We Christians need each other, like it or not! 

I know many of us (myself included) have been hurt (sometimes very deeply) by other Christians.  It can hurt like no other hurt and it leads us to feel like we need to stay away from other believers.

I went through that in my 20’s. I was very involved in my church and several inter-denominational Christian fellowships and Bible studies.  I was single at the time and it felt like people my age were meeting at these fellowships, hooking up and getting married or moving away to start new adventures. I had church or a Bible study or fellowship every night of the week but one.  I was never home.  I lived at home with my parents still at that time.

One by one groups stopped meeting for whatever reason and it go to where I was only left with church.  Then at church I drove the church van picking up inner-city kids that nobody else wanted to deal with. I weighed about 150 pounds more than I do now, and you can bet I heard everything those kids had to throw out at me about my weight.  I kept telling myself to bear it because the Lord was the One to deal with these kids. My job was only to be obedient and get them to church and get them back home again.

One night after dropping the kids off, I went back to the church to drop the van off, get my car and go on my way.  There was a sticky note on the windshield of my car by the associate pastor ‘relieving me’ of my ‘duties’ and accusing me of using the church van for personal reasons.  No discussion, not even in person. Just an accusation on a yellow post-it note. Done and done.

A few days later one of the guys (I’ll call him Jim)  in the church who was my age, and who also attended the inter-denominational fellowships I’d been involved in for years approached me after church in the aisles when everyone was talking before they left.  He yelled at me accusing me of being uptown in the bars.  In truth, I had been uptown, but NOT in the bars. I’d been in the park there on the square witnessing to people who came out of the bars with fellow Christians.  I was not patronizing the bars nor “partying”. I’d been about my Father’s business.

Jim was yelling at me loudly accusing me of being backslidden and that I was not in the Lord’s will and that I needed to repent.  I’d already had it.  I yelled back at him, “That’s not true, and if it WAS true, this is NOT the way the Lord would handle it!”.  He put his hands on his hips like a bratty child and said, “Oh yeah, how do you think He would handle it?”  I quoted Matthew 18:16, “But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.'”  He would NOT ASSUME things of me He didn’t know to be a fact and get in my face in front of others screaming at me like a banshee!

I ran to a room and the pastor’s wife followed me with me crying my eyes out, humiliated.  After I calmed down, I scheduled a meeting with the pastor to discuss the note from the associate pastor and then Jim’s humilation.  At my meeting with the pastor, he said he would talk to them both.  The associate pastor later apologized.  But two days later, Jim was voted onto church council and never apologized or even tried to talk calmly with me.

That was it for me.  I told the Lord, “I’m not leaving YOU, but I want NOTHING to do with your PEOPLE!” .  I left my church and left my fellowship group (the only one that was still there hanging on by a thread).

Looking back, I know the Lord understood every tear I shed over that and that He was not happy with His people who sinned against me and hurt me so badly.  But He also knew how being away from other believers would eventually also lead me away from Him.  Without the fellowship and the teachings (this was before the days of the internet) I did wind up backsliding.  For 9 years, in fact, with my two best friends who were also fed up.

I had every right to feel hurt and betrayed and I had every right to leave that church.  But I SHOULD have found another church and other fellowships rather than giving up on other believers completely.  I learned the hard way that other Christians may do me wrong , as ANYONE will do me wrong, but I have to answer to the Lord for my OWN relationship with him. I have a duty to obey the Bible, including Hebrews 10:25, ‘and not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another–and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”   That’s clear as a bell. We need each other. Whether we like it or not 🙂

I did come back to the Lord in 2002 when I was carrying my son through a very difficult pregnancy.  I didn’t want to bring him into the world into a home without it being a Christian home.  I was living in another city at the time (having gotten married and moved away).  The Lord provided a wonderful women’s Bible study group (where I experienced another hurt, but the Lord brought healing…) I was a big part of for 10 years. Also a church which we were a part of till we had to move back to my hometown to be near my mom who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

I read a devotional that reminded me of those days and I hope it inspires you as it did me:

“Better Together”

So in Christ we, though many, form one body,

and each member belongs to all the others.

(Romans 12:5)

We’re more alike than we sometimes realize. We’re all a bit afraid. We all want to belong. We all worry we will be too much or not enough. We all tend to feel more comfortable with a little distance between ourselves and those around us because we’re afraid we won’t be loved if we’re seen close up.

We might create that distance by saying “I’m fine” when we feel broken inside, holding on to our couch like it’s a lifeboat every evening, working too much, drinking too much, doing anything that will make us feel like we can avoid others seeing us as we really are.

But that’s not how we’re made to live. We need to walk onto the stage, out the door, across the room, and spill what’s really going on in our lives. We need to let people see our faces without makeup and our souls without scripts and our lives without the polish and practice.

Yes, there are days meant for wearing the beautiful dress, adding the extra coat of mascara, and putting our “best” forward. But there are days meant for inviting people into our worst as well. And most of all, there are moments for sharing everything that’s in between. In other words, plain ol’ lovely, ordinary, extraordinary you.

So let’s be brave today. Let’s love and be loved. Let’s look with gentler eyes at ourselves and each other. Whether we’re in pajamas or high-heeled pumps.

Whether we’re holding a microphone or warming up leftover coffee in the microwave as syrup-splattered toddlers run circles around our ankles. Whether we’re close up or far away.

None of us needs to have it together; we only need to remember we’re better together.

“…so it is with Christ’s body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.
–Romans 12:5 NLT

You can read this and other devotions in Holley’s book here:

It seems like most people I know anymore are on some form of antidepressant.  I don’t remember that at all when I was growing up.  I heard of the occasional “nerve pill”, but that was only when someone was on the verge of a nervous breakdown or close.  It really feels like the closer we get to the return of the Lord, the more anxious the world is getting.  With good reason!  It’s just fulfilling prophecy about the end times.  People will turn against each other, their hearts will wax cold, and so on and so on.

But the Christian shouldn’t allow the feeling of anxiety to overtake us.  We of all people have reason for hope and to trust that everything that happens in our lives are a part of God’s ultimate plan.  It may not seem like it at the moment, but I know (for me) we can always look back and see God’s hand in the most worry-fraught times of our lives.

I read this in my YouVersion devotional this week.

The Answer to Anxiety Rejoices in God’s Plans

The Bible is clear that God’s people deal with anxiety. The Psalmist acknowledges that even when the Lord is your hope, the cares will still be many! All through Psalms and Proverbs there are acknowledgments that God’s people know what it is to have cares in our hearts.

This devotional came at a really opportune time for me.  I’d recently been giving a lot of consideration about what to do about couponing blogging on my CalvaryCouponers.com blog.  I had been frustrated about the scammers bombarding the two large couponing Facebook groups I admin and the time it took me to moderate the pending posts,deleting a ton of spam and porno site links.  I was just frustrated and the whole coupon blogging world was just ‘old’ to me as a result.  After some prayer and thought, I felt like the Lord was reminding me of why I started that blog to begin with.  To help my family and others like mine learn to save money on needed groceries and be able to have a little more money at the end of the month.  Also given my natural inclination towards inclination, it gave me a creative outlet as I design 90% of my own graphics.

I just had posted about resuming my coupon posts on that blog when later that evening I read the following devotion.  See if it inspires something in your life as well!

Casper ten Boom

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, work has been arduous and difficult (Genesis 3). But as we saw yesterday in Genesis 2, work is not inherently bad—it was designed by God to be an act of worship and a meaningful way for humans to glorify God and serve others.

In a fallen world, it can be difficult to see the goodness, meaning, and eternal significance of our work. I doubt many of Casper ten Boom’s neighbors saw his work as particularly meaningful. As his daughter Corrie remembers in her book, The Hiding Place, for more than sixty years, ten Boom went to work every day as a thoroughly ordinary watchmaker and shopkeeper. But while ten Boom’s work may have appeared as monotonous as a ticking timepiece, he was a man who loved his work and saw it as a calling from God, using his watch shop as a means of serving his neighbors and discipling his employees. While ten Boom was faithful in using his work to serve the Lord in these “little things,” God had plans to entrust him with much more responsibility as Europe headed into World War II.

After the Germans invaded the ten Booms’ hometown of Haarlem in the Netherlands, the family began leading a clandestine effort to hide Jews and others at risk of extermination by the Nazis. Ten Boom’s unassuming watch shop quickly became the front door for the anti-Nazi underground network in town, used to smuggle food and other supplies to the Jews hiding in the ten Boom’s home behind the watch shop. The ten Booms even used encoded messages about “watches” as a means of communicating critical information across telephone lines undoubtedly tapped by the Nazis.

On February 28, 1944, German soldiers caught the ten Booms and sent Casper and Corrie to prison. At the time, the ten Booms were hiding four Jews and two members of the underground network. When the ten Booms were taken away, they didn’t know if these six people were dead or alive. Weeks later, while detained at Scheveningen concentration camp, Corrie received an encoded message informing her that “All the watches in your closet are safe.” Corrie knew that the six had made it out alive. Ten days after his arrest, Casper ten Boom died at the age of eighty-four, not knowing that his work as an entrepreneur and watchmaker had been used in this dramatic way to accomplish God’s will one more time.

I recently had a chance to visit ten Boom’s watch shop, which is still in operation today. As I approached the front door, I was startled by how ordinary and unassuming the shop is. Most people walked by without giving the shop a second look. I’m sure many of Haarlem’s residents looked at Casper ten Boom’s work as a watchmaker the same way, wondering what meaning there was in tinkering with timepieces for sixty years. But ten Boom leveraged his work in some incredibly meaningful ways. And while our stories will almost certainly not be as dramatic as ten Boom’s, the fact is that as we embrace God’s call to create on our lives, He will use our work in ways we can’t even imagine to accomplish His will.

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Genesis 3:17‭-‬19 ESV

“One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.
Luke 16:10 ESV

This devotional and others can be found in Jordan Raynor’s book, “Called to Create”