I could not believe the letter I was reading. My long-time friend, one of our elders, had resigned and written a scathing critique of my theology and sermons. Just last June we had gone fishing together in Idaho. Now he was informing me that he had officially contacted the bishop, seeking my removal.
“How could he do this to me?” I muttered, trying to decide if I felt more despair or anger.
Just the week before, I had learned that my next door neighbor was suing me and the church. He was naming me a defendant in the case over an incident that had occurred in the driveway shared by his house and our parsonage. Our son had accidentally hit the neighbor’s car as the two of them were backing out together. The neighbor had for years complained about the on-street parking problems and noise whenever we hosted gatherings in our home. This was his perfect opportunity to exact revenge.
The suit named both me and the church since the parsonage driveway was church property. He claimed the accident had resulted in neck injuries forcing him to miss work. He had hired a downtown law firm that specialized in personal injury suits. The amount they were asking for in damages was twice the church’s annual budget.
It wasn’t just the neighbor who was now experiencing headaches. The migraines I’d struggled with in college returned just after the first court appearance.
Finally, one Sunday evening, after a particularly encouraging morning service, I received a phone call from my younger brother Philip on the West Coast. With a quiet voice he told me the heartbreaking news that he’d been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.
I felt myself sinking under a weight of anxiety and discouragement I simply could not bear. The thought of getting up and preaching next Sunday seemed impossible.
“O Lord, how am I going to continue?” I prayed. “Every day the pressure gets worse, not better. And it’s been this way for weeks, not just days. Help me, Lord; please help me.”
I didn’t realize it then, but I was just beginning the worst year of my life in ministry. As my brother’s health worsened, the alienated elder became more and more vocal, and the lawsuit threatened to swamp both me and the church, the words of the apostle Paul became my own spiritual autobiography, “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death” (2 Cor. 1:8-9).
Lying awake at night asking God what I had done to deserve all this, I remembered Warren Wiersbe once commenting that when we go through periods of prolonged and intense suffering, “God has His eye on the clock and His hand is on the thermostat.” He promised listeners God will not allow our trouble to go one minute beyond the length of His choosing or permit the intense heat of affliction to go up one degree above what He has declared.
Even that assurance provided little relief as painful days turned into painful weeks and then increasingly painful months. I wavered between doubting my calling and questioning my ability to stay at the church.
In the midst of turmoil I began to discover ways of coping that provided genuine relief and comfort.
None by themselves proved a cure-all, but together they provided hope that someday I would again see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Looking back at my dark year of the soul, I now see God provided several important strategies for persevering when it appeared the trouble would never end.
Maintain normal priorities
One of the first temptations I faced was to turn all available energy and time to dealing with the immediate crises.
The tyranny of the urgent dominated nearly every aspect of life. When I first received notice of the lawsuit, I spent the better part of the next two weeks calling personal injury lawyers, scanning the Internet for relevant statutes, or simply sitting for hours alone in my office brooding over the situation.
As a result I rarely ate dinner with my family, and on one occasion failed to return a single phone call for an entire week. I made the mistake common to those who find themselves under prolonged attack: neglecting our normal ministry duties and disciplines. It’s hard to keep your regular times of study, conduct normal rounds of visitation, and even take time for daily devotions.
Like the human body, which shuts down one organ at a time to preserve the more vital ones, I was letting one important responsibility slide after another—all in order to hang on for dear life.
Fortunately, I had a trusted friend who insisted on keeping our weekly appointment to pray together. On one of these occasions, he said, “I know things are difficult for you right now. Let me urge you to keep your focus on doing the things a good pastor does.
“Give your time to teaching the Bible and showing love to your congregation. Regardless of what else is happening in your life, this will pay rich rewards when the present troubles are over.”
It took a few weeks for this advice to sink in, but it did when I noticed the distractions were hurting me in vital areas. For example, as I put less time in sermon prep, I became more tentative in the pulpit. Soon I found myself dreading Sunday morning because I knew in my heart I wasn’t prepared. I returned to my study regimen regardless of the crises.
Maintaining a normal schedule during a time of intense adversity produces an unexpected byproduct—it helps you feel normal! It provides a source of emotional stability and helps keep you from obsessing on the larger problems. By visiting our shut-ins and watching their eyes light up, I could temporarily experience more positive emotions. Focusing on someone else’s needs allowed me to forget my own—at least for an afternoon.
Challenge the siege
A biblical metaphor helped define my situation—I was under siege. In ancient times it was common for armies to surround and lay siege to a city for months or even years. The point of the prolonged assault was to wear down the opponent to the point of surrender.
I considered all the problems encircling me—the rage of the elder, the lawsuit with the neighbor, and my brother’s lingering fight with cancer—and wondered how long I could hold out before my energy and hope were gone.
For years I had maintained a routine of prayer and fasting that included missing two meals every Wednesday. I had seen numerous answers to prayer as a result of this practice. But when I applied it to the current dilemma, no immediate answers came. What was wrong?
Despite the fasting and prayer, the angry board member turned up his campaign to discredit me before the local district. The judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit and set a date to impanel a jury. My brother had to quit his job because the chemotherapy treatments were leaving him too weak. On top of all this, my second son, normally the most spiritually enthusiastic of our kids, simply announced one day he was no longer interested in going to church.
What was left? As I was struggling in prayer one day, the Holy Spirit seemed to impress on me, “You are under siege. Your normal times of prayer and fasting were adequate for your previous battles, but they are not enough to deal with this current enemy. You need to increase your times of prayer and fasting and ask God to lift this siege against your life, family, and church.”
I recalled the New Testament account where the disciples were unable to drive out a particular demon. This led to a heated argument among them, interrupted only by Jesus’ sudden arrival on the scene. He rebuked the demon and the suffering person was set free. Later the disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” So He said to them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:28-29, NKJV).
I began to commit longer periods of time to prayer and fasting. Instead of just two meals, I would fast for an entire day, sometimes two days a week. During these fasts, the weight seemed to lift temporarily.
I began to prepare myself for critical meetings and watershed events by first engaging in a prolonged period of prayer and fasting. On more than one occasion, meetings that should have been unpleasant and divisive turned into calm, productive discussions.
But the resolve to maintain this practice didn’t come easy. Sitting at the table sipping fruit juice while the family devoured a fresh pizza or a hot pork roast were awful, believe me! Yet the benefits of intensified prayer and fasting continued to pay off.
Another change was in my own demeanor during difficult meetings or conversations. As a result of the prayer and fasting, I was able to respond to adversaries with genuine love and patience.
While reading the biography of Hudson Taylor, I was struck by his statement: “You have no idea what it is like to wake up and be despised by everyone you meet that day … I asked Christ to give me love in my heart for each person I would meet, and he did. If learning this lesson was the only reason I came to this land, it was worth the trip.”
While my immediate circumstances did not change, my response to them definitely did. Prayer and fasting helped to break the siege.
Open up selectively
During this ordeal it seemed only natural to turn for support and advice to the one closest to me—my wife, Debbie. Yet as the weeks turned to months, I watched my dear wife begin to buckle under the strain. I realized I was placing more of a burden on her than she could bear.
One night she woke up gasping for air.
“What’s wrong, dear?” I asked, my own heart racing.
“I’m having trouble breathing,” she whispered. “I might be having a heart attack.”
I called her physician’s office. The answering service took the call, and soon her doctor was on the line. After several hours in the emergency room, he determined she was suffering from what once was termed “soldier’s heart” or pain in the chest wall. Though not life-threatening, its primary cause is traumatic stress.
It was a wake-up call—I simply could not continue to download my emotional pain onto Debbie.
So I sought out another pastor who had professional training in counseling. I also reached out to friends in ministry outside my denomination who were willing to listen with greater objectivity.
Oddly enough, my greatest moments of encouragement came not from other ministry professionals but from unplanned encounters with caring laypeople.
One Sunday evening after a concert, a distinguished-looking woman, perhaps 70 years old, walked up, extended both hands, and said, “Pastor, come with me. There are three of us at the front of the church who would like to pray for you.”
I had never seen her before. But she literally led me by the hand over to her group. As the sanctuary gradually emptied, they explained that they had been invited by mutual friends to attend the concert. They also explained they had been in a prayer group for several years and someone had shared with them the difficulties I was experiencing at the moment. The light and love in their eyes was life-giving.
I sensed that God had sent these women. I briefly described some of my burden. They laid hands on me and prayed. Nearly an hour later I felt as if several tons had been lifted off my shoulders.
“Where have you been?” my wife asked when I got home.
“I think God sent us three angels this evening,” I said.
While I worked to stay emotionally connected to Debbie, I no longer required her to serve as my counselor, and her health and spirit improved.
Character not reputation
Perhaps the worst moments of my worst year were when I learned that nasty stories about me were circulating in the community.
“Did you know his denomination is asking him to take a leave of absence from the ministry for two years?” one story speculated. “Did you hear he steals his sermons from others?” was another. Hardly a week passed without someone informing me of a new tale they’d heard.
During this time a cousin sent me a plaque. It simply read: “Reputation is who people think you are. Character is who you actually are. Take care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself.”
The plaque led me to search the Scriptures for others who had known the injustice of personal attacks. Moses was charged with a spiritual power grab by the sons of Korah. Nehemiah was accused of planning an insurrection by Sanballat and Tobiah. Jesus was labeled a cohort of the prince of demons by the Pharisees.
I knew I was far from perfect, and my faults had broken through on more than one occasion, but I also knew I had not earned the malicious rumors swirling about the community.
A man in our church pointed me to the example of Jesus: “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).
From that point on, I made a commitment to avoid mudslinging with the critics or hunting down the source of every rumor. I chose instead to rest in the assurance that one day the truth would become evident to all, if not in this lifetime, then in the next.
Go against your flow
One particularly dark and lonely day, I decided to skip a meeting with the bishop. I anticipated yet another session of answering the same old charges from the angry elder.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m there or not,” I told myself. Sensing what seemed like strength in this newfound rebellious attitude, I called for a tee time at the golf course, and scheduled it precisely for when the meeting was to start.
I was polishing my nine-iron when a friend from church called and innocently asked, “Can I pick you up this afternoon for the meeting with Bishop Swenson?”
“I’m not going,” I replied.
“Why? What’s come up? Are you feeling sick?”
“Yes, I am sick—sick and tired of meetings where I become the target for people’s potshots. I’m going golfing instead.”
There was a long pause on the line. “Pastor, I love you, and I’m going to ask you to trust me. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that I believe would hurt you. I’m going to pick you up and take you to the meeting. I’ll personally stop the meeting if it gets mean. But your presence is vital to restoring the confidence of the denomination.”
We argued for nearly twenty minutes. Reluctantly I agreed to trust my friend’s judgment. Much to my surprise, the meeting turned out to be affirming and productive. Afterward I put my arm around his shoulders and said, “Thanks. You were right. I did need to be here.”
From that experience I gained greater resolve not to take “the counsel of my fears” (as one famous military general put it). If my emotions said to stay inside and withdraw from people, I would deliberately take our family out to eat. If I felt anxious about making a difficult phone call, I would intentionally make it the first order of business in the morning. If I would spot a contentious person in the lobby after church, I would walk over and offer my hand.
“Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is kept safe” (Prov. 29:25).
Take thoughts captive
Then in the midst of all this, my brother died of cancer. Phil was just a year younger than me, and the two of us had grown up almost like twins. At times my grief over his loss threatened to overwhelm me.
I kept a picture on my desk of our last Christmas together. Tears would often come suddenly and without warning.
Four weeks after my brother’s death, my attorney called to urge me and the church to settle the lawsuit out of court for a large sum of money. It was the lawyer’s opinion we would likely lose the case.
For weeks I had wondered if life could get any worse. The words of Elijah, who collapsed from discouragement in the desert, were mine: “He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. ‘I have had enough, Lord’ he said. ‘Take my life'” (1 Kings 19:4).
My migraines flared up again, making me sick to my stomach. “Yes, I know how you feel, Elijah,” I mumbled while shaving that morning. “Believe me, I know how you feel.”
When would God bring relief? One afternoon a concerned fellow pastor called to check on me. As I shared my weariness and exhaustion, he replied that God had moved him to stay up all night to pray for me. Then he quoted a Scripture verse he believed he was to give me: “‘No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and this is their vindication from me,’ declares the Lord” (Is. 54:17). The verse promised something I had all but given up on—“‘vindication from me,’ declares the Lord.” Perhaps God had not abandoned me completely.
Then during one of my morning devotional times, I read: “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:3-5).
I realized that if I was going to survive, indeed if my marriage, family, and church were going to survive, I would need to begin taking my thoughts captive and making them obedient to Christ. I simply couldn’t let my mind wander down an undisciplined path to worry and despair any longer.
One by one, day after day, God began to help me confront my darkest brooding and fear.
“What if the former deacon is successful in getting me fired?”
No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.
“What if we lose the court case?”
I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord(Psalm 27:13-14).
My deliberate efforts to capture racing thoughts began to bring light and hope back to my spirit.
Yet as Phil’s birthday came and went, I found myself staring once again at the picture of my brother’s smiling face.
The pain, the unfairness, and the combined cruelty of his premature death suddenly threatened to lead me down a path of new despair. Even the assurance of life after death seemed to unravel at that moment.
“Lord,” I prayed at my desk, “where is my brother today? What’s happened to him?”
Several minutes later I opened my eyes and noticed an unopened letter in my stack of correspondence. The name on the return address was a former Sunday school teacher who had taught Phil and me years ago in California. Tearing it open, I scanned down the lines.
The last paragraph captured my heart, “Christians in East Asia, where I once served as a missionary, do not refer to death as death, but rather as a ‘change of address.’ Take heart, my friend, your dear brother has simply changed addresses.”
At the bottom was embossed: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17).
I cried harder than I had cried for weeks, but it was a cleansing grief. God had once again taken captive my thoughts and turned them over to Christ.
End of the year
Eventually the worst year of my ministry came to an end. Not all at once, but slowly. The troubling elder was transferred by his employer to another state, and with his departure the prime mover behind the turmoil at church was gone.
The title company involved in the purchase of the parsonage produced a survey of the property that showed my neighbor’s garage was actually encroaching on our property. The opposing attorney quickly suggested a settlement to avoid a counter suit. An agreement was reached that paid for medical costs, the price of attorney’s fees, and damage done to his client’s car, but no more.
Without the intense triangular pressures, the migraine headaches subsided and eventually disappeared altogether. I am a different person and pastor at the end of this ordeal, and most of the changes are for the better.
While the grief of losing my brother remains fresh, it has also made me more tender and sympathetic to those who’ve lost close relatives. I have a new appreciation for the practicality and timeliness of the Bible, especially where Paul describes his own ordeal: “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death” (2 Cor. 1:8-9).
This time I could go on and read the remainder of the passage and claim it as my own story, “But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.”
Frank Payne is a pseudonym for a pastor who remains in the church described. I didn’t realize it then, but this was the beginning of the worst year of my life.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
