The Lessons Get Harder

The next Lesson I learned was just as clear as the first but much harder to accept.
It is also much harder to explain. So, please bare with me.

Some of you will understand the lesson immediately. Others, who don't know my background, or the heritage in which I was raised will not.

I find it very difficult to describe the feelings of gratitude, freedom, and relief that we felt in the first few months after Matthew's final surgery. We did not actually realize the stress we had lived through for those 3 years until it was all over. I say that just to try and explain the emotions that were still very raw at the time of lesson number 2.

It happened on a Sunday evening. Because Lynetta and the kids were out of town, I ended up going to my friend's church to visit with him. This church was right down the street from the one we were attending at the time. It was not the type of church I was used to. To be honest it was the type of church I had heard preached against and condemned all of my life.

I slipped in the back door. I was afraid that someone from my home church would see me walking in. I would have a lot of explaining to do if that happened. The service had already started so I hid in the back row. My good friend Tim was the piano player. He saw me hiding.
He later said that he had to laugh because I looked so uncomfortable and out of place.

I don't remember much about the service. I do however remember not approving of the things that I saw. These people did not act like the people I was used to. They obviously did not understand the Bible. They obviously did not know the accepted pattern for God approved worship that my church knew. I spent the first thirty minutes of the service taking mental notes of all the religious error that I was seeing. Then something jolted me awake.

The preacher was actually talking to me! "Oh great," I thought. I'm not hiding as well as I thought. "Do you believe that God answers prayer?" he bellowed. Well of course I did. If he only knew my story he would know how deeply and completely that I believed in the power of prayer.
I slightly nodded my approval.

"If you truly believe in the power of prayer I want you to stand up right where you are!"
I was caught! I could not deny my conviction - not after what God had just done for me and my family. So I stood up. I remember praying: "OK God - this is far enough - Get me out of here."

It got worse: "It is not by chance or accident that you are here tonight." (this guy had been reading my mail) "We need everyone here tonight - who believes in God's power to heal - to come down to the front of this auditorium and pray with us."

Ha! Nice try. It ain't happening! I stayed put.

Then something happened that shook me so deeply that I almost ran down the aisle. There was a young woman standing in the front of the church. She appeared to be in her late teens. She held a new born infant in her arms. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I could see a very familiar desperation in her eyes. Her child was sick. He was born with a serious birth defect. The Doctors said that the prognosis was very poor. She was pleading with God to let him live.

To make a long painful story short, I went and I cried, and I prayed. I held hands with people who loved God - people who truly believed that God was listening and that he cared - People who were not of my religious heritage or my stripe - people who acted and worshiped a little differently than I was used to. That night we had a common purpose and a common Lord and Savior. That night we were brothers. That night it dawned on me that we had been brothers all along.

That last realisation ultimately cost me my church family. It ultimately cost me my parents and my earthly brother and sister. My earthly family has not spoken to me or my wife, or my children in over 5 years. In their eyes I have abandoned "The Church" - I have left "The Faith." But it's OK, I understand. They have very deep convictions too.

Oh, and just to finish the story, God did answer the prayers of the people assembled there that Sunday evening. The child lived.