Binding Up the Brokenhearted

These past few days have me feeling a lot better since Friday. Thank you for your sweet comments and prayers! You guys are the best. (Erin, I've tried several times unsuccessfully to leave feedback on your blog, but it won't let me.) :(

Friday night I had some closure with what was troubling me. Gregg and I had dinner outside on our back porch, and tried to make it romantic by lighting the Yankee candle we have on the patio table & putting out a small vase with a rose in it from our rose bush. As dinner was winding down, the conversation came around to weddings, and I took the opportunity to apologize to Gregg for letting those friends and my mother basically steamroll me and cause so much disunity between us. He said that that was years ago, and not to even worry about it. I felt really relieved, and free to put the past behind us.

Saturday continued the reconnection with my husband that I so needed. We lounged around in bed until almost 9 and then had breakfast and got ready to do some exploring. There's still so much of this area that we haven't seen yet. We set out on I-95 South and got off a few exits down, heading towards the Sebastian Inlet. It's a good place just to spend the day fishing or doing other recreational stuff. There’s a state park right there, and a spot to have barbeques & picnics. We spent a little bit of time there before looping around and driving north again, taking another highway.

Once we got back into town, we stopped for lunch at our favorite sandwich shoppe. From there we went straight to the church so Gregg could set up the stage for worship. He usually does this early Sunday morning, but he anticipated having a lot of other things to do then. I helped him at best I could, not understanding half the technical names for the pieces of equipment. It was good to get that out of the way, and Gregg appreciated my help.

When we got home we took Tess for a walk on a different street, which she didn't like too much. Other dogs barked at us from their yards and she got freaked out and started pulling a lot. We enjoyed going outside of our "box" for once, though! That night we just snacked instead of having dinner, since we were still full from our late lunch. Gregg worked on power point slides for the next day's service and I relaxed with the latest edition of Marriage Partnership. When he was done, we watched last week's episode of The Apprentice on NBC.com, since we don't have cable. It kept blipping, which made it not so fun to watch. I told Gregg we’ll have to go back to watching it on Yahoo.

I'm so glad we had a chance to relax this weekend, because the week coming up is going to be pretty busy. We have a special church meeting tonight, addressing some serious issues going on in our congregation. You may recall that our youth pastor was fired for insubordination in November, shortly after our senior pastor resigned. The session was unanimous in their decision to let him go and sent out a letter to each church member underlining their reasons. The youth pastor then decided to file a complaint against the session early in December because he was unhappy, and they responded (again unanimously) by upholding their previous decision. Unsatisfied with that response, he took the complaint to Presbytery, which is our governing board in the Presbyterian Church. An ad hoc committee was formed to review the complaint, and after doing so, upheld the session's decision and discussed their reasoning with the complainants for an hour and a half afterwards.

Still unsatisfied, the former youth pastor and a group of his friends sent out an email calling for a congregational meeting so that their side could be heard and new elders could be elected. In this email, they made some pretty serious accusations against the elders. At the end of yesterday's service, the chairman of the session announced the special meeting for tonight in which the Presbytery will come and discuss their reasons for upholding the elders' decision. He advised the congregation not to listen to these men who were going around with the petition for the congregational meeting and trying to stir things up. Following the service, this group of disgruntled members surrounded two of the elders and demanded they be able to speak at this meeting. Things got pretty heated. It was really upsetting, and completely uncalled for. Are we a church or a junior high school??

Please pray with me for our church. It's clear these men are trying to divide the church by asking members to go against what the elders have ruled and joining them in defying leadership. Their actions and presence are causing a lot of pain and turmoil right now, and our church has already been weakened by the loss of its senior pastor.

I have some concern about going to this meeting tonight. I anticipate things getting ugly. I prayed yesterday and this morning that God would grant us peace and restore unity. Our church is really hurting right now, unfortunately because a few men just can’t let this issue go and won’t rest until they’ve taken the session down.

While having my reservations, I do want to go to show my support for the elders and solidarity with other members. They swore to uphold God’s word and do what was right for the good of the church, and I believe they’ve done that. I’m going early with Gregg because he has to run sound and I might sit with him up in the loft. That’ll give me a bird’s eye view of the “fireworks”. Ugh.