Abandoned

Abandoned.

Maybe you abandoned the ministry, or maybe the ministry abandoned you. Either way, it's very likely that your friends, even the ministers you thought were your friends, have abandoned you.

"Oh, I'm sorry...I'm just SO busy these days. Things at the church are CRAZY! But things are good! Praise God! And hey, I'm sorry for what happened to you. I'll pray for you. I gotta go! Let's get together soon, ok?"

"Ummm...ok...but..." Dial tone. "But my church is holding the vote next week..."

"Ok...but..." Dial tone. "But they voted me out..."

As I languished in a particularly horrible internship that would eventually push me out of the ministry forever, my wife - MY WIFE - reached out to several ministers we thought were friends, begging them, pleading with them on multiple occasions - she emailed several times, called them, called their wives, anything she could think of - PLEASE, PLEASE call my husband. PLEASE help him! He's dying inside! He's losing his career before it even starts! He's SO depressed and I can't help him! Please!

The silence was deafening.

I was just as sure as sure can be that this was a completely unique experience. Only MY lousy friends, only THESE particular pastors could be so cruel, and God was punishing ME for daring to pursue the ministry out of selfish ambition (even though Paul said he didn't mind if the gospel was preached out of selfish ambition, so long as it's preached).

And of course, when we suffer and everyone abandons us, that's what we're tempted to believe, right? We're SURE that this is a horrible thing that has only happened to us.

And we are tempted to think that way because when someone in our church is sick, say they have some form of cancer that involves a battle that takes years to fight, then our perception is that the entire church rallies around them, bringing the family meals, praying for them at every single church gathering. It feels like we're ALWAYS hearing about that poor family and all they're going through. And if we're honest with ourselves, we tend to get a little sick of hearing about it.

Now stop and think about that. Everyone gets a little tired of hearing about it. Why? Because that's all they're doing. Hearing about it.

Next time someone in your church is dying, go and visit them in the hospital, and ask them how many visitors they've had. What they tell you will be very sad, especially as their stay in the hospital gets longer.

I once visited someone who had been sick for YEARS. Their spouse and children were SO sad! But they had grown almost numb to it after so long.Teenage children whose parent had been bed ridden their ENTIRE LIVES. Imagine!

Do you think they had a lot of friends? An active social life?

Have you ever visited someone in a nursing home? Most people have once or twice.

Did you enjoy the experience? How did it smell? Remember the poor suffering souls, dangling over the precipice of death, their lives hanging by a thread, literally just sitting around waiting to die. Did you make eye contact with them? Did you stop and talk to them all? Maybe you knelt down and looked them in the eye and asked them if you could pray for them? Maybe you held their hand and vowed to return daily after work, just to comfort them a little in their misery?

Neither did I. Nor does anyone else.

Would you like to work in a nursing home? It takes someone with rare gifts to do that kind of work. And of those, I imagine very few of them actually enjoy the work.

The truth is, the last thing you want to do in the world is go visit someone in a nursing home. Why?

It's because of the suffering. It's sad. It's depressing. You just want to get away from it. You have that reaction instinctively. It's just as natural as pulling your hand away from something hot that has just burned you. Touching it causes you pain. Being in a nursing home causes you pain. You want to just get away.

It's NOT just interns who are going through a horrible time in their internship who are abandoned. It's not just the minister whose congregation is crucifying him unjustly, or whose wife is leaving him or who is being put on trial for a crime he didn't commit.

It's also ANYONE who is suffering. Your minister friends don't want to be around you for the same reason you don't want to be in a nursing home.

Now, that's not an excuse - it's just a reason.

Maybe you can forgive your friends though when you realize the very same sinful tendencies lurk in every heart. Prove me wrong if you still feel defiant and go to the local nursing home. Even if you DO go once, you probably won't go back.

It's a good thing funerals only happen once, because no one would come back the second time.

But what is it about nursing homes that make us so uncomfortable? I could be wrong, but I think it's because it makes us feel vulnerable, like maybe some day we too will suffer such a fate. We don't want to be around death because we like to forget that one day we too will die. Or maybe that we too might get cancer or get sick or have to go through some awful, painful procedure for one reason or another.

If that's even remotely correct, or even if there's just a nugget of truth in it, then should it be any surprise that a minister wouldn't want to hang out with a minister whose congregation just voted him out of office, or whose presbytery just forced him to abandon the ministry?

They can't be around you any more than you want to be around the barely alive in a nursing home. They want to pretend like their job is secure. They want to believe that their congregation loves them and would never turn on them. Just like you once did, and turned your eyes away from the many signs that in retrospect were painfully obvious, but to which at the time you were blissfully - willfully - oblivious.

So yes, be angry, but only just. Remember that you would react the same way. Heck, maybe you knew someone who was once crushed and you stayed away from him. It's ok to be hurt, but don't add self righteousness to it, because you are no better.

And I'm not saying this from some ivory tower, just studying the theory. It happened to ME. This is MY thought process about MY experiences. I was abandoned. By ministers! Men I thought were my CLOSE friends! But gradually our conversations grew less and less frequent, till eventually they stopped returning my calls, even my wife's impassioned pleas.

This is how I've learned to forgive them.

But as my counselor recently explained, forgiveness doesn't necessarily entail giving trust back right away.

I've forgiven those men, but I no longer have a relationship with them, because I cannot trust them. Sadly, they have proven to me in ways I cannot forget that they are not worthy of trust. Those scars remain.

At any rate, they're too ashamed to return my phone calls at this point anyway.

Instead, I look forward to the day when we will at last be reconciled in glory.

In glory, when we're at last free from sin, I will see these men again, and they will apologize for abandoning me, and I will apologize for hating them for it, and we will be truly reconciled, and it will be forever.

And that's where our hope is right? Isn't that what I used to passionately insist upon in the pulpit, that we should abandon hope in this world and place it in the age to come?

Abandoned.

And so we come full circle. Let's abandon hope in this world, and instead live our lives with the age to come in mind, storing up treasure in heaven rather than here on earth.

Preaching to Satisfy Your Ego

Simplicity. Clarity. Brevity.

These are the very top virtues for any sermon.

Of course, you have to be true to the text you're preaching. That's absolutely important. But assuming you understand the text at all, then your sermon needs to aim at: simplicity, clarity and brevity.

If you are not aiming at those virtues, you are doing your congregation an incredible disservice. And why are you doing it? To satisfy your ego.

Yes, that's right. I'm posting anonymously and I'm about to say something that many ministers will consider an unfair, unjust judgment that lacks all the facts.

But I'm doing it anyway because I've been in that pulpit. I know what tempts ministers and their egos.

If you are not aiming at simplicity, clarity and brevity as your top three goals after doing justice to the text, it is because your ego has gotten in the way.

Why do I say this? It's quite simple really. Suppose that your number one concern after doing justice to the text was your listeners. Suppose that you were most interested in their best interests. What would that look like?

It looks like this: simplicity, clarity, brevity. When your biggest concern is being understood by your hearers, what isn't your biggest concern?

Impressing your audience.

Now stop and think about that for a minute. If you are concerned about impressing your audience, what will you necessarily NOT care about? You won't care about whether or not they actually understand what you're saying. You won't care if they get it. They don't need to get it to be impressed.

In fact, it's usually helpful if they don't get it, if you want them to be impressed. After all, all they really need to know is how smart you are, or how well read you are, or how good a job you do of crafting an excellent sermon. And if they come away saying, "Man, he knows so much! I'll never know as much as him!" then they're impressed with you, even though they didn't understand.

Who, you ask, are these crazy ministers who care more about impressing their audience than communicating with them? Well, frankly, most of them.

Oh, now I've got you agitated I suppose. But it's true. They want you to think they're brilliant.

You don't believe me do you? Ok, I'll prove it. This Sunday, after the service, when you're shaking your pastor's hand, tell him, "Hey, thanks for that sermon, it was really simple and easy to understand!"

What kind of reaction do you think you'll get?

Then the next Sunday, shake his hand and say, "Wow, pastor. Just WOW! That was absolutely brilliant! You're so well read! Pure genius! Just the way you have with words is astounding!"

I bet you'll get a much more positive and lively reaction. You may even have to excuse yourself from the conversation.

Look, Pastors are sinners just like the rest of us. We can forgive them for it, right?

But they are tempted with a desire to impress their audience. And this leads to all kinds of foolishness that would have no place for those seeking to communicate with simplicity, clarity and brevity.

I have actually heard people speak glowingly of a minister, "I never had any idea what he was saying till the last 2-3 minutes of his sermons, when it would all come together." And there are many ministers who foolishly and recklessly seek to mimic that style of preaching.

Really?

Most ministers aren't quite that far gone, but just about any minister can be tempted to use jargon from time to time. Or maybe they drop some names of some famous authors or ministers and quote them. At length. And no one has any idea what they said, because it's a translation of a Latin text written several hundred years ago. But boy, that minister did his homework, didn't he? We won't doubt his credibility will we? Never mind that we have no idea what he actually said.

But what if ministers sought to impress their hearers with the text instead?

What if their number one goal was for you to understand what this text was saying, even if you were only a child? What then?

You know, we Protestants are very quick to say that the Roman Church was crazy to conduct services in Latin for so long after Latin became a dead language. Why do we think that's so crazy? Because no one knew what they were saying, and therefore what was said was of no value.

Isn't that Paul's criticism of the Corinthian church in 1Cor 14? Verse 9 says, "So with yourselves, if with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air."

Ministers - I wish you would actually stop and THINK about that. If no one knows what you're saying, it's of no value to the people you're speaking to. You're speaking into the air. It doesn't matter if you're babbling in some nonsense baby talk and claiming it's the language of angels, or if you're speaking in Latin to people who don't speak Latin, or if you're just arrogantly using big words and complex sermon structures because you have a fancy seminary degree and you want everyone to know it.

A lot of ministers like to say, "My sermon this morning has 3 points, and they are..." and then they proceed to list them. This is ridiculously helpful for people taking notes.

And yet, one minister once said to me that he never does that, and he never does it very deliberately because it insults the audience's intelligence. It's not that he had 3 points and just failed to disclose them, it's that he was against having points at all. His sermons were like one gigantic run on sentence.

My eyes were opened when I invited a friend to church one Sunday, and he actually came. And the sermon text was some passage from the Old Testament that was 3 chapters of genealogies. Yes, 3 chapters.

My poor friend walked out absolutely bewildered. He had no idea what had just been said and learned NOTHING. He certainly wasn't about to abandon hope in anything and everything but Christ.

What a shame.

Yes, I know. The genealogies are Scripture too. I get it. But seriously, muster a bit of courage. If you can't preach an intelligible sermon on some passage of Scripture - SKIP IT!

Oh, but my conscience won't let me do that! That'd be like saying that this passage isn't Scripture!

No, it's not like saying that at all. It's admitting that you can't preach a coherent sermon on that passage, and you're sparing your flock the pain of having to endure an incoherent sermon.

And seriously, WHERE is the principle of lectio continua found in Scripture? Or do we not believe in Sola Scriptura anymore?

For those of you who don't know the jargon, what I just said is that the principle of lectio continua - which just means preaching through a book of the bible, chapter by chapter, one passage at a time until you finish the book and move on to the next one - is not found in the Bible anywhere. Nowhere does God command that in Scripture. However wise the principle might be, it's nowhere to be found in Scripture. And Sola Scriptura is a Latin phrase that just means Scripture alone. The point is that the Bible alone gets to tell us what to do, not some stupid principle that men made up, no matter how wise.

So for Christ's sake, and the sake of your hearers, SKIP that passage you can't preach. Maybe no one can preach some of those genealogies. Then maybe no one should preach them.

Or is it better to speak into the air and waste an opportunity to drive the point of the gospel a little deeper into someone's thick skull this week? Or actually communicate to those visitors who aren't sure if they should be there?

Because if you're trying to impress your audience with what you know, with your mastery of the Old Testament canon, with your familiarity with the famous authors of the church, your knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, or the subtle nuances of how to craft the perfect sermon according to the coolest theory you've ever heard - then you aren't preaching the text anymore at all.

You're only preaching yourself.

You're not saying, "Hey, look at Jesus!"

You're saying, "Hey, look at me!"

I know how strong the temptation is. I have felt it. You want them to listen to you. You have to establish your credibility. They have to accept what you're saying. They shouldn't question you. They need to just do what you tell them...right?

No.

No, you don't need them to listen to you.

They need to fall in love with Jesus.

You need to decrease, he needs to increase. You need to DISAPPEAR in the pulpit.

Preach the WORD.

As long as you're preaching the Word, what you're saying has all the credibility your sermon needs. It's the Word of GOD.

It has been proven by Christ's resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. It has been proven by the apostolic authority bestowed on the men of his choosing. It has been proven by signs and miracles of all kinds performed at the time when the foundations of the church were laid.

The Bible's credibility has been MORE than established.

I have news for you, preachers. You HAVE no credibility in the pulpit except that which you BORROW from the text! No one gathers to hear YOU on Sunday morning. They gather to hear from GOD.

To the extent that simplicity, clarity, and brevity are NOT your goal in the pulpit is the extent to which your preaching is simply to feed your ego. To that extent, you are not preaching the Word of God but only preaching yourself. To that extent, you put up your own ego as an obstacle between your flock and Christ Jesus, their only hope for salvation. You are risking peoples' eternal salvation for the sake of your EGO.

I don't envy ministers on judgment day. 

This is one of the reasons why I no longer envy them for today. I know that temptation. I am glad I no longer have to face it, at least not with such high stakes.

If you think that temptation didn't have a strong pull on me, just look at how long all my posts are on this blog! Terrible! Sorry readers!

I Confess...I Forgive

Note: My counselor suggested I write a letter to God, forgiving those whom I perceive to have wronged me.

Dear God,

I must first of all confess that I have no right to talk to you. I have opposed you to your face my whole life, you, who gave me life and breath and everything. I understand why your Word says on man's behalf, "I am a worm and not a man!" 

You see, I am a wicked, rebellious sinner. And I know it. If you say, "Up," my heart longs to go down. If you say, "Left," I'll convince myself that right is clearly the best way to go.

And yet you are the one who formed the heavens and the earth. You are the one who created light from darkness, who made such a diversity of creatures, and whose wisdom confounds the sharpest of scientists and philosophers throughout history.

And you sent your Son to die for my sins that I might yet be redeemed despite my foolishness and live forever.

And still my heart wanders. It is not as if I am not grateful for all you have given me: my life, both in this world and the one to come - and the world in which I dwell - and at such tremendous cost to yourself. I am grateful.

But I am not ONLY grateful. I am also heartless and cruel and selfish and pitiless and merciless and petty. I often live to seek my own glory rather than yours.

Yes I worship you - but I have other gods as well. I worship myself. I worship my stomach. I live for pleasure. I squander the talents you have given me, burying them in the ground. I have asked for my inheritance early and squandered it on the pleasures of sin.

And I have been bitter towards you. I walked away from the ministry voluntarily in obedience to your clear command spoken through the guiding hand of your providence. You backed me into a corner where I had no choice but to let it go for the good of my family, and I relented and obeyed your command to care for my family first and foremost.

And I confess that I felt like I had gouged out my own eyes. I confess that I blamed you for my pain. I confess that I feel like you have abandoned me and withdrawn from me.

And I confess that I feel justified in feeling this way. When I would preach the Word, I had an intimacy with your Word that it seems I cannot experience any other way. Sure, it's one thing to study the Word in depth, but quite another when there is the pressure of the need to write a sermon for this Sunday that accompanies it. That pressure produces a need to delve into the text, it produces a motivation and a purpose.

And I confess the truth: I miss you. I miss your Word. I miss preaching. And I confess that it's at least in part because I don't feel like my life is quite as important as it could have been had I preached your Word.

And I confess that since I have missed you and missed your Word, and missed the pressure that comes from having to preach, and miss the purpose in studying your Word - I confess that I have blamed you for withdrawing from me, and so I have withdrawn from you.

I confess I have abandoned your Word and abandoned prayer. I confess that these have become loathsome to me. I confess that my heart has become cold and bitter, black and shriveled. 

I confess that I tolerate life and have ceased to really live it.

And I confess I have abandoned hope in Christ by wondering if I have failed to measure up to some standard of behavior, so that perhaps I brought this upon myself. Perhaps my WORKS were insufficient to EARN your favor and so become a minister.

I confess that I have forgotten that even my BEST works, indeed, the best works of any man who now has the privilege of preaching in the pulpit, are but filthy rags. They are soiled diapers. My best works are as the vomit encrusted clothes of a homeless man who has died of alcohol poisoning. They do not cover my shame. They do not make me radiant.

I confess: you alone are holy. The only man who ever truly did good was your Son, Jesus Christ.

I confess I have no hope in myself but in Christ alone. I confess I could not have failed to earn the right to become a minister, because no man has ever earned that right. For, as your Word declares, even Jesus did not appoint himself to his office, for your Word to him that echoes of all eternity was captured by the psalmist who says that you once said to him, "You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizadek." No man can ever be worthy to preach your Word, no man can ever appoint himself to the task. It is never a matter of justice, but only a matter of your appointment.

I confess that you have appointed me to bring you glory however you see fit, and I will obey as you empower me to do so, whether I know what I am doing or not. May Jesus' words also cover me: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing." I confess I have no idea what I am doing or why I am doing it. These things are known to you alone.

Please grant me the wisdom that leads to being at peace. Please restore me to a love of your Word and of prayer. Grant me the grace to forgive others, even as you have forgiven me.

Whatever the truth of the matter is, I cannot say, only you know, but I forgive those who have, in my eyes, mistreated me unjustly without cause.

Your Word says that there are shepherds who do not feed, heal, care for the flock, your flock, your people, your church. You say that they feed only themselves. You have said that they do not bind the wounds of the sheep. They do not chase away the wolves. They eat the sheep! They clothe themselves in their wool.

I know from my experiences that your Word is true, because I have met just such a wicked shepherd. I was his intern. He was my pastor.

When I should have been especially under his wing, he rejected me. He did not pray with me regularly. He made me feel unwelcome and burdensome in his presence. He wasn't even there the first several times I preached in his church, and was alarmed and overreacted when the elders took issue with a sermon I preached that was too long. It WAS too long, and I feel awful about it and embarrassed to this day. He was right to tell me to never do that again, but it was my fourth sermon there, and the other three were of appropriate length, and I explained that I was trying to learn how to preach from an outline rather than a manuscript. I messed up bad. But he would never forgive me and labeled me useless and stupid and completely incompetent from then on, and there was simply no overcoming it.

He humiliated me privately by telling me, after listening to a RECORDING of that ONE sermon that he was pretty sure I wasn't cut out for the ministry.

He humiliated me further by demanding that I submit every sermon outline, Sunday school plan or youth group lesson to him by Thursday night in advance of Sunday so that he could look over it and make sure it was up to snuff.

He humiliated me further by regularly, week in and week out, offering up extremely rude and blunt criticism laced with accusations of everything I had written and said it all via email.

And though I had determined, right from the very start of this, to NEVER argue with him, to NEVER defend myself, but to be like Jesus, silent before his accusers, like a lamb to the slaughter. I demanded it of myself and I obeyed. Rather than respond in kind to his emails, I would simply make the changes he requested and send the materials back to him by the end of the day Friday or Saturday morning, so that he could take one last crack at it before Sunday - which he often did, subjecting me to yet more criticism and accusations.

And the humiliation was also public. Not content with making me feel stupid every week via email, he always also found ways to criticize my Sunday School lessons DURING Sunday school, and taught the church, especially the elders, to do the same. He also led the elders and consequently the whole church in criticizing my sermons every Sunday night during the ill-advised question and answer period that closed out the evening service.

Every meeting of the board of elders was another opportunity for him to criticize and humiliate me with an audience. Every Sunday was an opportunity to criticize me in front of the whole church.

The pastor and elders all should have known better than to think that anyone, as soon as their sermon was preached, would immediately be persuaded in a few sentences to disavow expressions and thoughts they'd carefully crafted over the course of a week in conversation with the text, something they'd been trained to do in four ridiculously difficult years in seminary. And they thought that they would change my mind with one or two sentences, carelessly thrown out after thinking about the passage for all of about 25 minutes. The truth is fairly obvious: the assumed I would simply bow to their obviously superior intellect and wisdom.

I succumbed to the temptation to defend what I had said ONCE. One time. I had been there several months at this point and was sick and tired of getting the proverbial rotten tomatoes thrown at me every single week, and had anticipated what they were going to say. And when they, predictably, said exactly what I knew they were going to say, I said that I had thought about it that week, hoping that that might at last gain me some modicum of respect in their eyes. But no such luck. It got really ugly, really fast. It was like trying to talk to a brick wall. Though I remained respectful, I wasn't about to concede that my entire sermon was based on an incorrect understanding of the passage (because it wasn't), and after diverting the conversation to someone else's question (which was inevitably not a question but yet another thinly disguised statement of the intern's incompetence to say anything about what the Bible says), we all moved on. Or so I thought.

From that ONE anecdotal piece of evidence, now every time the elders evaluated me formally as part of my internship, I was labeled "unteachable", and this was the only evidence cited - even almost a year later at the end of my internship. And at that time, the pastor even admitted that this was the only time there'd been even a hint at me being unteachable, and admitted that there was actually a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, I was labeled as unteachable.

And why? Because this group of men who had somehow become leaders in the church - these shepherds who fed only themselves, especially their own egos - had determined at the very outset of my internship that they were going to keep me out of the ministry and had been on a quest ever since to find reasons to justify it.

My unpardonable crimes were these, as I later realized: 1) a sermon very early in my internship that was too long (it was too long, but my sermons after that were always right at 25 minutes with no more than 2-3 minutes variance either way). 2) A "strong distinction between the law and the gospel". That's in quotation marks because it's a quote. The pastor, after my internship ended, admitted that my making such a strong distinction between these two made him very uncomfortable. He never mentioned it a second time, but there was NO gospel whatsoever in his preaching. NONE. At that was how he treated me too. No kindness, no mercy, no grace, no love. Just constant criticism, accusations and reminders that I just don't measure up. 3) I was a committed reformed/presbyterian who thought the Bible actually teaches what our confession says it does. I was "too sure of myself", which the pastor interpreted as arrogance, and demanded everyone else agree with him. Apparently I was supposed to have no idea what I was talking about after four years of seminary and was supposed to teach that the Bible says whatever anyone thinks it says, and that I had no actual right to interpret it.

And the whole internship came to a head almost 6 months after it was over, when he came banging on my door the day after Thanksgiving (3 years ago yesterday), demanding to know why I hadn't come to his office to defend last Sunday night's sermon as we had agreed last Sunday night.

And the horrible thing I had suggested in my sermon? The scandal that had him so outrageously upset?

It was that I had dared to suggest, as I preached out of Romans 4, that when Paul insists that Abraham was NOT justified by works, he felt it necessary to say so because there were Jews at the time who actually DID think he was justified by works.

The pastor vigorously challenged this in front of the entire congregation (because he was sure that no one wanted to go home, but would rather sit and listen to some obscure academic debate), and when I said that I had read such a view of the passage in Cranfield (a VERY credible and legitimate commentary on Romans which I liked so much I asked for it as a birthday present one year), he suddenly dropped the debate and allowed the conversation to proceed.

Of course, after the congregation was dismissed, he made a beeline for me and, after claiming that he didn't want to "gainsay" me in public, he demanded to know where Cranfield had said such and such and how he had come to that conclusion. I said that he quoted several - SEVERAL - ancient sources, and that he could see it for himself if he wanted. He demanded I bring the commentary to him that week in his office and show him. He said he found it outrageous that I could say such a thing in like of Sanders' scholarship on second temple Judaism. That's when I remembered his discomfort with a strong distinction between law and gospel, and realized this was a conversation I didn't want to have.

So I delayed. I didn't go to his office. That Thursday was Thanksgiving. And I didn't answer my phone. I figured I'd drag it out till Sunday and just hand it to him and walk away. 

But he came to my apartment and demanded to know why I hadn't come by, and why I hadn't returned his calls. And I finally told him. I told him he'd done nothing but criticize me, and that his desire not to gainsay me in public was ridiculous because he'd been doing that with astonishing regularity since the very first time he'd heard me preach, now a year and a half ago. And I told him he'd led the elders and congregation to follow him in this, so that whenever I stood before anyone in that church I felt like I was in the middle of a feeding frenzy. I told him he'd bred a culture of contentiousness in that congregation, and that it was all bent toward constantly criticizing me. And I said I silently took it all and did NOT defend myself, with one, really quite small exception, and that nevertheless, he and the elders had unjustly labeled me as unteachable, even though I changed EVERY sermon I ever wrote in that church in response to his criticism even before I preached it, and did my best to incorporate the mountain of criticism I received in response to my sermons or teaching whenever it occurred. I said it was as if he and the elders were listening to me only for the purpose of finding something to criticize.

I said that though I stood on the floor of the regional governing body of the church and when asked what my biggest weakness was said, "Humility - as soon as I start to show some small signs of humility, I take pride in how humble I am" - even though I stood before those who held my future in their hands, I nevertheless admitted this weakness - and yet I was still labeled as arrogant by him and the elders.

And when I had said this and much more, especially about him preaching through the book I had preached through as an intern - I couldn't BELIEVE the audacity of this man - he admitted to all (though he claimed his preaching through that book had nothing to do with my having preached it, which means either he was lying or the biggest moron in the history of the world, which I knew was not true) and said he was ashamed of himself. He admitted that he had seen me as a threat from day one and was determined to squash me. When I took it all in silence and did not defend myself, he said he interpreted that as defiance and redoubled his efforts to squash me. And when I continued to silently acquiesce to his slightest whim about my sermons or anything else, he grew more and more frustrated that I didn't argue back. He said this. And he prayed (only the second or third time he had ever done so with me) and confessed to you that he was ashamed of himself for what he had done.

He wanted me to be like him. He wanted me to be contentious like him. He wanted me to be sharp tongued and blunt in front of people like him. He wanted me to be a shepherd that feeds on the flock and teaches them to be wolves. And when it became clear that that was never going to be who I am, he decided to punish me for it.

Lord, I confess that in my eyes he is indistinguishable from Cain. 

This man maliciously destroyed my reputation. He crushed my career before it ever began. He stomped on my heart. He drove a wedge between me and the church. He isolated me from the fellowship of the saints. He threatened my well being, and much more importantly, the well being of my family. He was determined to be an obstacle between me and the ministry and was resolute that he would never recommend me for the office of minister.

And I know this because just before I left that miserable place, I made him admit it. He admitted that were any potential church to call him and ask about me, he'd say, "He's not ready." This is just a cop out, and I told him so. He didn't deny it. The truth was, he still felt threatened by me and remained determined to crush me to the extent it was in his power. He declined to say whether anyone had called him to ask the question or not. I suspect they had, and I never heard about it because he told them I wasn't ready and then was too ashamed to tell me what he had done because he knew it was unjust.

But Father, your Word says, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

First and foremost, I need your forgiveness. You have forgiven me 10 thousand talents of gold - an incredible sum worth Billions in today's money. It's such a huge debt that I could never have paid it to you. And really, Billions doesn't even capture it. If I had a Billion dollars, it wouldn't even begin to pay for the debt that I owed you because of my sin.

The only thing that COULD pay the debt for my sin would be eternal Death in hell forever. And even that would never be enough, which is why I deserve to die forever and ever with no one to rescue.

But you DID rescue me. You sent your only Son, who is himself God, who gave up his glorious throne to take on flesh and walk around among us sinners in the stench of our sin...and we killed him in a jealous rage - perhaps hoping to deny him the eternal life we felt we deserved despite our sin which we know makes us worthy only of death. We are foolish and irrational in our efforts to cling to our sins and justify ourselves despite them. We oppose you to your face. I oppose you to your face. And yet you gave up everything to redeem me, though you have to drag me, kicking and screaming toward what's in my own best interests.

You have forgiven me my debt by PAYING my debt for me.

How could I then turn around and demand that this man repay me for what he has done to me and what he has robbed me of?

He couldn't have prevented me from being a minister if that's what you had wanted. He's no match for you. And I deliberately chose not to defend myself. I chose to just go away quietly. I voluntarily walked away from the ministry because it seemed to me very clear that that's what you were asking of me - and wasn't I willing to do so?

Can't I look back on my experiences and know that I learned something from them? It may be that I don't understand all that I learned or its true significance. I don't know the future you have planned for me in this life or how you will be glorified in it.

But I do know that you were pleased to shape me to more closely resemble Christ through suffering. And that suffering was VERY public. Many people saw it with their own eyes and saw that I took it all in stride. Whatever I may feel about that internship or whatever anyone else may say, one thing is for certain: you were pleased to give me an opportunity to bear witness on your behalf - which is exactly what I had set out to do when I went to seminary.

Thank you for teaching me wisdom through suffering. Thank you for bringing me to that church where I suffered so many things for your glory. Thank you for granting me the grace to believe in all you have done for me, to believe in the promises of your Word, and to trust that you know what you're doing. Someday what happened to me will be made more widely know in the age to come, and YOU, not me, will be glorified exactly how you have determined to be glorified.

And so I forgive this man who did all these things to me and sought to overthrow your purposes for my life. His efforts served just the opposite. He sought to silence my testimony, but instead he handed me a megaphone and enhanced my testimony. He gave me an opportunity to "put my money where my mouth is". He gave me an opportunity to show that I really do, deep down, want only to serve you however you want me to (even if I also have competing sinful, fleshly desires).

It is not for me to say whether or not he is in Christ. That's your job. You're God and I'm not. You are the ONLY judge.

If he is in Christ, then there is no debt for him to pay to me, because Christ has paid it for him already. How could I DARE to demand any further payment if Christ has shed his blood for him and YOU have forgiven him? How blasphemous would I be if I still held his sins against him?

If he is not in Christ, your Word teaches me that vengeance belongs to you alone. David was so good about not taking revenge on his own behalf but leaving it to you to repay. And you did. So with him, so with all of us who hope in Christ. If this man is not in Christ, you will take vengeance upon him for what he has done to me. You will put him to death forever in torment and cast him out of your presence. What could I add to that? Is this not enough to satisfy me? For me to demand more is outrageous. If I insist on something tangible in this life, then isn't that admitting that I don't really believe in hell? But I do believe in it and I believe that you are just and will not leave sins, any sins, unpunished. Vengeance is yours.

Help me to repent and turn from all those little ways my heart yearns for little expressions of vengeance, hatred and anger. Keep my heart from hating this man. Keep me from anger. Keep me from desiring any sort of vengeance against him.

Please grow me in my faith. Please help me to believe that you really HAVE forgiven me. Please remind me that even though I can't become a minister, it doesn't mean you haven't forgiven me of my sins. Remind me that you have spared me from something that would not have been best for me.

Remind me that I was desperately seeking to get to the airport on time to make my scheduled flight, and that the obstacles you put in my way to prevent me from getting there on time were not your cruelty, but your mercy - because that plane was destined to explode on takeoff.

Take me to Psalm 73 again and again and again. Remind me of the end of the story: that we will live forever in glory, and those who do not have faith in Christ will die forever in shame and misery. Remind me that I desperately wanted to run as fast as I could to hell, but that you have dragged me, kicking and screaming, to heaven.

Whom have I in heaven but you? And on earth, there is nothing I desire.

You are the strength of my heart and my portion forever. I am your servant, you are my God.

I claim the promises of your Word in faith because of what Christ has done for me, in the power of the Spirit.

Amen.

How an Internship Drove Me from the Ministry

Well, here goes.

When I graduated seminary, I took an internship as a way of easing into the ministry. I thought it would make the transition easier. I thought I would be under the care of a more experienced minister who would take me under his wing, guide me, shape me, patiently correct my mistakes and gently show me those more excellent ways.

I couldn't possibly have been more wrong.

In some churches, Sunday School classes are a very solemn, quiet affair. The pastor presents some teaching, everyone takes notes, and the class ends on time - with enough time for everyone to use the bathroom and chug a cup of stale, weak coffee before the worship service.

Other churches are a bit more...spontaneous. Colorful. Stressful for interns.

I was used to the former, but this church fell in the extreme fringe of the latter. When I began my Sunday School series on the world's least controversial topic, ecclesiology (ahem), several people complained quite passionately to me afterwards that I hadn't allowed for more discussion. You see, I had printed out handouts with room for note taking and even brought a bag of pens. And I timed the lecture perfectly, and had even allowed 5 minutes for questions.

What I would soon discover was a very powerful culture of contentiousness that permeated that church completely. My strong statements defending presbyterian church government and other classic reformed doctrines regarding the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments proved to be like chum in the waters off the coast of Australia. Every Sunday was like a feeding frenzy. Boy did those folks like to argue and pick things apart.

Now if you've ever been in an adult Sunday School class, you know that there's almost always someone whose questions aren't really questions, but more of an attempt to teach from their seat. Often they try to prove the teacher wrong by logically backing him into some corner and forcing him to admit his mistake.

If you're well educated in seminary, have strong critical thinking skills, and most importantly have done your homework in preparation for the lesson, it's usually not too hard to handle such hecklers. A smile, keeping your cool and remaining respectful goes a long way. Not everyone acts that way out of malice - some people, that's just how they learn. And if it's a layman, most ministers, even some interns, can probably handle it just fine and the class is none the worse for wear.

But when it's the elders, that's when things get dicey. To disagree publicly with an elder immediately turns up the heat immensely. To say that this has to be handled delicately is a tremendous understatement. Many young wanna-be ministers have had to abandon their aspirations for the pulpit because a Sunday School class turned into an embarrassing scene from which there was no recovery.

And the elders of this church knew what they were about. They were well read and very sharp. Some of them were professors, some were executives, etc. And they wanted to see every single disagreement - of which there were shockingly many - to its bitter end.

And yet, I could have even dealt with that if the pastor had helped me. Had he rescued me from uncomfortable situations by defusing them, that would have been a huge relief. Had he taken me aside afterwards and made sure that I understood why it went down the way it did, and how I could avoid it next time, I would have been so grateful.

In fact, had he but prayed with me once in a while, or even just offered me a few meager scraps of encouragement, that would have been at least something.

But to my horror, the pastor was the worst of the bunch. He never encouraged me. He never prayed with me. Well, ok, I think he prayed with me 3 times over the course of the 2 years I was there; I shouldn't say never. That's unfair.

Instead, he led the charge. He led the people of this congregation into regularly publicly humiliating me. Almost no one in that church attended Sunday School hoping to learn something. They attended Sunday School to listen very, very carefully to see if there was something in what I said that they could take issue with. They were honestly constantly on the prowl, seeking to find some chink in my armor, some weak spot that they could attack.

And if the elders knew what they were about, this guy totally had me out-gunned. I think I'm a pretty smart guy. I did well as an undergrad and went to a very difficult seminary and obtained an MDiv with over 100 credit hours. And what's more, I did my homework in preparing these lessons. But this guy was scary smart. He had a PhD. He had a photographic memory. He could read his Greek or Hebrew like you and I read children's books. He'd forgotten the content of more journal articles than I'll ever read in my whole life. And his mind worked at the speed of light.

So naturally, my best answers came to me only after stewing on things he'd said for 3 days.

I learned extremely quickly that arguing or even appearing to argue or defend myself in any way was not only pointless but dangerous. I learned to just take the criticism, whatever it was, and smile and thank whoever it was. Anything to end the feeding frenzy.

Of course, it wasn't just Sunday School. No, this was one of those rare churches that actually had a question and answer time as a regular part of the evening worship service. So in the evening service, after finishing your sermon, you prayed and then took questions from the floor about either the evening sermon or the morning sermon.

And this was usually a bigger crowd than Sunday School. I usually preached about 3-4 times a month in the evening service, and I taught a Sunday School series that lasted about the first 5 months of my year-long internship. When that series was over, they decided to give me a break from Sunday School, and I politely declined to do so again.

Now, I also had to turn in every sermon outline, every lesson plan to the pastor the Thursday night before so that he could rip them apart on Friday and I'd have a day to make changes before Sunday came around. Every sermon. Every Sunday School outline. Youth Group lessons. Anything. And he would provide his criticism, which was always scathing, blunt and rude. No exceptions. And, also without any exceptions, I made the changes to accommodate his criticism and sent the materials back to him to give him an opportunity to be satisfied that I had listened to him before Sunday. Sometimes I was even treated to a second round of criticism. All via email of course.

You'd think that that would have prevented him from having any criticism left for Sunday, but you'd be wrong. There was no end to how much criticism this guy could generate. And it wasn't like, "Hey, you need to be more careful to uphold the doctrine of the Trinity." Instead, it was always nit picky, debatable stuff that he really should have allowed me liberty on.

Constant, regular, public humiliation. If every time the intern preaches a sermon and the pastor and elders constantly critiques it and makes him out to be a fool in front of the congregation, the intern has zero credibility. And I could feel it. There was an abundance of evidence of it. Yes, every now and then some lady would whisper a word or two about how horrified she was to my wife at how I was being treated, but this was very rare. And while those brief moments were like a drop of water in the desert, I was still dying of thirst.

To make matters much worse, about halfway through the internship, there was a vote in the congregation about keeping me on for another year as part of voting on the next year's budget. To make a long, painful story short, the pastor botched it by blindsiding the elders with this plan of his to keep me under his thumb another year. And having been blindsided, they obviously didn't support it, especially because they were all sure that I was a moron. (Ironically, when I was licensed in the presbytery, I passed unanimously and every single man present went out of their way to say how well I did and how impressed they were. Even my pastor felt constrained to say good job! Only time he ever did in two years.) And of course, I wasn't there when the congregation voted on it, but I imagine the pastor was too embarrassed to speak about it, and even if he did, he said something blunt and unhelpful that half the people present interpreted as hostile. I doubt any of the elders would have said anything supportive of the idea. And so of course the congregation voted no. It really couldn't have gone any other way, given the way that pastor handled it. (Which totally floored me, because when he brought it up to me, he said we shouldn't bring the idea up until my internship was almost over, and we could add it to the budget at that time. He blindsided me along with the elders.)

Of course, none of this poisoned the atmosphere at all. Nope, not one bit. Sigh.

I couldn't help but see everyone in that congregation as a wolf that voted to ruin my job prospects. My wife and I had no friends while we were there. We were far from family, far from friends, and everyone in our church became an enemy ready to stab me in the back as soon as they had an excuse.

After my internship ended, I was stuck there for about another year while I waited to move on and become a pastor. I filled pulpit still about 3 times a month or so. I would have left that church and attended somewhere else if there was anything remotely close by and if I thought I could do so without burning bridges. But no such luck. And of course I didn't have two pennies to rub together, so moving was out of the question.

Surely now my story is over and I've told the worst of it. No. Would that it were so.

During my internship I had preached a sermon series on a certain book of the Bible. You can't imagine the shock I felt when I came to church one Sunday morning - I had stopped attending Sunday School at this point because it honestly just sickened me to watch people fight over what Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant when he said: whatever - insert random unclear statement here. Who cares what some theologian in love with flowery expressions meant when he said some nonsensical thing that scholars have been debating for decades? What does the BIBLE say??? But I digress...

You can't imagine my horror when I opened the bulletin one Sunday morning to look at the sermon text and saw that the pastor was starting a new series...on a book I had just got done preaching through. I suddenly had a lurching feeling in my gut. This was going to be bad.

But, you say, it wasn't that bad right? I mean, he just really liked that book and it just seemed to fit with where the congregation was at and where he wanted to go, etc. ...right? I mean, maybe he's just that oblivious and insensitive.

Wrong. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined someone would ever have the nerve to do what he did.

I couldn't be more serious when I say that it was painfully obvious to everyone that he was preaching through that book in order to do it justice, since I had fumbled it so horribly. He not only preached it completely differently than me, by which I mean that he took a completely different interpretation in every single passage, but he also preached in a very aggressive manner so that he was laying out an improper interpretation and then knocking it down by proving it wrong. And what was getting knocked down was MY position that I had just preached from that very pulpit 6 months ago. Every. Sunday. Morning.

Several times he even said, "It has been said that..." and then what followed was my interpretation of the passage (which by the way was in keeping with guys like, you know, Calvin). He frequently mocked how laughably wrong it was and how totally out of touch with the passage such views were. Just when I thought I'd heard the worst, the next week would be something even more outrageous. It became almost comical, cartoonish, yet in a creepy clown, horrifying sort of way.

Yes, instead of hearing the Word of God preached to me on Sunday morning, I got a sermon full of accusations of my incompetence and lack of fitness for the ministry. He never actually said my name, though he hardly needed to, so I'm not sure how much of the congregation actually knew what was happening. Probably not many of them, come to think of it. Doesn't matter. I knew.

And through it all, I did not defend myself. I did not argue with anyone's negative opinion of me or something I said or did. I simply accepted the criticism and sought to incorporate it as best I could going forward.

One Sunday night service, he apparently crossed his threshold. He took great offense to something I said and questioned me about it extensively in front of the congregation, but suddenly backed off and dropped it. It was very odd. As soon as I dismissed the people, he rushed up to me and said, "I didn't want to gainsay you in public but..." he wanted to know where I had learned such crazy ideas. So I mentioned a very well respected and recognized commentary on the passage in question which took the position I had, and mentioned some of the evidence that that author had very carefully amassed. He demanded that I let him see it. (The dispute was quite subtle, I assure you.) Naturally, I agreed to bring it by his office that week. Clearly he didn't believe that what I claimed was in that commentary actually was. So annoying and so typical.

Well, that week was Thanksgiving, so I thought I might be able to use that to delay bringing my commentary to him until the next Sunday, because I just really didn't want to deal with it. By Wednesday, he was calling me, wondering where I was, but I ignored him. Friday night there was a knock at the door. The peep hole revealed that it was...you guessed it...my pastor. Wow.

So I opened the door and let him in. He had come to demand to know why I couldn't return his phone call. He was clearly extremely upset. By this point I was so used to his bizarre behavior that it hardly affected me at all. I calmly led him to a seat and explained that I was hoping to avoid this conversation. And he demanded that we discuss what's going on.

So I did. I let him have it. I said he had done nothing but criticize me and humiliate me every chance he got. I said there was a culture of contentiousness in his church and that he had clearly fostered it. "You didn't want to gainsay me in public? You make opportunities to do so on a regular basis! No encouragement! No help!" On and on I went, telling him the truth.

In that one moment he responded with humility. I was totally shocked. He said that he had interpreted my silent acquiescence to his every criticism as defiance and so was always resolving afresh to be yet more hard on me in hopes of breaking me. He said from day one he viewed me as a threat and he labored against me. I couldn't believe it. Submissiveness is defiance and the weak intern is a threat to the PhD with the successful church, the books, a nice house, etc. It made absolutely no sense. What on earth was wrong with this guy?

But he actually prayed with me - one of the three times he did so - and confessed to God that he was ashamed of himself for how he had treated me.

About a month later, my barely pregnant wife began having contractions and had to go on bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy. I was totally unemployed, waiting for a call. Our only source of income was my wife. Which didn't bother me at all. I loved sitting around on my butt all day while my pregnant wife made a living. Sigh.

I began to think that there was a reason no one was calling, and it was my pastor. I began to think about how it might go down. Suppose someone had been interested in me as a potential candidate. Do you think I'd be the first one they'd call? Probably not. They'd probably call my current pastor first. And what would he say? I was absolutely sure what he would say: not ready. He had said it often enough to me.

I realized there was no way I would ever get a call to a church as long as I remained a member of this congregation. But until I got a job, I couldn't afford to move. Stuck.

And that's when I had no choice.

That's when I threw it all away. That's when I tore my heart out of my chest and cast it out into the sea. That's when I gave up and simply commended myself and my family to God. That's when I abandoned the ministry forever, with no hope I would ever return and no idea what I might do to make a living.

I had a horrible time getting a job of course. I couldn't even get a call back from McDonalds. I finally got 2 minutes of face time with a manager of Starbucks who told me that she had 700 applicants for one opening. When the shock wore off, I asked her how I could get to the top of the stack and she said that I needed to spend a lot of time there, buying coffee, making friends with the other workers, hanging out, being cool. Blogging about how cool everything is. Singing songs I wrote myself about how much I love Starbucks and having the Youtube video go viral. You know, nothing much.

I didn't bother buying a latte. I couldn't afford it anyway.

Eventually I did get a job. An awful manual labor job in a factory for minimum wage. I had several deep tissue injuries in most of my joints and a sprained knee by the time I found a real job on the other side of the country 2 months later.

But I did figure out how to put my training and experience as a ministerial candidate to work for me. Don't worry, I'll post about that too. That's one of the main reasons for creating this blog - to help you figure out how you can recover from this devastating blow. But this is not that post.

Before we moved at last - before our exodus - my pastor had my wife and me over for dinner, along with several other couples. Not to say goodbye to us, of course. He just had some system that allowed him to have everyone in the congregation over about 2-3 times a year. It was just our turn.

And since I was leaving, and I knew I'd regret not saying it, I grew bold during that dinner conversation. Several elders were present as well. I was trying to help my pastor understand why I was abandoning the ministry. He couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to remain unemployed indefinitely and be his whipping boy. He really didn't get it.

So I finally looked at him and said, "I'll tell you why. Because if some church is interested in me as a candidate, who's going to be the very first person they call? You. They're going to want to call you. You're the authority on me. You're my pastor right now. And so your opinion matters the most as to whether or not I'm fit for ministry. And if you were to get such a phone call, what would you say?"

At this point, he started to fumble his words - I had finally caught him off guard. Only time that ever happened. But I cut him off.

"I know exactly what you would say, and so do you. You'd say, 'Not ready,' wouldn't you? You'd say not ready."

The room is totally silent now and all eyes are on us. The elders have gone pale. One of them in particular looked totally shocked at my boldness, like he had seen a ghost.

He admitted it. "Yes, I'd say you're not ready."

I said, "Yep, I know, and so would the elders. But you know what? I don't buy it. Either I'm called or I'm not. This whole 'not ready' business is nonsense, pure nonsense. If I'm called to the ministry, then I'm called - warts and all. No minister is perfect. If I have flaws, then I don't need to get rid of them before becoming a minister. If I'm called, then I'm called as a flawed man. If you guys are so sure I'm not ready, then maybe the truth is simpler than that. I'm NOT called. I can't wait forever. I have a family to provide for and seminary to pay for."

I stayed another 10-15 minutes to be polite. Then I got up and left that godforsaken place forever.

Was I called to the ministry? Lots of people thought so. I thought so. For a long time I remained convinced that I was, and that this man had simply stolen that from me.

Many times it was his name that my screams of hateful rage formed into when I was alone with my thoughts on my long commutes home. I eventually realized that I needed counseling. It helped. A lot.

I actually felt guilty and ashamed because of it all. I figured I wasn't called, and therefore I must have quite arrogantly lusted to be in the pulpit, lusted for my own glory, lusted for an audience to feed my ego. I was arrogant and selfish to go so deep into debt, especially with my wife working so hard to pay the bills. And I wasted a lot of our very scarce resources on food and booze and cigars. Anything to make the pain subside for a while. How wrong I was for even pursuing seminary!

The counselor I saw said something very, very wise one day that clicked. "You may not have been called to become a minister, but you definitely were called to pursue the ministry. The proof is: that's what you did. You didn't sin by pursuing the ministry. In fact, 1 Tim 3:1 says, 'If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.'

"There's nothing wrong with wanting to be a minister. That's a good thing! It's virtuous! It's noble! It is to be commended! So you didn't ultimately become a minister. You did no wrong in desiring this noble task. Of course, we know our intentions are always tainted with sin. Perhaps there was some arrogant lust for an audience. But no minister's motives are ever pure. We're sinners! That doesn't disqualify you from office!"

And then I remembered. How has the church always treated those who brought the Word of God to them? How did Israel treat the prophets? How were the apostles treated, and by whose hand?

How did the church react to Jesus?

Being mistreated by the church does NOT mean you are somehow unworthy of the ministry for some sin or other. In fact, it's precisely the opposite. If you've been mistreated by the church, it's probably a good sign that you are united to Christ, whom they crucified.

Being mistreated by the church doesn't disqualify you from ministry. More likely it qualifies you to inherit the kingdom of God, because you are being made to look like Jesus, who came unto his own, but his own did not accept him.

The book of Hebrews makes some very interesting comments about Melchizedek. It says more or less that Moses shaped his story to make him into a type of Christ, to make him resemble the Son of God. How? Just in how Moses speaks about him: not mentioning his lineage, his mysteriousness, the fact that his death isn't mentioned or what his religion was like, etc. Little details are omitted, questions are asked. And this is so powerful that Psalm 110 comments on it as well, saying that Christ (as we know now from Hebrews) is a priest after Melchizedek's mysterious priesthood that we know nothing about at all.

And here we are talking about it still to this day. One man's story was told in such a way to make him, in a very subtle way, resemble Christ. And thousands of years later we still marvel at it.

What would you be willing to suffer for the same to be said of you? What would you be willing to go through in order to bear witness to Christ as powerfully as Melchizedek did?

Or what would you be willing to suffer in order to gain wisdom? Or to gain eternal life?

There is no price so great that I am not willing to pay it, if only it means I can look a little bit more like Jesus.

When I was a child, I prayed that the Lord would give me wisdom. For some reason, it stuck that God was pleased when that's what Solomon asked for, so every night for years that's what I prayed for: wisdom.

God answered all those prayers when I was forced to abandon the ministry.

I was victimized by wicked shepherds who prey upon the flock. Like a lamb to the slaughter, I didn't fight them. Like Jesus, I did not defend myself. I bit my tongue. And it cost me everything. And it hurts. A lot.

But I guarantee that when we all get to glory, we won't regret it, you and I. Not one bit. Our scars will be badges of honor.

Christ is our wisdom. And he said, "Do not be surprised when the world hates you."

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