Stand up!

This blog goes out in increments, beginning with hundreds on Friday and continuing through Monday.  I have to do it that way or my computer goes on strike and my daughter and husband spend hours on the phone with voices who talk them through tedius instructions about how to  get back in the good graces of the carrier who owns us.  Yesterday I was accused on Email by a Friday reader of being a "whiner".  It was a  miserable day until I went to the Apple Shed and cut loose entertaining a restaurant full of people who had had bad days too. The toe-tappers and I kept going until the cook finished his clean-up job and handed me a tip for making his day...so the day ended well,  after hours of being tempted to deep- six this chapter of the "Life and Times of Ted and Jo Stone"  and stick to telling you just the pretty stories.

For some time I have been pressed by the Holy Spirit to address the plight of faithful Jesus-servers who have  been accused, sentenced and hung....without mercy and with no visible justice in sight. My counsellor son and I concur that many such who come to us leave the ministry and never attend a church again.  I am well aware of immoral,  popularity-wealth-seeking pastors and wives, but I am not talking about those today. Where can a sincere, hard-working, humiliated, dehumanized pastor go?  Where can his wife go?  She is cut off from her friends in the church who act weird toward her now because they are confused...and why wouldn't they be?  Somebody who should be telling the whole truth isn't. I know full well that the "whole truth", motives and all will only be revealed at the Judgment Seat.

I will reach 'way back to the days before we were married for this illustration that our Lord always has purpose for pain. Soon after Ted and I were removed from the world we had known we were placed in a Christian school.  I went first and Ted followed a semester later. I then believed that all of Christendom contained no darkness because "in Him there is no darkness at all."   I knew only the people in the music department of our school when Ted arrived;  therefore I arranged for him to room with the school quartet... the fellows who combed the nation each summer for new students. After the first night at breakfast in the school cafeteria Ted was more quiet than usual. "What's the matter with you?" "Uhh, I will be finding another place to live today!" This two-year veteran Navy man who had been jerked as a medical corpsman into the realities of the horrible effects of homosexuality, venereal disease,  and multiple sex partners replied: "I don't want to tell you this. ...but these four guys are homosexuals!"  I didn't exactly know what that meant, but I knew it wasn't holy.  I  grabbed Ted's arm and pulled him to the Dean's office where my Irish temper shot through the roof.   The Dean's face turned ashen and then he said, "Oh, I can't believe that is true! They're such nice fellows. Let me call the head of the music department!"  He did. ... same response plus this request:: "Let's keep the lid on this." I smelled the sulfur.

What were those two men afraid of?  They knew that if the word spread to the contributors that the school quartet were homosexuals, the donors wouldn't "don" any more. ...and the school was broke! ...going belly up.   If it did those two men would lose their jobs.  I  have met those two men (and women)  in ministries ever since with different faces in different places. God was warning us early on to be on the alert for the money and power-seeking people who quietly run the institutions and operate out of fear.  Unfortunately they do not show their dark side until the barn door is shut and there we are: vulnerable.   These people will pull out every mask and trump card in their arsenal to guarantee their status...and job.

Many Christian laborers suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  Years after Ted and I were treated with masked meanness by church leaders in Houston I went into a depression. There had been no place to safely express my frustrations, grief or anger. I absorbed it all into my soul;  Ted ignored it all. I heard a woman Bible teacher on TV this week say she was in shock because she had just learned that her former pastor's wife had committed suicide. ...no surprise there. I had seriously considered it. There is help out there, but not from the leadership that knows what they have done,   hide it and remain unrepentant.

Boy howdy, am I ever careful where I give my widow's mite and plant my behind to worship my Lord.  Even then I keep one foot in the stirrup. Go on!  Picture that!  Are there churches and missions with integrity?  Of course.  God hasn't pulled the plug on the visible church ...yet, but it's not lookin' good. We have sold out to Babylon. ...so what do we do? Here's one thing:  If you smell sulfur as you see a fellow laborer being mercilessly beaten up, don't just stand there. Fight for him or her.  Like Moses, you may have to run for your life,  but God will protect you,  show up in a burning bush and give you a fruitful ministry you won't believe!

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, Stand in His strength alone
The arm of flesh will fail you; You dare not trust your own
Put on the gospel armor, each piece put on with prayer
When duty calls or danger, be never wanting there. 

Love,  Jo