With Leaps and Bounds

"Fine!" I calmly said. "I think that’s best. Go ahead and remove all of our names."

There was a gasp and her voice raised to a loud shriek! "You mean you’re telling me to terminate your membership? You mean you want out? You want us to take your names off?"

"Oh yes! We’re through," I found myself matter-of-factly stating with no other explanation.

"Well, FINE!" she seemed to spit out.

"Oh, and Vivian, send Noel on out so that her father can pick her up, would you? He really would be perturbed if he has to get out of the car and go in to get her."

Hanging up, I called Frank who said, "I’m relieved it’s over. Those people are sick."

"Would you go get Noel now?" I asked. "She will be watching for you inside the door."

We all arrived home simultaneously, and to my relief, Noel, though tired, seemed to fully accept with relief the turn of events. "I’m glad to be gone from there. I’ve seen enough of their true selves to know it’s not a place where God wants me."

"Noel, what was so very important about this meeting? What did Bart talk about?" I asked.

Noel stood for a moment thinking, when eventually a smile began to break over her face. Finally she spoke. "The only thing he discussed was about his authority over us and how it was linked to God’s authority, and that anyone who resisted his authority would be resisting God’s authority. He said it would be detrimental to our development as skaters, and that to go against him would keep us from succeeding in skating anywhere! He said that to go against God’s authority would be to fail, and that God worked through authority, and he was the authority of God in our lives."

I stared in unbelief. "Were any other adults there to hear this?" I asked.

"I think everyone was there but you!" she said.

"And no one seemed to question this?"

"No one," she sighed.

"What happened after I hung up with you?" I asked.

"Vivian went back to the meeting and announced to everyone that our family had just resigned from the club and that I was packing up to leave for good, because you had called and decided we didn’t want to be members anymore."

"Noel, I’m afraid that whoever chooses to stay in that club will have to knowingly or unknowingly worship Bart. He is possessed with the notion of playing God, and sad to say, I’m afraid he has enough influence over people to see it work."

"Not over us," she said. "We can see it. We’ve seen it for a long time coming. Denise and Donald saw it. So did JoNell and Hannah."

(I had asked for the truth, and I was shown it in a matter of a few hours.) "We need to pray for those still there," I said. "I feel like I’ve been shown only ‘the tip of the iceberg’ of what’s really there. I shudder to think about what’s still hidden."

"God will open another door, Mom," she said as she went up the stairs to study. "I know that as a reality in my life!"

The very next day the banks came and closed the doors on all our businesses: padlocked and shut tight. In a period of just twenty-four hours, we had lost everything that in previous times I had thanked God for as blessings.

"What is happening to us?" Hannah asked in total perplexity and despondency one day. "What does it mean? What have we done?"

"Done? I don’t know." I said, as I thought awhile. "I don’t think we’re suffering so much for what we ‘have’ or ‘have not’ done. I think that too many of today’s teachers try to put all believers in the wealthy shoes of King Solomon or David. And as nice as that would be, it tends to ignore the greater probability that we perhaps fit into the picture of the thousands that were beaten in jails, fed to lions, slandered before judges, or sold into slavery. The Lord is Lord, through the bad as well as the good, and what better way to reveal His majesty than to carry us through the bad."

"Where is He then?" she sighed. "I feel so alone and so betrayed. I thought that God would protect His own from things like this. It just seems like the deceitful get ahead in this world. It seems like nothing touches them. It almost seems they are rewarded for their evil."

"Maybe they are! Satan would love for us to hate God right now and to turn away and blame Him. And believe me Hannah, it would be so easy to do just that. I have yet to see any magic wand turn the cinders of my life at present into a royal coach. My family seems to be walking straight through the cinders, and something tells me we’re not through yet! No, I think it is Satan rewarding these people. Satan even tried to offer rewards to Jesus, if He would worship Him; and Hannah, if Satan had not actually been able to hand these rewards over to Him, then it wouldn’t have been called ‘the temptation’. Something is temptation only when it can be delivered!"

"But can’t God be a little more audible to me?" she asked. "I feel like He has turned his back on me, like he doesn’t love me, or worse, isn’t listening."

"Hannah, do we love Him on the condition of the quickness of His ‘magic wand’? I’ve had to ask myself that a lot lately. You see, our financial advancement, here in Houston, was great and I praised and thanked Him. I guess, deep inside, I believed He was blessing us because we had done this and that correctly! It was sort of like His approval stamp of blessing on all of us in the form of money and success! Did it ever occur to us, Hannah, that this, our lot right now, also has His stamp of approval, to walk through the cinders?"

"I’m just so confused right now," Hannah replied. "I just hope He loves me and that this is not just some sort of punishment for me."

"Hannah, nothing on this earth will ever convince me that God takes away husbands from wives and children, sends thieves to steal and plunder, breaks legs, hits heads, destroys hopes, or stirs up enemies just for the primary purpose of punishing those that follow Him."

"Then why is He allowing this to happen?" she asked. "He could stop it if He wanted to. Why is it happening?"