The Prophetic Utterance

Yesterday was a fun day with the morning at the Church cleanup, and then the afternoon going over to Zona Rosa. We got the kids polarized sunglasses (no prescription needed, but we wanted the protection for their eyes) at LensCrafters, and then went over to Cold Stone Creamery for ice cream.

We hadn’t been to Cold Stone Creamery for years. I’d actually thought of it when going through pictures from my mother’s visit in 2005. So when we got as close as LensCrafters, I took the family on a walk. Nathan chose the ice cream flavor, and the rest of us chose an add-in, just like we had years before (Chocolate cake ice cream, with gummy bears, white chocolate chips and Butterfingers).

But it was then that the day took its unusual turn. Someone came over that we hadn’t seen in years, to say hello. Said he didn’t recognize us at first with the red hair. Just said hello, and then went to sit down at a nearby table with a woman and young child.

Thing is, the woman and child weren’t the wife and children we knew as his.

Betsy’s curiosity was even more aroused than mine. We had hardly arrived home when she had inquired on Facebook, found him, and learned that his status had changed within the last year. After she said that, I found a video where he mentioned his divorce.

Now, this was a person we had had no desire to see again. Let’s just say he’d used authority in the church to our detriment instead of service, and our only recourse had been to wash our hands of him, since we had no way to seek either justice or reconciliation.

This wasn’t the first time I had experienced such abuse of church authority. In the church where I grew up someone had taken a disliking to my father, and couldn’t get at him, so used me for the lever. Through an irregularity in election procedures I was elected to the board, but they miscounted, and when they corrected it, I was properly named to the board. But one member convinced the others, to have me removed, and met for the vote without my father, who was also on the board. The pastor and other three board members went along with him to “maintain peace”.

So we left, and I made a prophecy that I feared for the men who did it, to reap what they sowed.

Within the year, the man that led the charge lost his reputation at work, another who assisted him had a heart attack, and the final two were in a serious accident. The pastor soon left the church.

I’ve been careful what I have said since that time. Not that I feel that my words have any special power, but because I know the danger of pride in myself.

In the latest incident, involving the man we ran into yesterday, I was not nearly so perfect and upright (Job 1:8) in the events leading up to it as I was in the at the church where I grew up, yet I also wasn’t the one abusing power — and God takes that sort of abuse seriously. I was shocked, but not surprised, to see the way judgment had worked its way out. But I am mostly saddened, in that I do not think he has yet learned the most important lessons from his fall, and there will yet be many to suffer because of it.