Part 6: The Wedding

After her conversation, I knew things would get worse and really, really considered pulling out, having someone else marry us and greatly scale down the wedding. We could have done a small reception only at our friend’s house. Our wedding day turned out to be a beautiful day and I could have made it happen. My dad was strongly suggesting it and we really wavered. I just knew things weren’t going to work out. I knew that there was a lot of fake, trying to keep us happy stuff going on. If I blew the lid off the truth by sharing what had happened, it would have been bad. My husband and I were pretty prominent in the church and both of us extremely visible. It’s been almost a year and we still get people telling us how things aren’t the same without us.

The wedding happened and turned out beautiful and we had a fantastic day! There was no drama, not as many people came who had claimed just weeks prior that they were so excited to attend. So the reception ended up very small. One thing that bothered me in light of what had happened, I wasn’t too pleased about this Director having such a big role as MC at our wedding. If I’d have been asked I would have said no as I knew anything he did wouldn’t have been sincere or in Christian fellowship.

Side note: I had been praying, praying, praying that if God wanted us to keep relationships, and there to be restitution, that this Director would come to me to confess and apologize. He never did. If I yelled and screamed at someone like that, as a believer, the shame and conviction would just eat me alive. I’d never be able to be so cruel, even if I thought it true what I was saying. As believers we are supposed to be known by how we love one another. That’s why I could never wrap my head around some of the rules because almost every single rule was based out of control and not loving, the welfare, or the growth of the believers within the worship arts department. Every rule, brought restriction, legalism, and more restrictions than when I’d worked with professional paid musicians or when I’d been paid staff! I had more work to lead worship once every three weeks, than when I’d been on staff at my first paid position and I led worship there between 3 and 5 days a week depending upon whether we had a Sunday evening service that week or if I was leading in our sister church in Chipley. The amount of stress I was under was incredible with no grace ever! I firmly believe that this worship director/Elder is a wolf in Sheep’s clothing. Wolves love rules, legalism and are faucets of false teaching meant to enslave instead of bring Christian freedom through Christ. Wolves always bite and devour!

Well, we managed to get through the wedding with little incident. Graciously, I gave the Pastor’s wife a painting of mine that she had been drooling over for months as a way of thank-you for all her hard work. It had quite the price tag on it, but I gave it as a way of thanks and as a hope that we could get past this issue and hopefully restore the relationship. Unfortunately, restoration wasn’t going to be possible.

The morning after our wedding, we were getting dressed, ready to check out of the hotel and push on to our honeymoon destination when I got a text from my Son, saying how he’d been cornered by the Pastor’s wife and her son, pushing him for information about us, if we’d told anyone, and what we were going to do. At the same time, Geoff logged into the live feed and began listening to the sermon. Suddenly, we both looked at each other in shock as we heard the words “seed of division”. The Pastor was preaching about people gossiping and having a seed of division in them. The sermon was on 2 Timothy 2 about rightly dividing the word of God and he was preaching it as if that passage of scripture was talking about the early church gossiping! Wait, What! This was so clearly an agenda message and we were on the agenda to be discussed from the pulpit! There were quite a few lovely little hints in there about people talking about leadership and if they do so they are in sin. Keep in mind, there wasn’t anyone we had spoken to in the church about the incident with the Director. We did seek outside counsel with Pastors we’ve known for years and trusted. But no one knew anything inside the church.

We spent our entire honeymoon, just praying, talking and seeking God for the direction he wanted us to go and after that Sermon, it was the confirmation for us to leave that church. We even sought out godly counsel and everywhere we turned, there was confirmation to leave, we were just asking God the question of When.