer letter within a week that changed my life. I remember reading it and noting 4 key points.
Had the same, the same start date as the job I had lost, so no delays. It was a higher salary. No compromise on pay, token increase. Small number of stock options, always fun to get. Finally, a more interesting job at a startup than the job I had lost.
Basically, everything I was hoping to work towards was handed to me. It was like Joshua. I showed up for the job fair, God did everything else.
I saw the letter and thought, this is God’s answer to my prayer. And I want to follow God forever, and I have. I was so thankful. The letter was probably signed by some HR person, but as far as I was concerned, it was signed, you’re welcome, comma, God. So from Proverbs, raise a child up in the way that he should go, and he is— when he is old, he will not depart from it.
This verse describes perfectly what happened to me. An interesting aspect of this story He said, if I could have had a face-to-face conversation with an incarnate God and God had asked what I want, I probably would have said, convince the HR department at the company that had the layoff to reinstate me and reinstate my job. I wanted what was familiar, not what was best for me. But God knew what was best. And the story gets better from here.
The next big intervention God made in my life was 1 to 2 years after I was saved. This is where I learned that following God was not simply getting saved and continuing with life, but that God was going to change me, also known as sanctification. I was attending another church, and an associate pastor was moving to a new church and gave the sermon on his last week. His topic was money and giving. I thought that was amusing because if there was any blowback on his message, he would not be around to hear it.
His message was basically everyone should tithe. This was a well-off congregation, so he said the tithe— giving 10%— was just a starting point for some people. At that point in my young relationship with God, I was giving an embarrassingly small amount each week. God wants a cheerful giver, and I was cheerfully giving a pittance. I was single, few monetary obligations, plenty of activities that required money.
Where else in the world can you ski one weekend and scuba dive the next weekend? Both activities cost money. As the pastor spoke, I started calculating what a tithe would cost me each week. It was a stunning financial shift, even more so because the pastor clarified this was pre-tax money being tithed. During the sermon, he quoted Malachi 3:10: Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse so there may be food in my house And put me to this, to the test now in this, says the Lord of Armies, if I do not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.
That verse got my attention. Now I know some of you are asking right now if I can claim that verse since it was promised to Old Testament Israel. I don’t know if anyone can claim it. It’s a good question for Pastor Dan when he gets back. But at that moment, I had the distinct sense from the Holy Spirit that this sermon was directed at me.
I now had a problem. I had to decide if I was really following God even when asked to make a big change. I left the church service feeling like if I really, really believed, then I needed to do this. Suddenly the verse from Matthew that says, you cannot serve 2 masters, God and mammon, was more than just a concept. It was in front of me as a choice.
It felt like a huge change, but I took the step of faith. Giving that much money was completely out of character for me, and it— and to my total amazement, I found that once I started giving, I actually enjoyed it. I did not show up at work on Monday greeted by my boss telling me they were giving me a 10% raise, but somehow I continued the activities I was doing. The big lesson was that God could change me at a core level, and what I valued in life was being rewired. So though we want God to be part of our lives, to feel his presence, to know his will, the mistake I could have made is to think that God will be part of my life on my terms, where I am never challenged, never grow, never see the power of God in my life, just told I’m doing fine, anything you need, just ask.
God did not change my income so I could give what was asked. He changed me And I was happier for it.
At a later point, I started thinking more specifically, why did God want me to give more? The answer many of you know is that it is a way to prevent money from becoming an idol. Also, people matter, something we say here every week, because they are made in the image of God and God cares about them. So giving money to help them is aligned, is aligned with God’s will. Lastly, I’m a steward of what I have not the true owner.
So I’m accountable to God for how I use what he put me in charge of. Reread the parable of the talents to get a review of that concept. So after 3 years working as a software engineer, I was drawn to the job of product manager for my long-term career. As a product manager, you’re basically the business manager responsible for overall success based on product functionality, competitiveness, and marketing. I thought the best way to make the transition was to get a business degree, so I started the application process for graduate business schools.
Somehow the process was getting bogged down, and I eventually decided to wait a year before starting again. That delay turned out to be divinely orchestrated because during the year of delay, I met Kathy, the love of my life. We started dating. I went to business school at the University of Chicago, and we got married in December of my second year at— my second year in school at this church on this stage. The lesson I learned from all of this is that once again God wanted what was best for me and the timing for grad school had to be altered for my own good.
God had the right person in mind for me and caused all things to work together for us to be married.
When I graduated, I had a short list of computer networking companies in this area that I wanted to work for. I found contacts at all of them, interviewed, and got no job offers. Oddly enough, my old company was developing a product in the market segment I wanted to work in, but returning to that smaller company did not fit with my goals of moving up to bigger and better opportunities. However, the company knew me, liked my work, offered me a job as a product manager for their new networking product, so I took it. I would find out again God had something better in mind than my plans.
So now I was back at my old company as a product manager. Part of my new job was managing partner relationships with a bunch of software companies whose products worked with my product. One of the partner companies stood out to me as particularly promising. One day I got a call from a headhunter representing that partner company, and I pursued it. I was hired as the first product manager when the company was 25 people.
4 years later, the company was named by Businessweek as the fastest-growing public company in the US over the previous 4 years, all due to the growth in the products I managed. The company celebrated by taking everyone and their spouses to a resort in Puerto Rico. During an awards dinner, the San Juan Symphony Orchestra played dinner music, fireworks show, It was great. It’s great to be number one, and that success led to better subsequent opportunities. It felt like we won the national championship, which in a business context we had.
That big celebration turned out to be the high point in the company’s history, and it no longer exists. So such are the ups and downs of Silicon Valley. Now I said I would talk about giving God credit for the good in my life, and this is a great example. I did not start that company. Smart guys from Israel had the idea.
They raised the money, built the first version of the product, had a brilliant marketing strategy.
I was on the list of candidates for the job because I worked for the company God put me in when I was desperate and prayed, and that put me in contact with my new company. We won the award because growth was measured in terms of percent growth, and the 4 years being considered aligned with the company’s first 4 years of revenue when percentage went from roughly 0 to $100+ million. So in percent terms, it was huge. So I take credit for showing up, doing the best job I could with the education and experience I had, but the fact that I was in a position to be considered for that company is all due to God. So once again, I felt like Joshua when God gave them a victory and everyone could see that God gets the credit.
During the, during the time with this company, Kathy had a health scare, another challenge where we learned, leaned on God. At a time when we had 3 small children, Kathy had to have brain surgery to correct a congenital condition called an AVM. It’s a circulatory thing that you don’t find out about till midlife, and that left untreated can kill. The seriousness of the condition and the surgery forced me to contemplate the unthinkable. Kathy might die and I’d be left to raise our 3 small children.
In the end, surgery was successful. No restrictions, no side effects, no, nothing negative from the surgery. I was grateful for the comfort and assurance I felt during the process. This church prayed for us. Our life group brought us meals right after the surgery.
It did make me appreciate life and how fragile it can be. There’s a slide from James you can put up. So James 4:13 says, come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, engage in business, make a profit, yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. For you’re just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.
Each day you generally assume you’ll wake up, go about your business, be no major surprises, but none of that is guaranteed. And the challenge we went through and the lesson I learned made me grateful each day for what God has given me. A major— moving from that, a major tragedy happened when our oldest adult son tragically died in 2022 at the age of 31. It’s every parent’s nightmare. While God is present in tragedy, it is still tragedy.
Kay Warren, the wife of well-known pastor Rick Warren, wrote a book, Choosing Joy, that was particularly helpful. And grief counseling helped me process the grief. But there’s always a scar, and at some level, the pain never goes away. When each of my parents died, it was expected. And as I saw their decline, it was sad but also a relief that they were free of their ailments.
Losing a child is completely different— far deeper, more complicated grieving process. I felt the real cost of death, and when someone does not seriously consider Christianity and eternity, it is hard for me to be patient with them, but I understand that it is God who draws them to him, not an eloquent explanation or argument. There’s not a happy ending to this story like there was after Kathy’s surgery where the doctor says, go home, you’re healed, enjoy your life. In this case, the pain may subside, but it never goes away. Kay Warren’s book Choosing Joy has a simple illustration that’s been very helpful.
Imagine looking down a long railroad track. You see the 2 rails going off into the distance. One rail represents the challenges and difficulties in life. One rail represents the blessings you enjoy. You’ll always have both of these attributes in your life.
They will both continue for your entire life, just like the rails that continue to the horizon and you don’t see them end. Choosing joy means that at all times, especially when there is grief and sadness, that you remember you still have God’s blessing in some form. At times the difficulties can overwhelm, but they’ll change over time, and it is important to remember that other rail and embrace it and appreciate it. I made a list of good things in my life, and over time I remembered more and more of them and added them to that list. When I pray, I often look at that list and keep adding to it.
The list represents that rail that I should choose that brings joy. This does not mean hiding from grief or pain. It means not getting swallowed up by it. So this brings us to the current stage in my life, of my story, the transition from paid work to unpaid work, a retirement of sorts. I’ve been retired from— I’ve been retired from paid work for the last 7 years, and I’m often asked, especially by men my age, what do I do with my time in retirement?
So I’m going to answer that for all of you. There are 2 parts to the answer, one spiritual, one fun, because not only is it okay to have fun, this church encourages it. After all, we sponsor a Fall Family Fun Night every year. I’ll start with the spiritual answer. As soon as I retired, 2 volunteer opportunities immediately opened up.
I was asked if I was interested in being an elder. I prayed. God told me the correct answer is yes. I was asked if I was interested in being a BSF— that’s Bible Study Fellowship— discussion leader, and again I discerned that I should say yes. Both of those roles have helped me grow in my relationship to God, as I need to seek him to handle the challenges that arise.
I try to always remember that I am a steward of both the time and resources God has entrusted to me. I don’t really own them. I’m grateful for everything I’ve received from God, and if I had to— if I start serving out of a sense of guilt or obligation rather than gratitude, then I need to do an attitude check. Now comes the fun part of the answer. Joy is from the Lord, but I think fun comes in a lot of forms.
The fun answer is what I do with my time is related to the photo that you’ll see now. So there’s a next photo with a— there it is. So our youngest daughter found a backpacking route that takes 10 days. It’s 100 miles going across the Sierras and back. Until that time, the longest backpacking trip we had done was a simple 2-night trip, so her suggestion was a big change.
I could imagine a lot going wrong and was not interested, but Kathy was an enthusiastic supporter, so I reluctantly agreed. The photo shows us at the trailhead at the start. That’s the one. So the one on the left is the trailhead. The one on the right is looking east across the Sierras, roughly from the trailhead that we would be crossing twice, hiking across twice.
That view made me really question if this was a good idea. I was gonna say that we had a great adventure together, and then I read a quote that said, adventure is just bad planning.
And Kathy and Caitlin did an exquisite and meticulous planning job, so we actually had a great journey together, learned a lot, and loved it. We ended up doing more big backpacking trips and plan to continue them. This got me interested in climbing the peaks we were hiking around, so I looked into it and found the, the guide companies that will take you up the glacier-covered peaks in the Cascades, and I’ve climbed peaks all over the world in the last 6 years. You know how these things go. The further you get into an area of interest, the more it draws you in.
Kathy and I have backpacked multiple mountain ranges around the world. If there’s a spiritual element to this, it is, it is to this activity, is that I am enjoying God’s creation, especially the remote wild places. I love the Andes and have done multiple climbs and hikes from Ecuador to Patagonia. This dramatic scenery and the climbing is a thrilling challenge. Uh, there’s the next photo you can put up.
So this photo is last year in Bolivia. We’re headed to the peak you see in the background back there. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that part of the world is in my— in God’s best work, in my opinion, in my eye. So at some point I’ll age out of that, and then I’ll have to retire from my retirement.
There’s another piece to the story though. The preparation for these trips takes many months and a lot of time, but I was told years ago that based on my blood test results and my family history and genetics, my mother being a diabetic, that I was genetically predisposed to diabetes. Training for climbing turns out to be the perfect program to stay healthy. You need to show up physically ready for the climbing trips because your fellow climbers don’t want to be on your rope team if you look weak and wobbly. So this is my stay healthy plan, and it works.
This was also a lesson in the fascinating field of epigenetics, which explains that your genetics are not necessarily your destiny. Read a good book on that topic if you find it informative.
To conclude, I’m always grateful to this church for the many relationships formed and what I have learned that directed my path, that has directed my faith. The Experiencing God curriculum many years ago had a profound effect on my understanding of what it means to follow God. More recently, the Apologetics Men’s Group has helped me appreciate that our faith is not a blind faith but is based on all of the evidence from history, science, archaeology that God has given us to know he exists. Of course, the Holy Spirit, whose presence is a constant reminder of God’s presence in my life, the many helpful sermons that I’ve heard from this church. I have learned a lot in Bible study fellowship, which meets here during the fall and winter every Tuesday night, helped me understand God and my relationship with him.
I keep a list of the many ways God has blessed my life, and it reminds me of what I am grateful for. If I had to summarize my story and the lesson from it, It is, don’t resist God’s plan for you. Though it will challenge you, the results are worth it since God always wants what is best for you. So I will turn it back over to the worship team.
