We were in the middle of the lawsuit and everything was stacked against us.
We had already had to withdraw it because of statute of limitations issues and other reasons and now Bill Gothard was threatening sanctions against us for even filing a lawsuit in the first place. Sanctions that involved paying him money and what he called 'biblical reconciliation' among other things.
I couldn't understand it.
God had given me specific direction years before that this was what He wanted me to do. Not just me, but a few of the others also. Why was He now not coming to our rescue. Why did He not intervene? I was getting angry with God. It was my go-to reaction when things got bad. It's God's fault. He doesn't care. He doesn't listen. He won't even answer prayer. He doesn’t do what he says he will do - in his own Bible, no less.
I was mad, angry, disappointed, hurt that God would tell me to do something and then leave me all alone.
The experience of the lawsuit allowed me to see God in a different way. I thought that, because I’d grown up in a pentecostal church, I understood spiritual battles, but this was a completely different experience to what I’d ever seen before. It was as though I was shoulder to shoulder with God fighting something so dark and oppressive and the onslaughts never stopped. They just kept coming and we just kept fighting back. It began in 2014 (for me in 2012), and didn’t stop until 2019. This was the period of time personally for me that was fraught with danger. My husband nearly lost his life through cardiac arrest, our finances were decimated, my children faced health issues-we’d just get through one thing and something else would slam us. It felt like a Job-of-the-Bible experience. I would never, never, ever recommend anyone going into something like this without reckoning and understanding that your life might be shattered.
Why were the onslaughts so powerful? Why did it feel that we were up against an evil so great we weren’t going to survive to the end, literally?
And where was God? Why was He not helping?
Then the answer came. It came in the morning one day and I was pleading with God for help. Not just for myself, but for the other amazing women who were also on this battlefield. We were being pounded and we were battered and bruised. We needed help.
That still, small voice - those old words hidden in my heart from childhood.
“No one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6.
It was like a light went on that day. “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
Why had I not seen that before? Was I guilty of ignoring Jesus?
“For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.” 1 Timothy 2:5.
Once I understood this and processed it, my belief system began to make sense and change, but it was small steps at a time.
I changed my approach. I began praying to Jesus, not God. I began asking Jesus to stand in the gap for us girls. To go to our Heavenly Father and ask Him to help us. Every morning, faithfully, I would pray the same thing. I also asked Jesus to shelter each one of us under his wings of protection. I took our names, one by one, to him, every day. I asked Jesus to remind God of us fighting down here for Him.
“He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust… He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge: his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”
I prayed this every day for two years.
We began to climb out of the battlefield. We began seeing victories and triumphs, ultimately leading to our finale in the court room in January 2019. We were safe. We had done what we needed to do, what God had asked us to do. God had stood with us and fought along side us. The battle was over.
This experience for me, was more than this fight though. It was getting to know God in a different way, a new way. It allowed me to process the doubts and questions and showed me what had been missing for so long from ‘organised religion.’
Jesus.
I know that is a bold thing to say. I know that it will cause many to recoil and look askance at me. But it’s true. The church, both liberal and conservative has lost its way collectively and found ways to circumvent Jesus. While it doesn’t deny Jesus, it struggles to accept him.
They’re ignoring Jesus.
They’re going straight to God. Trying to understand God. Trying to reconcile the Old Testament God with the New Testament God. Does God have a personality disorder that in one time in history he’s horrible and in another he’s merciful? If you understand God through the eyes of what is written, and man’s trying to understand it, it would seem so.
But if you start looking at everything through Jesus and what he stands for, it changes everything.
I come back to the question I asked before, because it’s important and needs clarification.
“It was as though I was shoulder to shoulder with God fighting something so dark and oppressive and the onslaughts never stopped. They just kept coming and we just kept fighting back. Why did it feel that we were up against an evil so great we weren’t going to survive to the end, literally?”
The modern day church has forgotten about Jesus. Both the liberal and the conservative. It has set the culture of its own christianity as an idol before the people. It is arrogant. It speaks for God as an authority. Men and women interpret the Bible from their own cultural perspectives.
This was why our battle was so fierce. We were exposing some of the greatest hypocrisy and heresy and abuse the christian world had ever seen. It hadn’t just gathered in the confines of a cult, it had spread widely across all denominations. The fingers of this heresy, had touched many places, many people, ruined lives and turned people away from God. Slowly, subtly, over generations, the darkness had undermined the very cornerstone of faith and belief through men who were hungry for power and lusted after glory and it had warped the true message of the Gospel.
Jesus.
And God was angry.
I don’t think I will ever truly understand the implications of our little group of women going up against something so dark and evil and much more powerful than us, or the man we were fighting in court. I have tried, but I don’t think I will ever know the significance of that in the spiritual.
But what it did do for me was open my eyes to Jesus. Somewhere I had lost him. Somewhere between the years of 5 and 45 I had lost Jesus.
Why had I lost Jesus? Because I thought I knew who Jesus was and the battle in the lawsuit showed me I didn’t. My construct of Jesus was man-made and idol-like.
I needed to find him again.
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