This page is not to chronicle defeat in our lives but to show that no matter how difficult a situation is, we have a God that is bigger than our problem. There are literally thousands of pastors wives who've been down the road before us. There are those who've stayed the course and there are others who didn't make it. We want to tell other pastors wives that there is life after a church split. There is life after your kids have embarrassed you to the point of despair. We want to say that you can overcome no matter what the problem. Since this is the first month of the site I thought I would tell you the most difficult situation I have ever faced and how the Lord helped me through it.	My husband had been a minister for years before I met and married him. He went back to Bible school after we married. When he graduated, we started a church in southern California and my experience as a senior pastor's wife started. We went through a power struggle, and at the same time a minister came to our church, spoke for us, and siphoned off half our people and started his own work. I thought that was the worst thing in my life at the time. I felt so inexperienced and that I just had to be to blame for all that happened. We kept that church for another year and a half and moved to my husbands hometown. We took an existing church and restructured it. Four years into the work we had ANOTHER power struggle! YEESH! I got accused of everything under the sun short of sexual sin! The people involved decided they would shut our church down. I dreaded waking up in the morning. I would lie awake and think, "I wish it were night, how am I going to get through this day." Night would come and I would think, "I wish it were day, how am I going to get through this night!" I would read my Bible with no comprehension, I would pray for direction and feel like the heavens were brass.
We live in a small town where every body knows you and I dreaded driving around. I had a good idea of what was being said and none of it was true. I wanted to defend myself but how? I had been cussed out in a public restaurant, gotten vindictive mail, was being talked about to others in mean and spiteful ways and on top of all that my husbands son ran away from home. I felt like the scourge of the town and the wicked witch of Oklahoma all in one. Even simple things like go to the post office seemed like an enormous task, because one of the men worked across from the post office and would just stare at me when I arrived to pick up the mail. It took everything I had to hold my head up. I would ponder, over and over, was there anything in the accusations, after all my step son had run away from home too. He was telling everybody how terrible I was. Question upon question would flood my mind. Should we do as they wanted, turn all authority over to them. Would the people we had left follow us, would I ever be reconciled to my step son, were we even called to the ministry? My husband was going through the same agony, self doubt, and self-recriminations I was. Some of those that had departed were friends of his, some he had gone to school with and had a high regard for. Some had been part of a ministry he had helped start years before.	It was difficult because it was so vicious and mean spirited. When all the dust settled it was simply that they wanted us to turn all power over to them which we could not do. We thought about doing it, even intended to, thinking maybe we should. What should be done? We couldn't seem to get it clear in our hearts. One afternoon as we were driving to a pastor's conference I was crying and reading my Bible and I turned to my husband and said, "Paul, what we need is A WORD FROM GOD!" We needed a specific direction from the Lord. Do we quit, have we compromised anything, have we lost our ability to lead those that are left? What do we do Lord? We prayed, and said, "God, we need a specific word from you to stand on. We need scripture from your Word to know what to do." I looked back down at my open Bible and my eyes fell on Isaiah 41:8-20. I could hardly believe my eyes! The Lord had given us the very Word we needed. I laughed, I cried, I knew the Lord had not forsaken us and we knew what to do, at least I knew...Paul was still struggling.	A few days later he called one of the men who had been out of town when all of the hullabaloo went on. He explained what had happened and the man said, "Pastor, I keep hearing in my heart that Isaiah 41 somewhere around verses 8-19 or 20 is for you. Paul could hardly believe his ears! He laughed, he cried! He now knew what to do. We stood on those promises from that passage of scripture. Everytime we felt like we weren't going to make it we would read those scriptures. When doubt and fear would try to creep in, we would go to those scriptures and read them out loud and remind ourselves of God's promises to us. We had to keep ourselves from being moved by what what we saw or what we felt or what we heard. We had A WORD FROM GOD and we knew that when God gives you a specific Word He'll fulfill it if we'll not waiver or give up. Today our church is a healthy, thriving church full of happy people accomplishing great things for God. We weathered the storm and came out stronger than ever before.