It wasn’t until that evening when our ministry initiatives were completed that I became aware of how deeply hurt my friend was. By me. Early the next morning I called and asked if I could see her. She agreed. When I walked into her office, I saw the pain in her eyes and the downcast look on her face. I knew the only reason I could have hurt her to the extent that I had was that she loved and respected me. I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and told her how sorry I was. To my dismay, she didn’t accept my apology readily. Immediately, I learned a hard lesson. Wounded people may not get over their wounds easily or quickly. Wounds can be hard just to brush aside because the wounder says, “I’m sorry.” But I persisted, desperate to recapture the warm relationship that had meant so much to me. So I talked through with her what I had said, and she explained how she had perceived it. I explained why I had said it and listened to her counter with why I shouldn’t have said it. In the end, all I could do was say I was sorry. Which I was. All she could do was say she forgave me. Which she did. Then we moved on. We remain wonderful friends to this day.
I wonder what difference it would have made if Sarah had simply said she was sorry. Or if Hagar had said she was sorry. What difference would it have made if they had taken the time to talk things through and explain how each had hurt the other? But they didn’t. Neither of them apologized. While it may have given Sarah temporary satisfaction and even pleasure to strike out at Hagar, the cycle of pain began to turn in her family and in Hagar’s, and it is still turning today. The contemporary conflict between the Jewish state of Israel and her surrounding Arab neighbors, which has resulted in repeated physical, emotional, political, and psychological wounding, can be traced right back to this beginning of the cycle. That adds up to over four thousand years and untold billions of wounds!
Wounds can be contagious. One wound can divide and multiply as though it’s a living cell, until entire families are taking sides, fighting, suing, not speaking to each other. Does that describe your family? Or your spouse’s family? What misery we can inflict on each other. And families make up nations that actually take up arms and go to war over … what? Wounds. And retaliatory wounding from past generations that have been passed down until regional conflicts seem to have no peaceful or diplomatic solution because the opposing sides just want to hurt each other.
The examples come so readily to mind, don’t they? The conflict in the Balkans; the ongoing conflict in the Middle East; the generational animosity between Russia and her neighbors, between Iran and Iraq, between Japan and China, between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, between the Sunni and Shia Muslims, between African-Americans and Anglo-Americans, to name just a few — all can be traced back to wounds and wounding and entire generations that have taken up the war cry. It would be safe to assume that some of those fighting today don’t even know why they are fighting or how or when the conflict started. They are just steeped in hatred that was birthed in pain long before they entered the world. Then they are taught by parents, grandparents, siblings, political leaders, and religious institutions to hate … just because.
Would the contagious cycle of pain in your life, or that of your family or church, be stopped if you would be the first to reach out, to give in, to say you are sorry, or at the very least open up a conversation on the source of the wounds? You may never know the difference it would make until you do.
FOUR
The Believer in Exile
Running from the Wounders
Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
Genesis 16:6
One of the more difficult experiences my husband, Danny, and I have had took place in a church that he helped plant. After four years of meeting with a group of men to pray regularly for God’s leadership and blessing, he joined them as they incorporated into a church body. He served the church as both an adult Sunday school teacher and an elder. Once the church was established, the elders interviewed and then called a young seminary professor named Steve to serve as senior pastor. He accepted the call, and everyone was thrilled. He was passionate about the Word and had a heart to bring people to salvation through the Gospel. His preaching was solid, his demeanor was confident, and the church began to grow. For about three months.
Then Steve had a terrible motorcycle accident that landed him in the hospital for weeks. That’s when the whispering campaign began, instigated by those who had decided Steve was not the pastor they had envisioned for the church. They used his absence to foster dissatisfaction: Do you like Steve’s preaching? Don’t you think his messages have been a little hard to understand? Don’t you think he missed the main point of chapter such and such?
As I listened to what members were saying and what my husband related concerning the discussion behind the closed doors of the elder meetings, I knew momentum was building to remove this young pastor from his position. The astounding reason the whispers were so effective was that the primary instigators of the gossip were two prominent Bible teachers in the church. They succeeded in sowing doubt and dissatisfaction about Steve in the hearts and minds of many of the people because the people trusted and loved them.
What followed was months of almost nightly elder meetings that functioned more like a kangaroo court than a group of faithful men seeking God’s will. When my husband resisted the efforts to remove Steve from leadership, the wife of a prominent elder was assigned to pay us a house call. She wept as she tried to convince us that Steve was not the right person for the job and therefore needed to be removed. Our response was that the church had called Steve and, unless there was a moral, ethical, or theological reason for his removal, we would stand by him. She disagreed, and we had to ask her to leave our home.
In the end, with my husband as the only elder who stood his ground firmly beside the wounded young pastor, Steve was forced to resign.
While the people who attended the church were good people, they did not know what had taken place behind closed doors. Steve’s departure was publicly spun as a desire on his part to return to full-time seminary teaching. His farewell dinner was accompanied by praise and prayers and a generous severance package. The cover-up worked for the congregation, who had no reason to believe otherwise. They simply seemed grateful that the pastor they had been led to believe was not God’s choice for their church was leaving of his own volition.
When Steve left, so did Danny and I. For one year, we did not attend any church. Once again, we found ourselves on the outside. The first time was years before when Danny’s leadership had been rejected by the applauding congregation. This time it was when we felt we needed to support Steve and take a stand for what we felt was fair, ethical, biblical, and Christlike. I was not bitter, angry, or vengeful. Just heartbroken. I wrote a letter to each of the seven elders at the church explaining our position and asking for reconciliation. I never received even one response. And so we simply chose to separate ourselves. We became believers in exile.
Are you in exile also? Have you been rejected or refused? Slighted or slandered? Betrayed or backstabbed? Demonized or divorced? Abandoned or accused? Passed-over or pushed-out? Wounded! By God’s people!
As a result have you just walked out? Out of church, out of any religious organization or denomination, out of that relationship, out of that family, out of that ministry, out of that job? Are you running from the wounders right into exile? If so, I understand.
As a result of our own experience of being believers in exile, I have been alert to others who find themselves in a similar situation. One such person who came to my attention is a gifted Bible teacher, raised in the church because her father was the pastor, yet who now does not belong to any church. For church, she has substituted a small group that meets in various homes. Another believer in exile is a well-known Christian author who does not attend church regularly but floats from one circle of Christian friends to another. When I shared with him the subject of this book, he confirmed the need for me to write it. He shared that many of his friends are in the same situation he
is. They are committed Christians, but have been so burned by the organized church that they no longer feel they can be comfortable in it. They are in exile.
While working on this book, I went to visit my father. I had fixed dinner for him, and as he so often does following the meal, he invited me to share a devotional thought with him and others who were in the house. I read from the Bible and then opened up the time for discussion.
One lovely young woman made a few comments that provoked my query, “Where do you go to church?” Her eyes flickered, and I knew I was looking at someone who had been wounded. She shared that she and her husband had been actively involved in their church. They had taught the young people, led the youth retreats, become best friends of the pastor and his wife, and were included in the church staff functions. Then her husband suddenly left her. Just walked out. As she shared her story, it wasn’t the memory of being abandoned that caused her tears to flow; it was the fact that not one person on the church staff or in the church at large had reached out to her. No one had called, come by, dropped her a note, or just asked her how she was doing. Not one.
“So, I don’t go to church anymore,” she whispered.
She has become a believer in exile.
What propelled you into exile? Who wounded you? Was it a co-worker who berated you? An in-law who ridiculed you? A spouse who abused you? A boss who humiliated you? A child who defied you? Or__________? You fill in the blank.
And were the only ones who could have come to your aid so intimidated or indifferent that they just threw up their hands and walked away, leaving you defenseless—just as Hagar was left defenseless by Abraham? How did it make you feel?
Not long ago, a beautiful older woman described to me her experience of being left defenseless. Doctors who misdiagnosed her illness as drug addiction had locked her in a psychiatric ward to force her off her medications — and they did so with her husband’s consent. Two days later, the same doctors released her when the actual cause of her illness was identified. It was not drug addiction. As she shared the traumatic experience of being misdiagnosed and committed against her will, her voice was hoarse with emotion as she said, “And my husband stood by and allowed it.”
Have you been wounded while someone who could have intervened and prevented it didn’t? Did your sibling steal your inheritance from one parent while your other parent allowed it in order to avoid confrontation? Did a church staff member remove you from your volunteer ministry responsibilities while your senior pastor said he or she couldn’t override the chain of authority in the church? Did a co-worker steal credit for your project while your manager remained silent to avoid rocking the boat? Did your former spouse verbally berate you while your present spouse said it wasn’t his or her place to interfere? It hurts, doesn’t it?
When our beloved only son was going through the trauma and pain of a divorce, on several occasions his emotions became so raw they were volatile. He had been deeply wounded, and in his pain he lashed out. On one particular occasion, the house reverberated with the sound of his angry words that had been directed primarily at me. My husband, his father, witnessed the explosion, but sat silently throughout it. He then got up and walked out of the room. At that moment, I had no support, no defender, no protector. And it hurt.
While every parent experiences those moments when the other parent does not step up so that one is left to deal alone with whatever the situation is, it still hurts, doesn’t it? All I knew to do was to cry out to God.
In reflecting on other hurtful times when I have been mistreated and left defenseless, I will admit that I haven’t always prayed first. My responses have covered almost the entire spectrum. While I have prayed, I have also wept. I have tried to hit back. I have sharpened the sword of my tongue and given it back as fiercely as it was given to me. I have been speechless. I have spoken softly. I have spoken forcefully in self-defense. I have immediately apologized. And there have been times when I’ve tried my best to extricate myself from the situation and do everything possible to avoid that person in the future, which is a form of running away. How have you responded to your hurt? At times, running away seems like our only recourse for self-protection.
Hagar responded to her hurt by running away. When Abraham gave Sarah permission to do what she wanted with her servant and then walked away in apparent indifference, Hagar must have felt like she’d taken a knife wound to the heart. And so it’s not surprising that she responded by running.
Hagar also responded with what I’m sure she considered self-defense — a large dose of self-pity as she ran. She must have seen herself as a victim, a servant forced to do what Abraham and Sarah told her to do. When Abraham left her at Sarah’s mercy, Hagar must have thought, I’m not going to stay around and take this. The pagans back in Egypt treated me better than these so-called “godly” people. I’ll just go back to Egypt. So Hagar, carrying Abraham’s unborn child, ran away. But when she ran away from hurt and humiliation, she also ran away from God’s people, God’s presence, and God’s promises. And I wonder … was she also running away from God? Because if Sarah was any reflection of what He was like, it would have been understandable if Hagar had decided she never wanted to know Him.
Whatever the circumstances of your wounding may be, don’t make Hagar’s mistake. Don’t blame God for the behavior of the people who have wounded you. I understand the desperate desire to run from them, but not from Him. Besides, running away never really solves anything, does it? It just delays dealing with whatever or whomever it is you are running from.
As tragically self-defeating as it is, many other wounded people seem to follow Hagar in her decision to flee into exile. Recently, I read an article about bestselling novelist, Anne Rice.1 Ms. Rice had come to faith in a much talked-about conversion that she described in her book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. The article included this quote from the author’s Facebook page:
For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being a “Christian” or to being part of Christianity … It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.
If the words of Anne Rice are heart-wrenching to me, and they are, I can only imagine how her words and her decision must grieve the God of Hagar. I sincerely pray that God will find Ms. Rice in exile. That’s where He found Hagar. God cared about Hagar, and He cares about Anne Rice. God cares about those who are running from the pain. Running from the problem. Running from God’s people. Running from the wounders. And yes, God cares about you. Even if you are running from Him.
FIVE
God Cares
You Can’t Outrun God
The angel of the LORD found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, “Hagar …”
Genesis 16:7–8
In the previous chapter I described the church situation that sent my husband and me into exile. But let me continue the story, because although we “ran” from the church, we couldn’t outrun God.
The same day my husband and I left the church, the telephone rang. A young pastor named Marc was calling from a distant state. He had been a friend to our children when they were all in college together, had been in our home, and had become our friend as well. We hadn’t heard from him in years, so his phone call was a delightful surprise. After catching up with personal news, Marc told Danny the purpose for his call. He wanted to tell us about a good friend of his named Scott who had served as an intern at the same large church where Marc was a pastor. He described Scott as a gifted preacher who had a heart for evangelism and wanted to plant a church in our area. Marc, who knew nothing of our church situation, then asked Danny if he would be willing to show Scott around our community. Much to my dismay, Danny agreed.
After
forty years of practicing dentistry in our city and forty-five years of being involved in several large parachurch organizations, my husband knew just about every Christian of influence in our area. So while I was glad for him to open doors for the young pastor and introduce him to some key people, I wanted no part of it. The last thing I wanted to do was to get involved in another church plant, so I stayed clear of Scott.
But the more time Danny spent with Scott, and the more he listened to Scott’s heart and vision, the more excited he became about helping him start a church — and the more skeptical I became. Finally, I felt I had no choice. I agreed to meet Scott, his wife, and their newborn daughter, but I had every intention of squelching my husband’s enthusiasm. Over lunch, I asked Scott some fairly pointed questions: What was his conversion experience? When was the last time he personally led someone to faith in Jesus Christ? Why did he want to plant a church in our area? What did he hope to accomplish in a region where there is a church on every street corner? What would be unique about the church he wanted to start?
Wounded by God's People Page 5