S2S Sisters: "Living Strategically to Honor God: My Journey of Faith" by Sarah Knapp

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. We welcome each of you to the Strength to Strength Sisters platform. We're very glad to see you. We love to see your faces, just as a side note.

So welcome to our testimony today that we are blessed to be able to listen to. So Sarah Knapp, currently from Boston, is willing to share her testimony with us today. So the vision of Strength to Strength Sisters is to encourage women to be catalysts in advancing the kingdom through biblical teaching, testimonies of faithful women, and thought-provoking discussion.

Just as a side note, I noticed that it's been, I think this platform is about four years old now. So it's been a tremendous blessing to hear from so many women. It's definitely been an encouragement to my faith to hear amazing testimonies and encouragement that God is working in all parts of the world. And that is the desire here, is to draw women together from all over the world, which is, I think, a very exciting venture. So I want to introduce Sarah. I already said she lives in Boston. Her and her husband, Jeff, have five children. Or is it six now? Five. Five still? Yeah. Okay. I was just reading on your thing online here.

They're part of the Followers of the Way in Boston at this point. So we will also be hosting a Q&A right after Sarah's done speaking. And we would love to hear your questions and your input, any comments you may have. We would love to hear from you.

So at this point, I'm going to pray for Sarah, and then we'll turn the time over to her. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for this opportunity that You've provided in this day and age to have called us to the kingdom for such a time as this. And thank You for the technology that is to make this possible. We know that at home, face-to-face connections are the best in so many ways. And yet we know that You have provided this as well to reach all over the world. And we're so grateful for this. We want this all to be for You to receive all the honor and glory in this. And Lord, that this would continue to be a blessing to others.

I ask that You be with Sarah today, that You would just be near her and in her, Lord. Give her words, give her calmness, and give her Your Spirit. Just bless her for her faithfulness. Thank You for how You have led her and for her obedience to You, Lord. We know that You call, but our job is to answer.

And thank You that she has done this and that she can be a blessing to others in this way. All this I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So go ahead, Sarah. Okay. Thank you so much, Linda. Well, sometimes it's a little hard to know where to get started. I'm 45 years old, so trying to sum up 45 years of life is hard to know exactly where to start and stop. But I'll just start that I'm so thankful to God for His mercy to me. And He's just given so many great opportunities, especially spiritually, to learn about the Bible, to grow in Him, and to be refined in Him. So I'm just so grateful for those.

There's definitely been lots of seasons of my life where I wasn't learning and applying, I think, as well as I should have. But I'm continuing to seek. So kind of just going back to the earlier parts of my life as a child, I feel like I had just a wonderful upbringing from my parents. They taught me about God very faithfully, that they put God first in their lives. And I'm just so grateful that they provided so much spiritual training and just ability and emotional nurturing.

They did a really good job raising and nurturing me. And I think that has just laid a great foundation for my life. And I'm so grateful. They took me to church three times a week and more. We went to lots of extra church meetings and Bible studies and various trips that were focused around learning more about the Bible and growing closer to other Christians. So I'm very grateful for those opportunities to grow in the Lord and to learn about the Bible.

And both my mom and my dad, but probably especially my dad, taught us to work hard. We lived out in the country for most of my growing up years on a family farm. And that provided a lot of opportunities for hard work, which was helpful to me.

They both encouraged us, me and my siblings. I have two younger brothers and a younger sister. And they encouraged us to be humble and to ask other people lots of questions to try to learn from them, to not feel like we have it all figured out, but to really be open and seeking and learning from others.

And they really encouraged us a lot too to keep pressing forward and not to be satisfied with where we are and settle into complacency. And I'm very grateful that they encouraged us to do that as well.

Something that my dad would often bring up to me as well was thinking about how I was using my time. And he would ask about specific activities that I would be choosing to do as I was growing up. Is this a good use of your time? And I'm very grateful that he brought that up, brought that to my attention. And it's shaped my life in a lot of ways, even to now, just thinking, "Am I using my time well? Am I using it for the Lord, or am I furthering it away for other purposes that aren't very helpful?"

And then I think, as I've mentioned, serving God was very important in my family. And my parents really sought to put God first in everything. And I think that was so pivotal in my upbringing. And with that, they taught us the Bible in our home a lot. And then, of course, at church, taught us the Bible in all kinds of settings. And they really encouraged us to examine the scriptures, to follow it carefully, and even if it meant believing and doing very differently than people around us. And I think that was also a foundational part of my life that they instilled, to not be fearful of what others would think around us if we were different.

And so I really appreciate that they taught us that. And a passage that I heard a lot growing up, probably at home and at church, was Acts 17:11, which talks about the Bereans who searched the scriptures daily to see if these things were so. And that has also continued to impact my life to this day, to make sure that I'm looking to the scriptures for everything that I do and practice.

Is it right? Is it what we're supposed to be doing? And so, of course, I don't follow that perfectly, but that's the goal and trying to seek to do that. And some of my parents modeled this by choosing this.

They modeled being different and thinking about the scriptures and examining it and following it, even if it was different. They modeled that by choosing to homeschool us when very few were doing it at that time. And they modeled it by encouraging us to dress modestly, to have higher standards when it came to entertainment, choosing courtship over dating.

And they also encouraged us to become Christians through baptism as adults, which was also very different from many around us. And then just all kinds of other ways as well. But again, I'm very thankful that they chose to step out and really think hard about what we were doing.

And then as a family and with many others, we would often discuss the Bible and discuss different viewpoints in the Bible and challenge each other and challenge the typical practices in the churches of Christ that we were a part of. And I think that was really good for us to help us to stop and think about what we were doing and not just accept what we were doing blindly.

And so I mentioned that we were part of churches of Christ. We were members of several different individual congregations within the churches of Christ over a period of many years. And I do believe that the churches of Christ had many strengths that were very helpful to me as I grew up and to now. And they really helped me to have a good foundation to grow in the Lord. Some of those strengths are they emphasize knowing the Bible well and loving it and then trying to base the way that we live and worship together as churches.

They base their practices off of the Bible. They try to. And they value communion very highly and partake of it every Sunday, which made a big impact on me as well. And I do really believe there are many people in the churches of Christ who really love the Lord and are zealously serving Him and do really appreciate many of them, even though that we're not part of churches of Christ anymore.

And so just kind of moving on in my life after childhood. As a teen, I became convicted through a Bible camp and through church and through my family that I should read the Bible daily. And I've tried to do that pretty consistently since then. And I think that's made a huge difference in my life to know the scriptures better and to be seeking to follow them better.

Also, in my teen years and even a little bit earlier, I wrestled a lot with when to become a Christian. I remember well a friend of mine was baptized into Christ. I think she was 12 and I was 10. And so because of her becoming a Christian, I came to my dad and was asking to be baptized as well. And he sat down, talked to me about it, and encouraged me to wait because it seemed like I was more motivated to become a Christian because of my friend becoming a Christian and not so much of my own motivation.

And then I kept coming back to him, I think every year or two after that, asking about when I should be baptized because I always, ever since I was very little, I've had a desire to serve the Lord and to give my life to God, but wanted to do it in His way.

And so I would keep coming back to my dad.

And at some point, probably around 14 or 15, my dad encouraged me to pull out a Bible that I didn't mind marking in and to go through the book of Acts and underline all the places where it talked about who were becoming Christians and who were already Christians. And so what I noticed was that I did not find any children. I found it was men and women anytime it was specific, gave any specific indication about who were Christians. And so that made a big impact. And I knew that I wasn't a woman at 14 or 15. And I also found a passage that talked about a 12-year-old girl, meaning little girl. So that also gave me context that 12-year-olds were considered adults at that time, like some people were telling me.

So that's just kind of all, again, shaped my understanding of who was examples of who were becoming Christians and maybe who was intended to become Christians. And just thinking more about it as well, I could see that it was a very, very big commitment to choose to follow the Lord. And it's a commitment, a lifelong commitment, and even a bigger commitment than marriage. And I knew I was not ready for marriage at 14. There are many ways that I didn't want to be married at 14, but I was certainly ready at 14.

And so with all of those things and that wrestling with, again, my heart was to follow those examples as closely as possible and to honor the Lord in that way as well. I waited and I wrestled with that with when to become a Christian. And I may have waited too long, but again, my heart was to obey. And so I became a Christian. I was baptized at 19. And it was kind of strange with the churches of Christ that we were part of that unsettled a lot of people that I waited. And I'm not sure exactly what all the reasons for that was, but they were a little unsettled with me, but many were pretty upset with my dad for influencing me in that way.

And that came to play in some other areas. And that's actually a factor, definitely not the only factor, but with some of the next things I'll discuss, that my family and my parents needed to leave two churches in my teen years because people in those churches were being very divisive.

And that made a big impact on me. That was a very foundational, formational time in my teen years. And my dad tried to be a peacemaker in both of those churches and in both of those sad situations. And both the peacemaking and a few of his atypical views were not tolerated well.

And just very sad. But sadly, I think I swung to be too tolerant because of some of what I saw from the ugliness of these divisions that we experienced. The biggest things that I saw were people being unloving and divisive as they tried to hold the truths in the Bible.

And they wouldn't allow different views in several areas. It's a little hard to explain to someone in a short talk like this, what all was happening. But the biggest thing that I saw was people acting in a way that was very unloving. And that's never right. It's to act in an unloving way to others, especially brethren, even if it's in the name of clinging tightly to Bible truths.

But what I regret is that I think I became too tolerant of sin and also very tolerant of significant doctrinal differences out of reaction to those divisions. And that impacted my life, I think, for the next 20 years in the way that I interacted with churches.

And that'll come into play later as I talk more. But kind of moving on in my life, after I graduated from high school through homeschooling, my parents encouraged me to use my single years to focus on the Lord and to learn from older women and to serve others. And I'm grateful that they did that.

And my dad supported me financially so that I could do that, which was a huge blessing. And so this mindset of serving the Lord with extra focus during my single years, that mindset led me to South Africa for almost a year. And I lived with a Christian family that my parents had known for decades. And so I taught women and children the Bible there and created Bible correspondence courses and just various different things, helped in any way that I could there.

And my desire while I was there was to teach, especially that women and young women and children, the gospel and to strengthen them because they had so few opportunities to learn about the Bible, especially compared to the opportunities that I had growing up. And so I wanted to help bring them more opportunities and to show sisterly love to them, just build them up.

And then I came back to the States and I tried hard to focus on evangelism and service while I was living with my parents. And again, my dad wanted to continue to support me financially so that I could be free to serve the Lord in a different way than I can now with family responsibilities. So that was such a blessing that he did that. So during that time, I got a job where a friend worked. This was a friend that I knew from a church that we had been a part of. And she was not walking with the Lord. And so I was trying to, through this job, I was trying to have more time to be around her to hopefully win her back to the Lord.

That didn't wind up working, but that it was also a good opportunity to be around other coworkers and to seek to try to teach the gospel to them as well. And it was a blessing to me too, just to be in some very different circles than what I had grown up in.

And then I also, during the season, I took a Spanish class to try to make connections in the community for evangelism. And I also thought that learning Spanish would be helpful to hopefully teach the gospel to Spanish speakers in times to come. I should have kept going because I didn't know enough to really share the gospel very well from just one semester, but anyway. But I did continue to build on the Spanish skills through visiting a Spanish-speaking church and just seeking to get to know those brethren there and to support them and encourage them. And so all these opportunities, they were a blessing to me as well. Hopefully, it blessed others too, and they helped to stretch me.

And then I taught young women in various other settings through homeschooling connections and various other types of settings. And then after a little while, I traveled to Pennsylvania to reach out to a group of young ladies that I knew through homeschool and church settings.

And so that time in Pennsylvania brought me into contact with a David Brousseau book. And I did not read it. I think it's a little embarrassing now, but my dad read it. He picked it up and he just took off. He started buying David Brousseau's books by the box full and started passing them out and bought a bunch of CDs. And so we would go on family road trips and we would listen to the CDs and we would talk about the books. And it definitely brought up a lot of good Bible discussions and challenged a lot of things that we had accepted.

And I think that was really good. And it'll come back up again later in my story. I started changing a little bit through some of what we read and some of what we discussed in those books, but I didn't radically pursue changes at that time.

But one of the big things that his books helped me to see was that there were others with a similar understanding of some of the same Bible beliefs. And so that opened doors for where we are now spiritually. And so I didn't make a lot of changes then, but it helped for future.

And so just kind of moving along in that season of my life, again, I was in my early to mid-20s at this point. I took a semester-long missionary class. And it was more focused with an evangelical background, but it had some really good takeaways that have continued to impact me to this day.

They really emphasized how much God loves all the nations and that we should love all the nations and seek to reach out to them, whether it's here or whether it's abroad. And then just also love people enough to really reach out and teach them, teach them the gospel. And those are always things that I need to be spurred on and I want to continue to do to reach out more and be seeking others who are looking for the gospel.

And then I think largely because of that class, I befriended some international students there in our hometown in Arkansas and started trying to teach them about God and about the Bible. Most of them were Japanese.

And that was definitely a huge blessing to have time with them and to be just enjoying their friendship, but also seeking to help them to seek the Lord. And some of them did start seeking the Lord more. But in the middle of all that, I could also see I could have had a lot more time and probably would have gotten together with them more often if we had not lived so far out from them. We were out in the country and they were in a city about 20 to 25 minutes away. So it was doable for me to go in, but it just made it a lot more challenging to get to them very often.

And also during these years, I visited elderly people in nursing homes and tried to teach them about the Bible and also to just bless them and seek to befriend them. And visited many in our church to try to get to know them better and seek to help each other spiritually to grow.

And my parents, that was something my parents really emphasized as well, was growing closer to the brethren that we were in a church with and trying to strengthen each other in the Lord. And Jeff and I didn't marry until I was 28, approaching 29. And I struggled with being content while I was waiting to get married because I didn't meet Jeff until I was 25, 26. So there were a number of years where I just wondered, would I ever get married and what would my life look like? And would this single season be the rest of my life or would it be a short season? So I will freely admit that was a very challenging time for me because I definitely had a deep desire to marry and to raise children for the Lord.

But I also knew that I did not want to jump into marriage and settle and marry somebody that didn't really love the Lord because I'd seen more than one, but one woman in particular come to my mind that she married quickly because she was discontent and she had very great difficulties throughout her marriage and struggled with submission because her husband wanted her to raise two children, however, by worldly standards instead of God's. And I knew that I would not do well in that situation. And so I definitely wanted to wait and find a godly man to marry. And so very, very greatly blessed to find Jeff. And we met through a mutual friend, through our brother in the church fellowship that we were part of within the Churches of Christ.

And so, yeah, we knew each other about a year and a half before we even really started corresponding very much. And then we started corresponding and it was a little bit funny. I'm the oldest child in our family. And so I was the guinea pig.

And so Jeff started writing not just me, but he would write my dad and my mom and my family. So everybody could kind of see what he was emailing me, which was probably very strange for him. But thank the Lord, he was willing to go along with it. And so we eventually got to know each other better through a lot of emails and visits. And then we, after all those emails and visits, getting to know each other, we decided we were serious enough to start a courtship. And a courtship that was we were trying to be pure and so it was hands-off, so no touching each other. And I know there's a lot of different definitions of courtship, but what we were pursuing with courtship was trying to get to know each other very intentionally to see if we'd be a good fit for marriage.

And so we courted, I think, about six months. And then we were engaged about two and a half months before our wedding. And our wedding was at my parents' house as it was being built and on their property.

So, yeah, so we got married back in 2008. So, again, I was 28, almost 29. And we moved back to Dallas, Texas, where Jeff lived, and he had a job there. And we were part of a large church there. It was about 350 or 400 at that time.

And I'm very thankful. It was a very easy transition when Jeff and I got married in so many ways. And I think a big part of what made it an easy transition was there was a godly altar woman who has been my Titus II woman since then, that I go to her for advice about marriage or child rearing or just someone to care and to give me solid biblical counsel. So I'm so grateful that she was there and pouring into me and just spent a lot of time and gave a lot of care for me. So I'm very thankful for that. She also taught Bible study for a number of young women in that church.

I think it was for 20 years. So she really invested a lot in a lot of young women. So I guess I have aspirations to be like her, like Miss Michelle, as I get older, to seek to invest in young women the way that she invested in me and to be so caring.

So, again, this was in the Dallas, Texas area where we lived. And while we were there in Texas, we were in the Dallas area for about 10 years. And we faced some pretty significant challenges there, a lot of us do over our lifetimes.

And some of those were my dad got cancer. He was diagnosed when I was pregnant with our first child, with Dietrich. And then our first child was born, Dietrich, and he was in a NICU and had a number of pretty significant health challenges for the first few months. And at the same time, my sister was having some pretty significant health challenges. And Jeff had lost his job before our first child was born. So kind of all this was happening right around the same time. And that was pretty overwhelming for me at different points.

God did provide a great job for Jeff even while our son, Dietrich, was in the NICU. And God did give strength each step of the way.

But there were times when I felt like God had forgotten about us. And I regret that I felt that way. I know that's not true, but emotionally, I felt that way. And so those back-to-back struggles were very hard over several years. And I was the closest I'd ever been to walking away from my faith.

But I knew I couldn't do that. And I knew that would be very foolish. I didn't. But I think those experiences really helped me to see that it's very important to walk with others when they're going through really hard times.

There are a lot of scriptures, warnings in scriptures about enduring through hardships and continuing on and persevering. And I think some of those experiences helped me to see there's a good reason why those passages are there. And so I think that's a significant takeaway for me from that time period to reach out and really try to be supportive to others when they're going through hard times because it can be a temptation to turn away from okay.

And so after that time period, over the next few years, things were somewhat easier. My dad did pass away, and that was very hard. But again, God gave strength each day. And even while he and my mom were living with us away from their house in Arkansas, he would be moaning and crying out in pain. And that was very hard to see that. And our children were very little. I had Dietrich, and then 15 months later, our second child was born. So we had the children very close together, and the dad's cancer was pretty bad right along in all that time period. And so that was hard. But again, God gave strength for each day through that.

And that helped my faith to grow too, that God can help us through very difficult things, things that I had feared how I would handle it when my dad passed away. But he gave strength and just made me trust in the Lord even more and that I knew that my dad was no longer suffering and was so grateful. And it helped me to lean on my convictions and in my faith, hadn't by experiencing them.

So after that, it wasn't easier season in a lot of ways. It was still very busy. We had four children in just over five years. And in the middle of that, we moved to Arkansas to be closer to my family. And we built a house on my family's land.

And then COVID hit. And COVID, I know for all of us, probably shook a lot of things up. And I think the biggest thing for us during that time was our church started meeting just for very short periods of time once a week. And so we were really missing more spiritual interaction and fellowship. And that just made that very obvious to us. And just kind of felt like we were starving a little bit spiritually for fellowship. And so we offered studies and prayer groups and singings and all kinds of things. And sadly, there was very little interest from the people in our church. And it just kind of revealed things COVID kind of revealed things that were already there and helped us to see that we were on a very different path than what we desired to be on.

We felt like we had been pretty complacent and not really emphasizing spiritual things like we should have prior to that and that we weren't really reaching others for the Lord very much. So I'm grateful that COVID shook us up in those ways and helped us to reevaluate.

And then we also, for years, for decades, for me, I'd been concerned about quite a few things within the Churches of Christ. But I didn't really know where else to go or where else we would be better aligned or what to do with those thoughts. But with COVID, we definitely started thinking about things a lot harder. And we were, as I've mentioned, really longing for more fellowship. And then a friend that I met with during that time, she said, "Well, I know of a group that stays really close to one another and really is very close with fellowship." And that was Fathers of the Way. And so my husband and I just started devouring sermons.

We were so hungry. And through that, we started realizing there was a lot of areas of our lives that we had been lax and that we were not as holy or as diligent or using our time as well as we should be. And so I'm very thankful for that time to reevaluate and to examine our faith. And it did change us. So we were just very drawn.

One of the big things that we kept taking away as we were listening to those sermons was just the zeal and the love for the Lord through this Fathers of the Way. And that they were trying to live very strategically to use time and our energies in the best way possible. And I think one of the things, too, that was just very, very willing to me, they purposefully live close to each other in proximity. And that makes fellowship so much easier when you live very close to each other. And then not just close in proximity, but to also deepen those relationships through that and very intentionally doing a lot of things to make those relationships closer and deeper.

And one of those ways to do that, to live strategically, is to live in large cities so that we can be seen and be available to a lot of people who may be seeking God. And that's not the only way to do things, but I was drawn to that way of living, trying to live strategically to reach more people.

And so as we were listening to all these sermons and not just listening to the sermons, but opening our Bibles and examining and trying to see if our lives lined up with scriptures, we started changing a lot. I started wearing a head covering.

We took off our wedding bands and started not wearing any jewelry.

Jeff started leading us in family Bible studies every day. We started reaching out to others more, seeking to minister to them and help them to draw closer to the Lord.

I really had to work diligently on forgiveness. That was an area that had really become apparent in that season. And there's so many pastors that talk about how critical forgiveness is in our relationship with God, that if we don't forgive, we won't be forgiven. So I really had to work hard on forgiveness.

And then we also started changing as well on how we practiced communion. And so we chose to practice communion, close communion with those that we knew well as living holy lives and people that we had a good relationship with. And that was a pretty significant change.

And I'll go into that a little bit more later, some of the reasons for that. But we also changed quite a bit on our views of divorce and marriage. We changed some on modesty. I had been wearing pants.

I kind of went back and forth throughout my life between wearing skirts and wearing pants at different times, but realizing that that was not as modest and feminine as I thought the Bible was teaching. And so decided to wear skirts all the time and to also have our girls wear skirts, very long skirts, and for our boys and our men to be wearing pants. So all of these were areas that we were changing in over a year or two. And we chose to stop voting and not be involved in the government out of exclusive allegiance to God's kingdom. So that was, again, another significant change from a lot of people around us.

We eliminated secular music. We became stricter on standards for books, both for ourselves and for our children.

We studied quite a bit about non-resistance and non-violence. And I took my pepper spray off my keychain as a sign of that and as part of that. And we chose that we would not have guns in our house.

And another area that we were changing on was we weren't so desensitized to the extreme of modesty by many religious people, which sadly, I think we had become pretty desensitized, which, yeah, that's frequently what happens.

And then also, just as a church, we were seeing that we should have more emphasis on holiness as a church and to be accountable to one another and to be much closer to one another. And so that was a big part of our change, too, was seeing that there is a much higher level of commitment as members of the church together. And so that led us; that was leading us more and more away from the church, the Churches of Christ that we were a part of. And then, sadly, a sister was talking to me, and it was pretty apparent that there was a significant sin issue in her life. And I tried to help her in love to turn away from that.

And she did not respond at all well to that. And so she justified the sin, and the leadership justified the sin. And that sin issue just helped us to see a lot more clearly that we were going in very different directions from the church that we were a part of. And the picture that kept coming to my mind was, I believe it's 2 Corinthians 5, that talks about being unequally yoked. And if you think about cows or oxen trying to plow together, they're yoked together. If one's going to the left and one's going to the right, you're not going to get very far.

And so that made me think of that, that we were; that was kind of how we were with the church that we were part of. We were just going in opposite directions, and we were going to hinder one another instead of helping one another. And so we were moving more and more toward not being able to be a part of that church. And it helped us to stop and think about what is our mission as a church? Why do we come together as a church? And to the best of my knowledge, it's to help each other grow spiritually in the Lord, of course, to also reach out in the community. But as far as each other, it's to help each other grow spiritually.

And part of that is to overcome sin. And what we saw instead, sadly, was to justify each other to stay in sin. And so that seemed like that was not fulfilling. The purpose of coming together as a church was just to justify each other and encourage each other to stay in sin. We really need to try to help and strengthen each other to come out of sin. And that's true love, is to try to help each other in that way, not to be kind of soft on each other and allow each other to stay in that.

And I think through all of that as well, we realized that we had become very tolerant.

So I know there were other things that had come up over the years that we had not; we had just let sin issues go and had not loved people enough to reach out and to warn them. And I regret that.

And I think part of that was the church divisions that we had experienced when I was a teenager, that I reacted by swinging too far to becoming too tolerant. And I became too tolerant to significant doctrinal differences, to sin, and to being more like the world, which was not helpful.

And I felt like we had become very much like the frog in the pot, where the water's slowly heating up and the frog just eventually cooks because it doesn't know to get out of the water. And so we felt like we had become like that, being very desensitized as sin was creeping in more and more and more, and biblical values were being let go of more and more and more. And we felt like we really needed to jump up.

And again, I'm not wanting to condemn the people from the churches that we left, but we felt like we were going in very different directions. And we're very concerned about a number of issues. And I think I had mentioned earlier that communion was one of those areas. And that was one of the first things to change that I knew where this sister was that was living in unrepentant sin, unashamedly, and spreading the sin all over the church, and that I could not partake in communion with her anymore. And so that was one of the first things to change.

But then as we went on and tried to help, we felt like we really must separate from the church and leave it completely. We felt like it was an issue with similar serious consequences to 1 Corinthians 5, where the man had his father's wife and that Paul would leave them for allowing that sin to go on and to not address it. And so we felt like we had tried to bring it up, but it was not seen as an issue. So we felt like we just couldn't stay.

And then part of it, too, as we went on, Jeff and I, my husband and I both were realizing that through staying, we had been accepting a lot of things as normal that we don't believe the Bible teaches us to see as normal within a church.

We were seeing distant and cliquey relationships within the church, within many of the churches that we had been a part of in Churches of Christ. And that's not God. God wants us to be loving and caring and close to each one, not to have the in-crowd and the out-crowd within churches and people feeling like they don't belong and aren't cared for. So we saw that as a very significant problem. And we didn't want, again, we didn't want us or our children to see those things as normal.

We saw sin being tolerated as no big deal. We saw worldly values with dress, with materialism and family life. We saw people worshiping together like everything's fine, but underneath, there's a lot of gossip and unforgiveness and exclusion and things going on. And to just keep worshiping together when all those things are going on under the surface, we came to realize that should not be normal. That should not be something that we should just accept.

And we saw, sadly, a much greater emphasis on social events than spiritual ones, like baby showers or bridal showers, compared to Bible studies. Bridal showers would be attended much, much, much more than a Bible study or a prayer meeting.

And just kind of made us stop and think, "What's really important to us? Are we valuing spiritual things or are we valuing social things more?"

And there was also a mindset that we shouldn't need to make bigger sacrifices to serve God, specifically that we were considering. We were considering leaving my family, but leaving the area where my family lived and selling our house and moving. And many people thought that was just crazy, that you're becoming too extreme in your faith to consider that. And as we were studying more, we thought, "Jesus asked that of his disciples to leave their nets and to leave their families, at least for a time, and to deny self." And boxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. And so he said to his disciples, "Make big, big sacrifices at that time."

And we were coming to see that we had, I think we had kind of started believing in a more easy gospel that doesn't ask very much of us. And not that everybody needs to do that. I'm not saying that.

But that if there's a need for that, well, if there's a need for other significant changes and things that would be very hard for us, that we should be willing to, our commitment for God should we should be willing to give up anything and everything for the Lord. And so that was a big that was a big change. And again, something that we felt like we had that had become that easy gospel had become normal for us, and we did not want to see that as normal anymore.

And again, we wanted to use our lives for the Lord strategically. And we felt like we weren't doing that very well where we were there in Arkansas. We did not know of other families that were going in the same direction. And so we felt like we needed to we needed to be a part of a church. So that's God's design, is to be a part of the church. And so that's what was motivating us to go ahead and sell and move to Boston because we felt like we were much, much better aligned with the Followers of the Light group here.

And so we continued to visit Boston and continued to examine the Bible, examine the scripture, and examine our beliefs. And so yeah, over that two to three years, we went ahead and decided for sure that the best we thought the best course for us to have a church that we'd be aligned with would be to sell our house and move to Boston.

And we felt like this would be really helpful for our growth spiritually, and it would provide a lot of opportunities to serve, and that there would be a lot of values that we wanted our children to catch and many other children to encourage our children in that. And that has been the case many times. We're very grateful for that, for both all children and for all the adults. We've been very grateful.

And again, I definitely want to be clear that I'm not wanting to condemn Churches of Christ, but we were going in dramatically different directions. And so we left, and we were on our own for quite a while. And again, we knew that that was not God's plan to be on our own for an extended period of time. But it was just while we were getting things it took a long time to sell our house and just getting everything wrapped up. It took a while to be able to finally move up here.

And in the meantime, there was a group of ladies that I started pouring into, which was very helpful to me too. It was a group of ladies from a drug rehab program not too far from us. And so I would go and teach them the Bible and befriend them. And again, I think that was a huge blessing for me to have that avenue to pour into them. And I hope it was a blessing to them that I was seeking to pour into them.

And so yeah, about a year ago, we finally got up here to Boston after a two to three-year process of trying to come up. And people up here are still people. They have weaknesses and challenges, just like all people have. But it's really been very, very good, and we're very grateful.