With all that’s going on within the fellowship and the ministry these days, it feels like there is so much unsettling and unrest within people. I understand that. What we have known (for most of us) for all of our lives and what has served us so very well is now being shaken from the very top to the very bottom. Foundations are being shaken. Buildings are crumbling. People scared and running in all directions just trying to find something that resembles peace and unity. I understand it.
I keep hearing from different ones in conversation things like:
• “I don’t know what to do now”
• “Just because a few people are having some issues, why should that turn life upside down for me?”
• “I’m really scared!”
• “I’m grieving for what I had and feel like it’s lost.”
• “Why are bitter people trying to tear down what we have?”
• “Why is this happening when there’s nothing to go on to?”
What has served us so well for many years, how can it be wrong? We’ve had peace, right??
Why leave something that has served us so well??
Just because this has been your whole life, don’t let it be your whole book when it’s only a chapter.
God is leading us to better things. Let go of the reins. Just trust His leading.
I’m angry with men and women, who should have been Godly trustworthy people, who took advantage of trusting people in horrifyingly destructive ways. That makes me angry.
But I’m not angry with the religious misguidance. Everything that I should have known has always been in the black and red words in the Bible. I cannot really blame the misguidance on anyone but me. I should have been reading for myself all these years and praying for understanding instead of trusting that the ministry was preaching the pure Word of God.
However, I was brought up to believe in Jesus and to bring my concerns to God through Jesus. I’m not angry because what I have lived through has brought me to this point in my life. I’m thankful that Jesus never let go of my hand. I can look back now and see Jesus has been for me the whole way. There were experiences that I needed to live through to work beautiful Christlike things into the soil of my heart. Compassion, empathy, and understanding to name a few.
There have been plenty of times during my “professing, go to meetings” lifetime that I know without a doubt that God has answered my prayers and has worked things out in my life that was 100% Him. I cannot deny that or deny that I had a relationship with Him. So I absolutely do not despise those years. They have brought me to this point in my life. I look back on them thankfully.
Twelve years ago, my parents and one of my sisters and her family left meetings. I couldn’t understand why they would leave. I understood that everything was not right within the fellowship but where in this world are there any fellowship meetings that get everything right? I believed that I could still love God and be right where I was under the guidance of the 2×2 ministry even though not everything was right. I even gave the example of Zacharias & Elisabeth and Joseph & Mary being faithful in the midst of corrupt religious leadership. Just doing what they knew to do in their place.
And that is well and good until God moves you to think, do, and say otherwise. When the Holy Spirit moved me out of that place I was in, it was undeniable. I have always prayed to God that if He wants me to do anything He needs to make it undeniably clear to me. God is faithful. I cannot deny His leading.
Perhaps this is our Tower of Babel. We are trying to build something in our own strength that reaches to heaven that keeps us together in unity when God wants us to go out into the world and glorify Him.
God: “I guess I’m just gonna have to go down there and confound their way of speaking so they don’t understand each other.”
What is spoken by the ministers I believed to be of God no longer speaks life to my being.
What served me well for many years is now a finished chapter in my history book. God is moving me to see Him even more clearly than before. He’s moving me in a direction that is still unclear to me but for all, I trust Him. I walk by faith, not by sight, trusting the one who loves me. I trust Him to move me to places that He can be glorified because that is my purpose. I don’t know where that is or what it looks like, but I want to stand before God with no expectations and a willingness to glorify Him. Don’t put a period where God has put a comma.
Today I stand before God free and untethered to be moved through the grace of God by His Holy Spirit.
Laura Bryan
Lowell, Arkansas USA
February 24, 2024