Changes: chapter 11

Darren felt a certain urgency to move forward in this new direction.   Although we served in all the areas we could;  cleaning the church, working in the nursery, children’s ministry, and youth, it was made very clear to us that this was as far as we could go in the ministry which is fine if these are the areas that God has called one to.  But it was not for us.  Since Darren knew that the Lord had called him on, we had to move on.  We spoke to the pastor of the church we were leaving and let him know that we bore no hard feelings but that it was just time for us to move on.  He wasn't happy but what pastor ever is when he loses members. 

             

We moved to a church which checked out doctrinally.  It was also a place where Darren felt there was room for him to pursue his ministry calling.  We served here faithfully cleaning toilets, scrubbing and vacuuming floors, teaching children, working in the nursery and doing whatever else needed to be done.  In time, Darren was placed as an elder and soon after as an assistant pastor.   He was blessed by being given the opportunity to teach and develop a gift that truly was of God.  Darren definitely had the call of pastor on his life.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to him.    It was evident to all around him including our new pastor.

             

Astoundingly enough, to make a very long story short, Word of Faith doctrines made their way to forefront of the teaching.  But not only these doctrines made their way into our home church but also other beliefs which Darren deemed to be heretical. The two equally dangerous systems caused us great concern.  To make matters even worse a “Faith School” was  opened on Wednesday night’s teaching curriculum that clearly stating Word of Faith foundations.  Things really began heating up at church. Just as fast as these doctrines were making their way to the forefront, Darren too became bolder  about speaking out against them. 

             

Meanwhile, I found out that I was pregnant again.  Enter fear.   Because I was hearing from so many angles now how fear is the vehicle for disaster, I tried hard not to fear for this pregnancy.   This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing.   The problem for me was all about motivation.  I wasn’t controlling my fear out of any desire to please the Lord but rather out of superstition.    I might as well have watched to make sure I didn’t walk under any ladders, or ran into a black cat.  My beliefs were just a dangerous and deadly.   Other thoughts flooded my thinking.   Perhaps, fear is why I had lost the baby before.  Downward and downward I spiraled in my thinking.   In fact, no matter how hard I fought fear, fear became my master. 

         

On February 13^th, 2004 at my sixteenth week check up the ultrasound showed no heart activity. I went home on February 14th,  after the surgery and lay in bed, with a broken heart . My family was so compassionate and loving towards me that day.  First my husband walked into the bedroom with a card.  I did laugh because I knew how hard it must have been for him to buy what he considered to be a waste of money.  Don’t get me wrong, he lavishes me with gifts often just but rarely with something as "useless" as a card. But he knew what it would mean to me.  My son walked in next with a flower.  Next was my daughter with chocolate.  It was touching and I wanted to sit in bed and just bawl for how wonderful they were and for how much physical, mental and emotional pain I was in.  I shed a few tears and told them how grateful I was for their gifts.   They all sat on the bed for awhile trying to cheer me up.  After awhile, my husband could see that I was in need of rest and shooed them out.   It was then I let the stopper go and cried till the well ran dry.  

After this day, I stopped praying.  I stopped reading the Word.  I was angry and desperately bruised.  I directed much of my anger at God this time.  I was very careful not to do that with the last pregnancy loss.   It wasn't that I blamed God.   I knew He was there with me and I knew that He was all-powerful. God was just a convenient vent for my anger.

No one at the church ever mentioned anything about the pregnancy loss to us though everyone was aware.  There were no words of comfort or love offered.  No one brought us food or cards.  There was nothing.   The pastor and his wife came over one day to speak with us but nothing was mentioned about our loss and neither of them asked us how were doing with it.   Though hurtful it was not surprising.  If  "faith" teachings are taken to their full extent, then any believer who does not walk in their God given authority over negative circumstances, they are to be pitied. It was good for me to see their reaction in this way. It was the catalyst I needed to completely reject false faith. I was hurt by their actions but I did not hold  those actions against them as they made sense to me in light of their beliefs.  I understood that they were powerless to treat me any other way.  

Shortly after the pregnancy loss, three weeks to be exact, we were asked to step out of leadership at the church and were encouraged to leave.   This we did, believing that the timing of this action was not an accident.  Though it was never said, it was heavily implied that Darren was considered to be "at fault" spiritually for what had happened to the pregnancy.     And of course, it was deemed that he was no longer in line with the vision of the church; which was true.  Though painful for me in the way it was handled, it was no loss to us.  As a matter of fact it was just what we had been praying for.  Three months earlier we had started asking the Lord what he wanted us to do as we watched the churches doctrines go askew.   The pastor (I'll call him Charlie for the sake of ease) and Darren had agreed months earlier that when Charlie was ready to leave to start another church, Darren would become the new pastor.   Darren had all along made it clear that, “when this happens, I will be taking the church in my own God given direction”.  Charlie agreed to this full heartedly.  Due to this prior commitment that Darren had made, neither of us had peace about leaving  despite the teaching.  We continued to pray and ask God for clear direction.  Being asked or rather encouraged to leave was the release we had been seeking for.  

            

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Answered Prayer: chapter 10

Shortly after Darren and I married, I asked the Lord to teach me how to excel in the area of prayer.  The Lord answered this prayer in the year after losing our baby.  I spent hours a day in prayer.  I found such solace while I was praying. I prayed for my children, for the country,  for the nations leaders, for Billings, for the city we lived in, for our church, for the persecuted church and many other things.    And I prayed for my husband.  I prayed that my husband would fulfill his ministry. More specifically, I prayed 2 Timothy chapter 4 for him.  This scripture fit so completely with the ministry that I had sensed in his life.  Ironically enough, it seemed to me that Darren was called to hold the corporate church accountable to pure doctrine.  Though, I could not, at the time, communicate this near as eloquently as I just did here.  I knew it in my heart.  The irony that my husband would function in an area where I was so dysfunctional completely eluded me at the time.  But there isn’t irony in God’s scheme of things. 

             

Prayer was one area that I was firm and founded in.   In my earlier Lively Church days I had been taught that one should only pray one time for something and then stand in faith for that thing.  To pray more than one time for something showed a lack of faith.  For some reason it was not difficult for me to reject this line of thinking.  Although this contradicted Word of Faith teachings,  I had no trouble diligently praying scriptures over and over again.  Actually, each time I prayed in this fashion, my faith and hope grew by leaps and bounds.  It is precisely in this way that I prayed 2 Timothy chapter 4 for my husband day after day for five months. 

             

One night, after spending a couple of days at a youth retreat, he came home very excited.  He tearfully told me how the Lord had touched his life.  He began by telling me that the theme of the retreat was 2 Timothy Chapter 4.  He said to me, "I need to fulfill the ministry that God has laid aside for me". I started to cry then too.  I had never told him what I had been praying for him.  When I told him at that moment, we cried together in amazement. God determines when He is going to answer a prayer.  In many cases people pray for years with no visible results.  I say, keep praying!.  There are other areas that I am still praying about and have yet to "see" results.  Yet, I keep on.  In this case I had prayed for five months.  When God answered my prayer He answered it very specifically.  But then, praying the scripture is pretty specific.  

Token Trial: chapter 9

I spent hours in prayer the whole next year.  I had constant choices before me all the time.  I could either fester in my pain, try to ignore it or I could cry out to God with it.  Completely, by the grace of God, I almost always chose to cry out to God with my pain.  I had my moments of weakness when I indulged self pity but overall I made the right choices. I was surprised to learn that turning to the Lord during grief is a rather bittersweet experience.  On the one hand, the Lord was closer to me than one could possibly imagine. It is the sweetest most wonderful feeling but the process of expressing grief to the Lord is also excruciating.  I know, however, that after a full year spent in worship and prayer I gained, by God’s grace, victory over grief, in most areas, in a miraculous amount of time.   But all the while there was something else happening too. 

              

There was another war being waged within me; one which I kept guarded from the Lord. Whether I did this consciously or not, I don’t know.  I questioned the loss of my little baby through the glasses of the faith teachings. I did not, yet, possess all of the necessary tools  to truthfully cope with this trial.   In a little compartment in my heart and mind, I continued to hold  ideas hostage before the Lord.  This lengthened and complicated my grieving process in another way.  Leave it to human intellect to skirt God's truth even in the face of His wonder working power.   In that little compartment I still stood steadfast and unyielding to God's sovereign plan for my life.  I do not want to minimize what God had done in my life in another area because it was undoubtedly a step in the right direction.  Looking back I think to myself: “What could I possibly have been thinking while I watched as God performed a miracle in my life?”  But deep inside I know what I was thinking: “I have partook of my token trial and I am done now”.

           

Growing up in the Catholic Church prepared me for thinking that I could live the easier life.  We went to church and saw all the families standing around us with their children in their well pressed clothes.  Hair do's all in place.  The mass was always said and performed  nicely.  As a family, we came early, took our seats, knelt and prayed.  After wards, we left early never knowing what hardships the other families were experiencing.  And they never saw or knew what ones we might be experiencing either. My parents didn't purposely protect themselves in this regard it was just part of the culture of the church we attended.  But as a child growing up in this, I naturally thought that everyone was perfect and that their lives were perfectly tranquil.  Even at home, our life was the same steady pace day after day.  Very few ripples affected our lives.  No great traumas or trials crossed our paths that I ever knew of.  Sickness and tragic losses were foreign images to me.  I wasn't completely ignorant though.  I knew something wasn’t right.  That is to say, thank God that nothing horrible and traumatic did happen to us but somehow it did not fit with what I perceived was happening in the world around me.   Instead of creating a happy go lucky child these experiences drove me to wonder when the "bad" was going to hit us.  My parents were oblivious to my dilemma.  Had I shared my thoughts with them they probably would have "set me straight" in my thinking.  But alas I obsessed about when it was going to be our turn.  The question rang in my head, “When it did hit us, would I lose a parent or some such awful thing?”   I really wondered how long we could sail through life without any of the storms of life hitting us.  In my sinful way, I mentally tried to balance what I perceived as an unnatural charmed life  (in reality just a good childhood) with a life of fear and negative expectations.

            

My parents, to this day, appear to live the same way.  All of my siblings are "good" hard working responsible adults who never rebelled as teenagers to any notable degree.  We all get along and have fun together at family reunions.   We are all healthy for the most part.  With one or two exceptions, all of my brothers and sisters have had relatively smooth lives.  My folks are both healthy and are in their 80's.  They are happily married and are in relatively good spirits most of the time.  According to a worldly standard, they really did and do have a great life.   I was sort of torn in my adulthood.  One part of me expected to have a smooth life like my parents.  This is the part that fit perfectly with the foundations of the faith movement.  The other part of me knew that it was too much to ask and that the lightening was bound to strike.  This is the part of me that nurtured “fear and control”.  This is why I sort of became a control freak and decided that I would make sure that nothing bad would happen to me.   I just wasn't prepared for the Lord to love me so much He would make sure that it would.   When the baby died; that was that.   It had finally happened.   I could breathe freely and know that the bad had finally struck me and now I could go on and live just like my parents did.  As fantastic as it seems, I really believed this.  Little did I know God would relieve me of this fantasy.

Agony Understood; chapter 8

After two years of attending the Calvary Chapel in Billings, Darren and I felt that the Lord was calling us to move our family.  So with our three month old Alexis and seven year old Joshua we packed up our house and moved to Kansas; first.  We didn’t know where this journey would eventually land us.  As a matter of fact it took six months to end up at our final destination of Sterling, Colorado.  Here, we attended one church for two years.  It was a good church.  Suitable, but it wasn’t our home church in Billings.  We sorely missed Calvary Chapel. Darren even called some Calvary Chapels in the Colorado area to see if they would send someone to Sterling to start one.  Although, I did make some fabulous life long friends at this church; the false faith movement doctrines that were never taught from the pulpit were entertained by the women within the walls.  The flame of false faith continued to be fanned and fueled in me.    

            

 Darren and I were to endure our hardest trial at this church.  When Alexis was three, I found that I was pregnant again.  We were so excited.  We bought a more reliable car and a home.  The pregnancy went well.  No different from my previous ones except for some pre term labor issues which I learned to manage with a few simple techniques.  On the evening of Saturday, January 13, 2001; in my thirty-ninth week of gestation, I started labor.    When I awoke the next Sunday morning I felt strange.   Labor was still progressing very slowly and gently but it was there nonetheless.  After a couple of hours I finally realized what the problem was.  I had not felt the baby move.  I called the doctor and she had us meet her in the hospital.  My worst nightmare was realized.  The baby had died sometime in the night.  How can this sort of pain be described?   Even as I sit and write ten years later the memory is as real as it was that moment.  Nothing had prepared me for the grief that was so to ensue from this moment on.

             

One week later, on the morning of Sunday January 21, I made a difficult decision to go to church.  I knew it would be a painful thing.  Staying home, even in pain, was far more comfortable.  However, I also knew that I needed the Lord. I could have worshiped alone at home.  I could have read my Bible alone at home and it would have been ok and nobody would have blamed me.  Though, there is something precious and intimate about worshiping in the congregation of believers.  God is there in His power and fullness.   Once a person has entered into corporate worship, there is a sense of vulnerability.  I needed to share my pain with the Lord and I needed to do it publicly.  I stood there on Sunday morning, with arms lifted up, I cried and worshiped.  I didn't really care that so many were staring at me and weeping with me; sensing my desperate pain. It proved to be the most painful yet one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had.  No prayer meeting with “prophetic” women could even come close to that experience.  While I worshiped, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my Lord knew my agony. 

             

The body of believers at this church showed Darren and I an enormous amount of compassion during this time.  We were lavished with cards, calls, food, visitors and most of all love.  We felt embraced and cared for.  This body truly represented to us what God always intended for His body; to weep with those who weep and to laugh with those who laugh.  I will never forget this display of Christ’s love.