daily java

Daily Java:
My close friends detest me. Those I loved have turned against me. (Job 19:19)
It was 1997, a rough year for me. of course, it seems several of them have been rough. But I suppose this was more strange than rough, an odd year.

I had gone through a thirty day fast in the month of April toward National Day of Prayer on May 1. Then I had been normal (or as normal as you can be after coming off a thirty day fast). Then my gall bladder blew up. I had surgery and it went badly. I don’t know if the gall bladder attack was worse than they thought or if the doctor was a butcher. Probably a combination of both.

The doctor gave me a laproscopy and I wasn’t a candidate for it and it hurt me badly. It took almost a month before I was back to normal.

Between the fast and the recovery from the gall bladder attack and surgery, I lost 80 pounds. I was smaller than I have been in decades.

We were friends with some people who lived outside of town in a commune. They and the circle of people around them were some of our closest friends. This circle included an old cop and his wife and a musician for the Catholic Church and a minister for the Disciples of Christ, along with some other ministers and such. We got together with all or some of them a lot.

We met a lot for prayer during this time and talked about a lot of things. I shared words of the Lord with them and they with me. We were friends.

We had a church plant in a storefront in Odessa, MO, that also had a coffeehouse on Saturday nights. A lot of these people were coffeehouse friends and we even had the Coffeehouse Band for a while. It was great fun.

Then it turned.

I introduced many of my coffeehouse friends to the commune friends and they began to get together. For some reason this caused the coffeehouse friends to drift away from us.

One day I was at the commune’s restaurant. This was quite a large undertaking as they viewed much of their ministry with feeding people. We had the commune pastor’s father with us along with a missionary from Africa. The father and I had talked and seemed to get along well.

The pastor’s father was talking about ministry and suddenly he told me that everybody in town was laughing at me, and that my ministry was worthless. I sat stunned by this sudden and unexpected turn. Then the missionary began to address me about something, I forget exactly what, but it went along the same line. I stood there listening and realized that I had to leave. I took my jacket and started to leave. It surprised everyone that I was leaving and the missionary said, “Wait.” I said no, that I had to go and I left.

I was stunned by this turn by my friends. The commune was used to this. Somebody would do something they didn’t like or thought was wrong and they would castigate them publicly and they would take it, it was part of their community. But why me?

Over the next week, several of my friends came to me in tears over this, wondering themselves both why it had happened and why they allowed it to happen.

But over the course of several weeks they had moved away from me into the circle of this commune and it hurt. It was almost as if this commune had told them that they could their friend or mine and they decided to go with them. I never knew and I never found out.

But these former friends were in tears over their own participation. But it seemed too late.

We went from a circle of friends to virtually no friends in a month. And I never figured out why.

It has been 15 years and tonight I remembered it like it was yesterday. The betrayal and public humiliation was too much to bear and it still hurts.

It was not long before I found out that another friend had been lying to me and the church died.

Fifteen years ago. Tonight it seemed like last month.