Not The Only One !
25 Apr 25
Post #190
" Monumental Mess ups"
Howdy!
If this is your first time along with us for the ride, then let me welcome you and introduce myself to you. I am the most favored one. I am a child of God and since God is king, that makes me the son or daughter of the King. Understand, not just any king, but " The King" of all kings. I understand my privileged position as one of God's kids, who is blessed beyond measure. I was raised in a Christian home and at a fairly young age understood and accepted Christ as my Savior. I understood, that meant that I accepted His finished work on the cross at Calvary. I grew up understanding the true meaning of Christmas and that it wasn't about a fat man in a red suit, but about God sending His Son into the world to launch a rescue mission that had been promised for centuries and had been planned since almost the beginning of time. God sent His Son to reconcile us unto Himself after we had broken our relationship with Him, because of our sin and disobedience.
Like wise, I grew up with the understanding that Easter was not about the Easter bunny, but the Resurrection of a king, who was victorious over death, hell and the grave. He rose as the first of all who love God and would later follow His example. I'm not by any means claiming that I understand it all or have it all figured out, but I definitely got how much God profoundly loves me , and not just me , but all who love and seek after Him. I'm not perplexed by the thought of, " how about the rest of us"? God loves all who He created in His image, but it's a little difficult to be in a love relationship with someone whom you don't or want to know Him. He still loves them, they just don't know and are unaware to how much He loves them and that's just a tragedy.
My walk with God continued through my teen years and early twenties, and I grew in my faith and became more confident as to what it meant to be a follower of Christ. I didn't and still don't always get it right, but as I drew closer to God, I was much more willing to step out and exercise my faith, such as leading, teaching and taking mission trips outside of the country. I was always blessed by the trips , even though they were completely out of my norm and comfort zone. It went way beyond just not having air conditioning and other every day conveniences that we just take for granted. It was seeing people with so little in life , when it came to physical possessions, but possessing so much joy and contentment. It paints such a hard contrast between there and the States, where people have so much and are just often miserable and in a constant quest for more. I know that some will point to the fact that you can't miss what you have never had or experienced, and while I'm not entirely sure that is true, it makes me curious as to how many of us would be willing to trade for a simpler lifestyle, just to know that our lives would be full of joy and peace. I think that one of the coolest things about being on mission is how God works out the language barriers and we just always seem to be able to understand one another. It's almost as if God and the gospel is a universal translator ☺️.
I want to say that life goes on and there are other aspect of life , besides church and ministry, but what I have come to believe and understand, is that the marker identification of being a believer is not something that you can take off and put on at will , but it impacts every area of your life and that it invades the crevices of your life in ways and places, that you, well at least , I never saw or thought possible. The Christian life style is often summarized by love and forgiveness, which most of us struggle to do correctly, or at least like Christ did. The other third making up the tripod is service, and it should be about serving others, more so than making everything about yourself. When Christ was walking the earth , that is what He did serve others. Just like we get the love and forgiveness thing often sideways, then you would probably get the service portion upside down as well, and we often do.
I think that we Jack up service, because we want everyone to know what a good person that we are. We pat ourselves on the back and tell just about anyone who will listen about our good deeds and will sometimes dress it up as a prayer request, when it's us spreading gossip about someone who thought we were doing them a good deed. Well the good book says that they have their reward by blasting what a super star that they are. It holds no eternal value or significance. I was determined that I wouldn't be one of those people who goes around praising themselves and ailinating others all along the way. I wanted to really serve and be a force for God's kingdom and not my own. I had a servants heart and eventually I was approached by my church to become a deacon. I was excited just knowing that is what a deacon is, someone who serves. I quickly got involved in serving the few widows that we had in our congregation and before long it had rolled into helping the single mom's in the church. It was a way bigger need, and it seemed as if the few widows that we had in the church were doing pretty well on their own for the most part.
I don't know when common sense and training goes out the window, but it did for me. People will say that hindsight is always twenty/ twenty, but it's usually, way so much more. There is this place where we become proficient at whatever it is that we are doing, and before long the mission and vision is lost, and we forget that Jesus is the one directing and it becomes about us, and I mean all about us. ☺️ A little background, so we can see what we are working with, without getting to detailed, because its really obvious of all the mistakes and missteps that I took along the way. There was this one single mom, who had a young son and a none involved father. It started out simple enough. I was supposed to fix a chain on her Son's bicycle. She caught me in the hall at church one Sunday and started talking to me about a door that wasn't closing properly . I thought it was probably something simple like a loose hinge and I told her that I would be happy to take a look at it. What came to mind much to late for me was be careful what you let your eyes see. ☺️. I say that because I had the biggest pair of blinders on that you could imagine. Call me nieve, but I didn't at first realize how much time we were spending together over little projects, that eventually turned into dates out with her son. Before long, I found myself way out in the middle of the ocean without a floatation device☺️. Well...
Well!, what does that look like? It was like I had built a house of cards that was beginning to crash down in on me. I am by no means , claiming to be a victim, because I liked what was going on and the way that it made me feel. Most would say that they saw nothing wrong with what we were doing, two single people getting together around providing some semblance of a family for her kid. The rub is that one of us weren't exactly what you would call single. That's right! I made a big assumption, and most would say that should have been one of the first things that you should be talking about, but somehow, we just didn't. Oh! wait, it gets really good. My wake up call came from the pastor of my church asking to speak with me. Apparently the person who I believed to be an ex husband, was a not so much! He had dropped by the church one day on his lunch break and told the pastor, that they were infact not divorced, not even leagaly separated, and that he thought that they were working on getting back together. He told the pastor, that was until a certain deacon began to come around and she just stepped away from the negotiations. As disgusting as egg on the face sounds, I wish it was something that simple. ☺️. Out of all of the things that I've been called over the years, slide over an make room for home wrecker. I had placed myself in a very sticky situation, but just not myself, but my church, and in the process giving Jesus a big old shiner. A black eye for Jesus! It's kind of funny the places we can find ourselves when we don't pay attention to the contours of the road that we are traveling. I dug a big fat ditch for myself and I blew past a lot of safe guards to get here. I'm not even going to name them out of just sheer embarrassment.
I just got to big for my britches and this was a class" A "humbling. I lost sight of the mission and the message, and my service, very much became about self service. I'm the problem, not a part of the problem, but the problem itself. I'm the reason why so many people give push back to God and faith. They say, just look at those Christians, always preaching one thing and doing the complete opposite. Hypocrite, do as I say and not what I do, just laughable. So very sad and true! It's very much about focus and placing our eyes on others, ourselves, or our wants and desires, and God just gets lost in all of that. Gandhi, once said that he would consider becoming a Christian if it wasn't for Christians, and this is an acute example of that. This is and was a monumental mess up. How do I fix or try to undo, what has been done? No one is really interested in excuses and my heart just breaks for her young son Andrew. We so called adults are really good at screwing things up and taking them from bad to worse. It's no finger pointing about how I didn't know, or she didn't disclose certain things to me, I just should have known better. There I was discussing my pedigree as if I was above temptation and as if I had some immunity to sin....not so!
Here I am in the place that I've seen so many before me. Maybe not this particular one, but some greedy politicians or corporate executive who enriches themselves at the expense of others, and yes, maybe some church leader as well. I have often cast my vote to condemn them, but it doesn't feel so great being on the other side of the equation and the one who is being condemned and judged. There is absolutely nothing like a good old fashioned church scandal, and people can distant themselves from you faster than rats when they know that the ship is going down. ☺️ I don't know that that there were any real innocent parties here except for Andrew and yet this all lands squarely at my feet. I feel the need to make an amends, and it's got to start at the place where I should have been all along
and that's on my knees. I'm pretty good at making and getting myself into a mess, but I know that only God's wisdom and direction will get me to a place where peace can once again reign in my life. I need to make sure that I'm not somehow making things worse, by trying to avoid responsibility and discomfort, as I work to show my remorse, repair any damage that I can, and to reconcile broken relationships. I pray and ask God for forgiveness, which He freely gives, but up next is an apology to a husband who just believes that the church is a front for taking advantage of unwise people and I'm just another agent of that. Honestly I didn't know that he existed and I just kind of wrote him off as a dead beat dad, but I had no right to judge him like that. It's sad that so many men see their children as an extension of their mom's, and they loose that connection, wanting to avoid the hassle and awkwardness of kids questions. Marriage is hard and perhaps that's why I have avoided it. I don't have a say, because I've never done it, and Lord knows that there are all kinds of experts running around, telling you how to raise your kids and everything else, without having actually done it themselves ☺️☺️.
There are those times and places in life when an apology just rings so hallow , regardless of how sincere it is. It's one thing to be sorry and quite another knowing that you are responsible for the pain, or have somehow contributed to it just being a much deeper hurt. The church is a family and people just love to talk...aka gossip, it keeps the spot light off of themselves ☺️. It was not a violation of the church, but at the same time, it was because my actions carry consequences for others who are actually trying to do things Gods way. I have cast a shadow over all ,and sadly instead of the forgiveness thing that we should be about, I got he should be gone, or they are leaving for not wanting to be associated with this particular body of believers. Sadly, we are all a mixed bag of faith and flaws. So running away from a problem is just another way of running into a problem somewhere else. There are no perfect people, as much as we are hoping to find one, and as far as I know, there has only been one. ☺️ I believe and see these uncomfortable moments as opportunities for us to grow spiritually and to not be a paper tiger, but to critically live out what we say that we believe. The love, the forgiveness and the service. I know that I blew a bunch of equity and some of it was already borrowed, so it's up to me to do the work and try to earn back the trust of my church family, especially my pastor, who had so much confidence in me.
You know what? You are correct, I skimmed over a whole bunch of details, but it was just suppose to be about getting you a frame of reference, not about more details for gossip, and whispers in the shadows. I know that the parts that you don't know, you will just make up and fill in with conjecture ☺️ Oh! How the mighty have fallen, and a big fall from grace. God's word says that pride comes before the fall and fallen I have accomplished with amazing accuracy. I didn't see the pride, which kind of just speaks to the arrogance, which was on display for all to see , except me with the huge blinders on. One thing is for sure and that is I take away huge lessons and lumps from this monumental mess up. Taking my eyes off of Jesus, made it about me and in the process made it painful for so many others, which I had not even considered. The mirror is smudged, it's dirty, with a crack or two, but it's not shattered because of the love and grace of God. God can make all things new and I especially pray that for Andrew.
Till Next Time ✌️ Peace!
Sandy The Southerner
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