2 Corinthians 4:8-10

⁸ We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;

⁹ Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;

¹⁰ Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.

I have felt recently that my health may be breaking, in the attempt to get At The Rainbow restored.

For the past few weeks I have felt more and more tired. I can sleep 12 hours a night, and yet to work more than 15-20 minutes at a time sends me back to lay down and rest for 30 minutes to an hour before I can find the strength to go out and try to work again.

And yet I keep on getting up every time, to try and do something more. Not quitting, but not getting very far in anything that I am doing. My heart will not let me stop, but it will also not keep me going for long at a stretch.

I find myself troubled, perplexed, perseucted, and cast down. There is always somebody ready to find something wrong in anything I do, to question and malign my motives and actions. Most every public place I go security is there ready to harass me for speaking, ready to escort me out, threaten arrest and imprisonment. They yell at me for yelling, when my decibels have not gone up, my politeness has not forsaken me, yet I am bullied and harrassed without cause and without measure.

Joseph Corey Cook, aka “Alabama” stayed at our house for several months a few years ago. A homeless person at the time, I ran across him and gave him a chance, a place to stay. I say potential in him, and gave him a place to stay, based on a business model he proposed that would enable him to earn money to help contribute towards our bills. We never saw the money, though I helped him with a lot a transportation. He assaulted me several times, until we kicked him out, and let him back in, several times. The final time I could not trust him in the house but gave him a heated outside shelter during a period where it was sub zero temperatures and he might have frozen. He got kicked out of that when he came and me with a 2-by-4 and found that I charged inside his perimeter of assault and drove the coward from our property.

Mr.Cook contactetd me recently to say that what we had done to each other was 50/50 and he forgave me for all the bad things I had done to him. He is back in Alabama and has gotten off drugs, gotten a job, a girlfriend, an apartment. He said that I have been deceiving myself, and everything I did for him, at no benefit to myself, were merely to use him, and that I delude myself to think I had done him any good. That my giving him a place to stay instead of freezing in the cold was equal to his coming at me with a 2-by-4.

Well, I gave him a piece of my mind that I didn’t really need anyway, and lambasted him for his pharisaical attitude. He wrote me back about all the terrible things I was probably doing right then, none of which were accurate or true, but which his mind could only conceive that could be what I was doing and my motives.

And this has been the pattern for most everyone we have tried to help. God, however, chose to put in my life one of those coincidences, to happen that same day. Amy, another person we had helped, who also had a drug problem, came by to see how we were doing, say thank you, and see how we were doing. She is the first person we have helped who has actually returned to say thank you, and after hearing about the fire, said she would see what she might be able to find out, what services might be able to help us.

But the experience with Joseph showed the massive problem we have had in making progress here. Because even family makes the same assumptions that Joseph did about us. If there is smoke, there must be fire. If two churches have thrown us out, then obviously we must have done something wrong. That those churches were trying to hide the malfeasance of their own staff and members by kicking us down the highway just couldn’t be possible.

Joseph made the point that if these things are happening to us, it had to be because of the bad things we are doing. As if my son did anything to deserve having his home set on fire, but he must have, according to Joseph, and according to some of our relatives who have practically disowned him.

With such examples of Christian charity and love, it is no wonder that my son finds himself feeling far from God these days, and not feeling any need to get any closer to God, because he might have to get closer to those who have thrown him away. Those who confirmed him in the faith have by their actions confirmed even more deeply that he will try to avoid that faith for as long as possible.

Jasini and I have tried at every turn to reach out and reconcile with those who have rejected and cast us out, but the others have no interestt in reconciliation. They talk about the “ministry of reconciliation” but what they pracitice is the “ministry of rejection”.

As the choir director at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church stated “we don’t want those type of people here” — meaning Jasini and myself. So much for the “everyone is welcome” banner they fly outside there door (Note to everyone: if a church has to have an “everyone is welcome” banner, then you don’t want to go there, because everyone is NOT welcome.)

And yet, though these circumstances have troubled me deeply, hurt and wounded me, I find a core within me that, even when my strength ebbs, my vision fails, I find I cannot stop, but have a core that must always go on.

For though I am troubled, perplexed, persecuted, and cast down, I am not distressed, do not despair, am not forsaken, and not destroyed.

As Jasini says, we are striving, we will be thriving. and though we also know we have no assurance that we will thrive, Just like in Hebrews 11 we know that while not all the saints listed there thrived, many were brutally treated and killed, yet they all proved that God is worthy, when the world isn’t.

We live in the Goodness of God, even while living in the badness of men.

So, this is part one of my rant about what we are going through, in the hope that it will encourage some of you who also feel cast down, cast out, persecuted, that this is where God wants you now, and you need to bring your struggles, your sorrows to him. Cry and whine and complain to Him, in faith, as the psalmists did, lifting those cries in worship to Him. For it is the worship that he seeks from you. He is the only one worthy of those cries, of those complaints.

And don’t let anyone convince you that your cries and complaints are unworthy of you, for they are worthy of God.

(Note: I tried to get an AI generated feature image for this post, but apparently the passage 2 Corinthians 4:8-10 violates some standard of the OpenAI and is inappropraite to be made into an image, because it might somehow offend someone. Isn’t that just a perfect example of what I have been trying to say in this post!!!)