THE VIEW FROM HERE

Over the last month, I have experienced something that I thought might encourage anyone that there is hope and life and purpose for those who are ‘post partum’ with a dysfunctional religious group. You might be currently still slogging it out in the trenches where your only concern is finding any bearing in which you will be able to  right yourself and at least stop sinking…and bailing. I know what that is like. I spent about the last 4 years doing that. It is not something that you get over quickly. A pastor who I met in North Carolina this past month told me that  ‘It is not time that causes things to get better, it is the healing you have received from Jesus.’ Nicely said and it rings true with me. Time separates those who once walked together if healing is not  experienced but if the Lord has done any amount of healing that which others intended to separate have grown closer and their road ahead will once again cross paths. We tend to forget that God is not in the separation business…oh yes I know all the scriptures that talk about ‘come out and be separate’ and I do not mean to down play those in any sense but they must be understood in proper perspective. The key teaching of Jesus in the gospels was to reconcile the WORLD to God the Father. Now if the motivation for that coming was only for personal glory in the sense that God would gain more glory by it, that is hollow. It was not to bring teachings upon which we could live a better life although those are replete. No, the main purpose was to come and DIE for a lost world. That was God’s motivation: Love and that alone. What a tremendous price God the Father paid through God the Son.  So life goes on and on and people and places are cloaked under the dust of one’s life’s activity. Loved ones seem like they are a memory only in the mind and the disconnection is no longer raw but it is not healed, it may still be open or an ugly scar rent across one’s mind. Either way, it is ever present. Why? It is because the reconciliation has not occurred yet. It is because it will never fully be covered over by activity, babies, jobs, church or any leader. Make sure you understand the Lord does not cover over it either…in fact it is a place He ensures is never covered over.

Why is this the stark fact? It is because God seeks reconciliation and wants that families now broken and split apart made whole. You must understand that if you are experiencing a separation that it is not God’s will. Maybe you had or will have a choice to ‘go or to stay’. If you go, you would leave all you know and love. If you stay, what you understood about God and his will for you would be supplanted. Quite a choice isn’t it, yet there are many held hostage by the fear of such a decision. Let me ask you, what do you see? Do you see that what you may be in now may not be flawed by human frailty or lack of vision but something that uses the very Bible as a machine in which to grind people’s bones to powder.  The reality is it has become corrupted and its corruption gilded over with scripture.  It has corrupted what once was good. Friend this is a working definition of evil. 

I sit here in my home office and there are boxes all around me. My wife packs and packs running across a trinket, a snapshot taken of a little girl sitting in a winter coat smiling, a young woman in a white wedding dress looking at her father on the most important day of her life, an old video of a basketball game of a son no longer in her life...these are the hard times and thoughts as she packs. Why does she pack? It is not to rid them from sight but to lovingly put them away for a trip: a trip to a new life and new direction. Many years ago, we travelled to North Carolina for treatment of my wife’s illness. In those trips, we heard God whisper that He wanted us to start a work there. There were others that heard the whisper and wanted to come along at that time. We branched out while we visited trying to meet people and to see if it was something God really wanted us to do. All I know is there was ‘good ground’ there and I sensed that God had started something with us. The leadership we had at that time did not think it was a good idea but grudgingly went along for awhile. After all, we had just completed a church building project and services were being held so what they said seemed to make a lot of sense yet I could not drown out the whisper and to be frank I did not want to do so. In the course of a few years, I was told to sit down and pastor that  ‘rebel church’ yet all the while the signals were pointing to me passing a ministry along to someone very dear to me  and to move into the next phase. In fact, direction we had received earlier confirmed this many times over ; what we could not understand was the change of direction from an outward message where churches were to be established and people ministered to what it had become. It reminds me of the story of Joseph when he told his vision to his brothers and mother and father. What was their reaction? It was to refute his dreams and throw him in a pit and sell him off for any profit they could get. Yet the dream stayed, it lain on the ground in pieces but friend it was still there. It had become a weight that I did not know what to do about so I dragged it around for a few years. It is funny, when God is not in something it does not last but when He is, it does not go away, it is impervious and imperishable.  What happens in the end? The dream if it is from God will somehow remain and pieces scattered begin to collect and meld together and in the end it is even more beautiful and clearer than what you remembered it was. I don’t know if it is the fact that time has passed or the pain of bearing it has caused it to become tarnished in memory but to see it whole again is to know it is much more beautiful and precious that anything we could have recalled it to be before God had breathed back into it. I bear no malice any more to those who sought to kill it, they weren’t a part of it. But my wife and I were and we bore it through the darkest of places.

Because of that dream, during the past month, God allowed us to visit North Carolina and to just see if the dream was only that or something more. Only this time, we had no agenda or specific ministry in mind. We had no form of teaching anymore to take whoever we met ‘through the material’ and this time we did not look at people as perspective members of what we were a part of. No, we went only because of the dream with nothing else in mind at all. What would God do? As a true gift, God allowed us to stay in the very place we had come to call “Condo Bob’s” back when my wife was very ill. Recently, I had taken a job that allowed me to work out of my home and so, I could live anywhere. During that month I met in the providence of God two pastors and started having coffee with them in the morning during the week to seek counsel about what God might be doing. As it turned out, both had gone through similar forms of departure from what they were associated with but they were different than me. They were in the field sowing and reaping again. During that month the words both of them spoke to me encouraged me to take the next step and that they would be there to support us in any way that they could. I remember one pastor telling me how to start and what steps to take. We arrived at something that seemed to be a good approach that felt right to me. He said ‘Kevin, you need to find a “man of peace” in Denver that will be the one with who you make a connection in the area’. Well the next day we decided to what I like call ‘flounder around’ Denver driving to a fro looking for that ‘man of peace’ how improbable is that? Yet there we were. Turns out my wife needed her hair cut and she had been trying for some time to get an appointment that did not seem to materialize during that month so I asked her ‘Do you want to get your hair cut?’ she said that she still did and we pulled into the ‘Hair Station’ in Denver, NC. Once we came, we saw ‘Our Daily Bread’ on the table and the Ten Commandments on the wall…hmmm. Well turned out one was free in 30 minutes so we left and came back. My wife went with the stylist and entered into idle conversation with her. It came out why we were there and when the hair cut was over with the person had tears in their eyes and wanted to come and meet me in the parlor to get me to pray with her. Seems everyone these days s going through a tough time. I had been chatting with an older gentleman and our conversation had turned to the Lord and while we were talking Vicki and the stylist walked in. In the parlor of that place, we joined hands and prayed  for situations. Jesus had allowed us to pour out the wine and the oil in a place where dreams were shattered like mine had been. We had made a friend. That friend is now texting my wife asking us when we will return. Friend, it isn’t about us…Jesus was there..oh we were too but it wasn’t about us and what we had to give out, it was Him…all Him.

On our last day there, we were walking out to the car and my wife stopped and looked at the clear blue and said to me. ‘You know, when we were here before, I had asked God “Lord is this where you want us to be?” and I remember him saying back to me  “Not Yet”…’ We stopped and thanked God for His faithfulness to us and then got into the car and drove back home with a dream more beautiful.

“When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great things for them. The LORD hath done great things for us; [whereof] we are glad. Turn again our captivity, O LORD, as the streams in the south. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves [with him].” Ps 126

So we pack. We leave all we know behind. All we have come to love. I you have been reading his blog for anytime, you will have known that the church building that was built now houses a young church doing quite well and growing but more importantly than that, people are meeting Jesus and coming to believe in Him. We and all that helped build it have a part in all of that. Every broken heart healed and every soul taken as a brand from the fire - Even those that left us and shut us down at the time – but the dream and God’s word live on and works to fulfill the purpose in which it was sent.

As Rich Mullins wrote in a song as a Ragamuffin he came to call himself.

I kissed the earth on my daddy's grave

Said goodbye to my brave young companions

But when they hoist that sail I know my heart will break

As bright and as fine as the morning

I don't know where this road will take me

But they say there's a place there for a man

And I'm only afraid that my dreams may betray me

And I'll never get home again

But I'll carry the songs I learned when we were kids

I'll carry the scars of generations gone by

I'll pray for you always, and I promise you this

I'll carry on, I'll carry on

What is the ‘View from Here’? My Sail is hoisted, I do not know the outcome. I have no plan. But I do have a dream.

And there is more love for my family than there has ever been.

Post Script: Here is my contact information if you would like ot correspond or would like to talk or pray with someone who has gone through possibly what you are going through and can at the very least pray for you about your situation...God Bless

Kevin Flynn
Email: kftron@hotmail.com
phone: 205-903-7744