Prophecy

I was raised a Roman Catholic. When my first marriage broke up I got mad at God. The priest who tried to comfort me by assuring me that I could get an annulment through the church only made me madder. I believed in “til death do us part” and I didn’t want out of the marriage, no matter how abusive it was, I wanted God to change my husband and restore my marriage…ask and you shall receive and all that.
For the next 5 years I was lost in the dark, looking for truth in all the wrong places. Then I was born again. I said yes to a personal relationship with Jesus. I read the Bible with earnest, listened to such greats as Chuck Swindoll, Chuck Smith, James MacArthur, Keith Green and Don Fransisco.
And I married Art.
It took my husband (also a baby Christian) and I a while to figure out that we needed to be part of a church, and even longer to find the right church for our family. We started fellowshipping and serving at Grace United Methodist Church in 1981. Our pastor was an old time preacher who had gone to a “Good News Conference” after over 20 years of service to God, and got saved. When we became part of the church, the Spirit was really moving there. I’ll challenge anyone who says that the Holy Spirit can’t or won’t move through a UMC.
That was where Art was called into the ministry. The call was confirmed by the church and as a family we began the long process to ordination. During this time, the United Methodist denomination was becoming more and more liberal in its teachings, but in our Church Jesus was still LORD and sin was still sin. We were attending a Free Methodist college, Free Methodism is more fundamental and Bible based than is United Methodism, but it is Armenian, as opposed to Calvinistic. Periodically Art had to meet with the ordination board, to go over his progress and his plans. In 1989 he was assistant to the pastor of a small church in a small town, and we were making plans to move down to Kentucky in a year or so to go to seminary.
The board insisted that Art should go to a more liberal seminary, that he needed his convictions stretched. They were opposed to the stand that he took against Abortion and Homosexuality. Calling sin sin was being intolerant and unloving, and we all know that God is love! It came to the point where Art had to compromise or quit. Quitting would mean totally rethinking our future. The United Methodist Denomination takes good care of its own. The salary and benefits can’t be beat. We were looking forward to a secure future, but now, if we were to stay true to our Faith and Convictions we would have to walk away from that promise.
Did I call this piece “Prophecy” ? I just took a break and thought no one is going to read this. It’s too long, but like I said, it’s a sort of therapy for me I think…anyway, on to the prophesy.
So, there we were, 2 young sons, having to move out of our home because Art had to resign from his job, we hadn’t had time to save up much money, and we didn’t even know where to go to church on Sunday. Well, I was working at a Christian school and the Church that sponsored the school wasn’t very far from where we were saving, so we decided to visit there one Sunday. They asked for visitors to stand up at the beginning of the service, and I was welcomed by many co-workers and the parents of some of my students. Then the service began. They had a guess speaker that week, a missionary, and I sat back expecting to hear a typical “mission life” talk.
But after introductions, as the speaker began, he motioned to Art and I and asked us to stand up. He explained that he usually didn’t do this sort of thing, but that he has a very strong feeling that the LORD would have him tell us something. He spoke about how we were going through a hard time that seemed to be caused by religious leaders; that we had made the right decision, but that didn’t make the resulting refiners fire any easier to take. He told us that God was allowing this to happen to us for a reason and that we shouldn’t doubt the calling on our lives. He went back to his planned message, but interrupted it 2 more times, to clarify the message to us, to be sure we understood the message. He said Art was called into the ministry, and that he’d be a prophet evangelist, but that his ministry wouldn’t be one of those big time deals, it would be more of a one on one evangelism. And worse of all, he said, this wouldn’t be the last time we went through this. We would be rejected by other churches, people who we fellowshipped with would turn their backs on us. People who we submitted to as Spiritual Leaders would say and do things that would hurt and discourage. He was right. I mentioned my catholic and our United Methodist back ground to show that this kind of “word of knowledge” was not familiar to us. Where as some of the people in the church knew our situation, it was unknown to the speaker. It was very real and very exciting, and it is one of those things I remember, I muse over, when things seem to be getting darker and darker with no sign of relief in sight. Four years ago, when the Free Methodist Denomination closed down their church in Farmington, we were in that place again. And in my prayer journal I wrote, how many times do we have to go through this? Then I found Psalm 12:6 “the words of the LORD are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven time”
SEVEN TIMES! Lets see, 1. The United Methodist 2. The Free Methodist in Rochester 3. A nondenominational church in Rochester. 4. Our Church in Colorado. 5. The American Indian Bible Ministries in Farmington, 6. The Free Methodist Church in Farmington. 7. This crisis with Ardy, my son who is currently in prison as a Sex Offender, and the resulting rejection that our family experienced by several local churches as well as nonbelievers…that fire has been burning for 3 years…and I am tempted to say, our life has been a big joke, we have failed in ministry, and I can not…Abba, this is too hard.
I keep thinking, Art will be home soon, and it won’t be for 5 days. He should be in a cabin by one of the many lakes in Minnesota. I wish I could have gone too.