Family, Faith and Fairy Tales

In October of 2000 we took our family to Galveston for a vacation.     This was before we moved into our new house, before we sold our old house, before we joined Eastland Baptist Church, before we had done much of anything except make plans.   We had joined the little church in Glenpool and quickly got to work.   But all the busy-ness in the world could not adequately distract us from the nagging strangeness of starting over.   So, we went to Galveston!   I grew up in Sugar Land.     Galveston was only an hour away.    I had driven there many times with friends as a teen and loved most the sound of the ocean, the salty air (especially at night) and the beachy caw of the sea gulls.   Over the 24 years of our relationship, Paul and I made many short trips there, but this trip would be very different from all the rest.   This time we would rent a beach house and stay there for a whole week!    Our previous trips th...

Our first six months on ‘the outside’ was a time of many, rapid changes. We began working in the church in Glenpool, Ok. It was during this time that Paul felt called to start a church in Jenks, OK.    Jenks is a small, thriving community with a large and very excellent public school system. It is located forty minutes on the other side of Tulsa from our former church. We got busy right away employing the efforts and skills we acquired after having started a church from scratch nineteen years before. Good things began to happen despite the fact we were still in a state of shock and confusion.  It wasn’t long before we realized we could not continue working in that little church. It  just wasn’t going to work.    There were several reasons for this, but the most important reason was that our older children still living at home were becoming increasingly unhappy there.   The sadness of leaving the comfortably sized church, youth group, family, frien...

I found the world to be a much stranger place after leaving the church.   Even the small city where we lived for 22 years seemed darkly strange and foreign after leaving.   I can remember going into the local Walmart where I had shopped for so many years and feeling envious of the other people shopping there because they all seemed comfortable, lighthearted-- carefree even.    I ached to feel this comfortable again.   But these feelings lessened as we immediately went about the work of rebuilding our lives.   One of the first things we did was get some counseling and advice from seasoned pastors in the area who knew us and knew plenty about the church we left.    The first pastor we spoke with was Clifford Clark. He had pastored Tulsa Baptist Temple for many years until he retired. He had also been a favored guest speaker for Missions Conferences in our former church for many years.    There is not a wiser, kinder, more gracious and belo...