By Van Mylar for CHRISTIAN DAILY INTERNATIONAL
I was scrolling through Apple News before bed when I saw the headline. My body registered it before my mind did: disbelief, then denial. I read the first paragraph and couldn’t read another word. I put my phone down.
But I couldn’t let it go. I opened the article again and read every word. Then came the numbingly familiar cycle: betrayal, anger and that weary thought (not another one). One of my favorite Christian authors, whose books shaped my faith as a young believer and guided me for decades, a man I thought was above reproach, had confessed to a years-long affair after 55 years of marriage.
Several days later, during morning devotions, my heart shifted. Anger gave way to something softer: compassion, grief. For all of them (him, his wife, his family, the other woman and hers).
That heart shift is why I’m writing this. Why do we keep losing ministry leaders we believed were invincible?
We count everything about ministry leaders except what matters most. Attendance, engagement, book sales: the metrics pile up, but no dashboard tracks the state of a soul. Faithfulness gets confused with productivity. Yet Jesus insisted that lasting fruit flows only from abiding, not performing.
