In the year two thousaaaand…
“God has a way of growing us that we don’t quite understand, until we look back and see how far we’ve come.” – jdr
In the year 2000, I was about to finish up middle school, and head to high school. It was to be a monumental year. Y2k was upon us, we were all scared that the world was gonna end when the clocks hit midnight, and then it didn’t. I thought I was gonna finally get a girlfriend, and then I didn’t. And then, in the winter, something happened. We were at church one night, at a business meeting, and one of the men brought up that he thought the church should reenact the yearly vote of whether or not the pastor should remain the pastor. Controversy and much arguing ensued. My dad (the pastor) gracefully stated that he felt a church should not have a yearly ballot with the pastor. The pastor should stay til he needs to leave, and when that day comes, either God will tell him, or the church will. One side of the church folk argued that the vote needed to put into place, and one particular man (whose name I don’t like to mention to this day) stated that he had been getting calls from various people saying they felt that this should happen, because they’d been having problems with the pastor (once again, my dad). I’m a 13 year old kid. I’m confused. I don’t understand what’s going on. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Why do they want us to leave? Well it gets put to a vote, and 11-9 (there usually wasn’t much attendance at the business meetings), the church voted NOT to reinstate the yearly vote. I was relieved. My family was relieved. The scandal was past (or so we hoped). We found out a week or two later that the guy who said people had been calling him lied. He had been the one calling other people, badmouthing our family. Why, I still to this day do not know. He had two kids, elementary school aged, who were in my sister’s Sunday school class. She was the teacher. Because of his disdain for my family, he decided he didn’t want his kids in her class. So he took them out. In the weeks that followed there were several altercations between he, his wife, and my sister…that did not fare well for my sister. She was very hurt, and emotionally traumatized by the events. In the spring of 2000, we left the church. Dad said he couldn’t let his family suffer any longer, and the Lord was allowing him to leave. That summer was probably the roughest I’ve had. We were in limbo. A pastor’s family without a church….is very strange, indeed. We didn’t know where to go. We visited a few churches, but nothing ever felt right. And then, in the early fall, dad got a call from Buffalo Baptist Church in Rutledge, just a few miles away from the church we’d been at. They wanted him to come and preach a couple of Sundays. Well, at the church we’d been at before, I was the ONLY youth my age. There were 7 year old kids…then me…then 25 year old folks just out of college. So I was pretty alone. Well, dad told me that Buffalo had one of the larger youth groups in Rutledge. I was pretty excited! Well, the couple of Sundays became a couple of months, and in December, they asked dad to be the pastor at Buffalo. Now, out of the four years I’ve been there, I’ve gained: a solid group of friends, in fact, all of my best friends now attend Buffalo (my very best friend of 8 years joined the church last fall); a place in leadership (I’m the head worship leader of the youth group, and one of the music directors for the church); and a TON, and I mean TON of wonderful memories.
All of this, because of a few horrible months in late ‘99, early 2000.
In retrospect, I wouldn’t change it for the world.