God said, “My ways are not your ways” (Isaiah 58). The context is a call to repent, but in the midst of this is a statement that has long carried meanings beyond the context. Rightly so, because Hebrew prophetic writing was meant to be taken expansively, and this statement is obviously universal in scope.
A few years ago I helped a fellow obtain ordination. He went back to the same organization and got some more training. I never picked on him for his oddball beliefs; I just guided him through the process. Then I helped him publish a book or two, but it required very heavy editing — he can barely spell. He has precious little of my education. Anyone would expect him to take a different tack in Kingdom service. Sadly, that tack includes the insistence that I have to agree with what he believes, that somehow he outranks me and the burning insistence in his mind is binding on me. I’ve had to tell him to leave me alone on the grounds that he is interfering with my ministry.
It’s not a question of which of us has the right ideas. I can’t use his and he can’t understand mine. You can probably guess the rest, and I refuse to name him. Could you have the time to waste chasing back through more than five years of posts here, you’ll find some have drawn major objections and quite a few debates. Well, half of a debate because I generally refuse to debate. I just answer questions and let it go. None of that makes me superior, but I’ve never once backed down. I have had to ban a couple of folks and I once deleted some truly goofball stuff that was way off topic. (I block spammy stuff for an entirely different reason.) Aside from idiocy, I’ve always had an answer because God gave me a really good education and it’s not hard to answer broken logic or broken ideas.
I have my mission and they have theirs; people with their different approach don’t rattle me. But I can’t allow interference. I find the inflated sense of entitlement exhibited by some folks truly amazing. That fellow I helped suffers from it, too. He really doesn’t even know me, largely because he doesn’t know how to listen. I can’t guess what God has in store for him, but it doesn’t include me. I sincerely hope he finds something that brings him peace.
