Submitting To The Scalpel Of The Great Physician
In the interest of caring deeply for the truth and for my readers who have suffered at the hands of unscrupulous, false shepherds and abusive/ unhealthy leaders I am compelled to share my heart concerning the aftermath of the abuse in my own walk with the Lord and dealing with some anger and resentment issues which have recently reared their ugly heads in my life. My hope is that someone will be helped by my experience….
It has been five full years since the church I was in, and where I served the wife of two succeeding pastors for over 20 years declined to the place where it was clear to myself and my family that the pastor and his wife were bazarrely taking over my son’s family and taking his wife and newborn child away from both their maternal and paternal families ; and the Pastor and his wife were becoming the surrogate parents and grandparents to the young woman and the child….My family which consisted of 8 of us were quietly excommunicated with a lie….According to my counselor at that time the church was now a cult….
There was an elder in the church whom I reached out to, that I had known since he was about 25 years old and for the whole twenty years which I was involved in the church I loved him and believed he loved me like a mother and I loved him like a son..He was totally taken in by the Pastor’s wife and was her stepson by the previous marriage and had been under her false teaching/ deception from a teenager , years longer than I had been, and he totally abandoned our family and refused to respond to my pleas for help…..Still.. I loved him..
When my son was twelve years old and my brother was 16 and living with me this elder was in his early 20′s and held a Bible Study at my home with a few of the boys we knew , including my son and brother… It wasn’t long before my son and brother were both saved…..
This was around 1986…In 2006 the bottom fell out of my family’s lives when the church listed to the left and everything began to sink…what I mean by this is many left the church..the church leaders even were helpful in my daughter in law divorcing my son without any scriptural reasons. or Biblical grounds.. My son’s heart and our hearts were broken… the divorce was final in 2009..
I have always prayed for the church leaders and the young elder I have mentioned with sincerity and love; for repentence and reconciliation.. How shocked I was in 2010 when this very elder was divorced from his wife of 20 years breaking up his family with four children and two months later marrying my daughter in law..Yet I continued to love him even though I felt totally betrayed by him..
In May of this year , two events occurred that impacted those in my family.. first the elder and my ex daughter in law left the church and started their own church and all communication was stopped with the church leaders. About the same time the elder and our ex-daughter-in-law had their first child together. I tried to be happy for them..I continued to pray for them.. But in my heart I still believe they are living in sin.. because she had no grounds to leave her husband and marry another man..
So as long as they were in the unhealthy church or even when they left and started their own church and I could feel it too was a root from the same unhealthy tree I could love them and pray for them… Then when their little first born son died of crib-death at 2 months old I was sad for them , but there was a little place in me that felt justified and that justice was administered… after all when David sinned with Bathsheba , he lost his first born son, right?
I realized today that somewhere inside me there has been an infected boil of sorts which finally came to the surface… Today I found out the elder and his wife and my two little grandsons went to a healthy church last Sunday…The wife teaches a Good News Club.. I was bitter and angry and disturbed in my spirit all day over it… My family was so deeply hurt by the leaders of the church, and these two people were involved in the hurt and betrayal as well! My family who love the Lord has not even been able to bring themselves to go to a church.. I forced myself to go for the sake of my family and I have found a wonderful church home.. It sickened me that they could go in and act like a normal Christian family when they had done such harm…
I want to explain how the Lord has dealt with me in this situation…I had already planned to visit a friend who had a painful boil the size of a silver dollar on her back in a place she couldn’t reach.. I was going to hot-pack it for her and try to get it to come to a head and give her relief…I went in fuming, angry and resentful and spent 3 hours hot-packing her horribly sore boil and gave her some relief…I cared about my friend’s pain and was there to help her.
Jesus the Great Physician cares for all His children’s pain…We sometimes have resentment, anger, even rage pent up inside of us for various reasons..We can’t reach it, sometimes we can’t even see it, and we can’t fix it…. He has to lance the eruption and clean it out so we can be healthy spiritually…He allows just the right things that hurt dreadfully to come our way so the dross can come to the surface and be scraped off…Surrendering to his loving scalpel and trusting His love and mercy is the only way to be free of the unhealthy infection of anger, resentment and rage..
I felt painfully bitter today.. Have you ever tasted a rotten peanut or walnut… It’s horrible and puckers your mouth and tastes nasty..the anger, resentment and rage today gave me a “nasty taste in my soul.” The only thing that would help is to repent of the anger, resentment , and rage … Then I felt immediately clean/ spiritually whole again .. It didn’t make anything people did to hurt myself or my family right , it simply made me right with the Lord…
God is dealing with them as well as with me…. I am also a needy sinner … I trust He has my best in mind and because I know He loves me, I can risk loving others and wanting the best for those who have hurt me… It comes down to forgiveness.. If we do not forgive others, He will not forgive us… It doesn’t mean we have to agree with sin… We simply choose to believe in God’s goodness and Trust Him, allowing Him to take care of those things that are more than we can bear… His ways are higher than our ways and we cannot see the whole picture as He can..He allows people to have free will…
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