Remembering God’s Faithfulness When Hurt By The Church

Note: This is a rough transcript and may contain some misspellings.

Julie Roys:  

I’ve found in the past few years I’ve had to remember because when you see the kind of abuse and corruption and the very thing that you’ve given your life to, that you believe in so much, it’s meant so much to your family. It’s meant so much to you. And when you see people representing the Jesus you love and doing it so poorly, it really does a number on you.

And it took me several years of wrestling through. And as Melissa said, we don’t ever arrive, right? I have days, right? We all have days. But God has been faithful and remembering these stories of how God has worked in my family’s history, but also in my life. ’cause there’s no spiritual grandchildren, right?

So if I didn’t have some experiences with Jesus, I wouldn’t be here right now.

On March 23rd, 1898. A boy was born in Barnes Bureau, Pennsylvania to a physician’s family, and his father at one time had been a leader in the community, but at this point his father had taken to the bottle and he was drinking regularly. He was a full-blown, a alcoholic at this point, and this boy who is my maternal grandfather was physically abused.

Verbally abused in that home. He was so neglected that, and I know this is hard to believe, but I swear this was the story that’s been handed down and my grandfather swore it was true. He was never named, his parents didn’t name him, and so they called him boy. Some of the local townspeople called him guy, but for eight years he had no name.

You can imagine what that does to a boy psychologically.

But my grandpa had some chutzpah and when he was eight years old, he decided to name himself and he named himself Sim i Socrates McMillan Sim because that was his initials. And I, Socrates, we have absolutely no idea, but this is why you don’t allow eight year olds to name themselves.

He had an older sister, we called her Aunt Anita. And his older sister when she was 17, and she was abused in the home as well, but she, when she was 17, she went to a Wesleyan camp meeting, and at this Wesleyan camp meeting, she met the Lord and she came home and announced to her father that she had become a Christian.

And he was furious and he tried to dissuade my Aunt Anita from her faith, but she was resolute. In fact, she loved the Lord so much and was so transformed by what had happened to her that she decided she wanted to go train to be a pastor, because Wesleyans were actually ordaining women at that point.

And she said, I’m gonna go to Faulkner, New York, and there I’m going to get ordained as a pastor. And my grandfather said to her, if you go to Faulkner, New York and you die up there, let them bury you because you’ll never be welcome in this house again. And my aunt a left and she became a pastor. My great-grandfather got cirrhosis of the liver, and then he got two strokes, and at age 55, he was no longer able to practice medicine.

He lost his house and he was destitute. He had no way of supporting himself, and so ironically, he moved in with. His daughter, he had kicked out of the house and she cared for him in the parsonage of the church till he died of a massive stroke. And it was during these years that my grandpa went and heard an Anita preach repeatedly at these camp meetings, and he met the Lord and he was transformed.

And my grandfather went to teacher training school, he became a teacher. He saved up his money. So his last two years, he was able to go to the University of Chicago and he graduated and then he he applied to three medical schools. This is a guy who wasn’t even named. He should have been a statistic.

He probably should have become a drunk like his dad, but God changed him. He apparently got into all three Harvard, Johns Hopkins. University of Pennsylvania, but he went to University of Pennsylvania because they had a program where at the end of your first year you would take a science exam and the top two scores on that science exam would get a free ride for the rest of the time in medical school.

And sure enough, my Grandpa Sim i Socrates, McMillan. Got a full ride for the rest of his time in medical school. He met my grandmother, Alice Jean Hampi. She was the daughter of Wesleyan Pastors, one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met in my life. Even when she was very old and she was, had lost her faculties.

It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen for the evidence of God, because she had nothing up here, but sometimes she would say, Julie, would you pray with me? And I would sit to pray with her and she would come alive, like she had no dimension or anything. She would quote entire passages of scripture.

And when she would sing, even though her voice was frail, her entire spirit would light up. And my mother used to say, everybody called my grandma a saint. And she said, and I lived with her and I couldn’t argue with them. I said, I had a wonderful heritage, my grandfather. When he married my grandmother, they decided they wanted to go on Wesleyan’s Mi Wesleyan missions.

And so after a year in London training in tropical medicine, he went with my grandmother. They were the first Wesleyan missionaries to Sierra Leone, west Africa. And when they were there for 12 years. My grandfather oversaw the building of comic hospital. Qua Hospital is still functioning.

In fact, in 2014 when there was an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leon and West Africa, it was Kaku that became like the hub for so many in that whole entire area who had Ebola were treated there at Ka Qua Hospital. In fact, when I happened to be in Ghana, west Africa with Moody Radio many years ago, I ran into a missionary there and I, he said something about comma queen.

I’m like, comma queen. That my grandfather was a part of that building here. He was the first white child, born at Comico Hospital, career missionary, spent his entire life in Africa. Beautiful guy, just a small world, but their real, they loved being on the mission field and my grandmother taught bible when they were there, but their one real sadness is that all throughout their twenties, all throughout their thirties, my grandmother was barren and she couldn’t have children.

Until she was 40 years old and she got pregnant with my mother, and my grandfather immediately wanted to take her back to the States. Then you did it. It was on a ship, it’d be like a couple week trip. And so they went back and he found, he looked up the best O-B-G-Y-N in the country. That person lived, apparently practiced in Toledo, Ohio.

So my mother was born in Toledo, Ohio. And then when she was an infant still, and it was dangerous back here, we’re talking like 1934. The thought of taking an infant back to Africa just wasn’t thought of, nothing to do, but they got on the ship and they went back to Africa and they served there till the outbreak of World War ii.

And when World War II broke out, they actually got on one of the I think it was from the story that’s told, it was the last ship. That was heading back out of there. And, the Germans came down into North Africa and there’s more to that story, but we don’t really have time for it.

But they got away because they were looking for, I guess on the ship for a physician. And so he was able to get the family on the ship and they came back to the United States. They settled in Houghton, New York, which is a Wesleyan college. And they lived there the rest of their life. Grandpa was the college physician.

My grandmother was a Bible professor, because women could do that in the Wesleyan Church. And she was a dean of women. And my grandfather also when he was there, some of you who are as older or older than me, really older than me, which there probably aren’t a whole lot. But he wrote a book called None of These Diseases.

Yes, thank you, sir. But it sold like 6 million copies, which was, it is a lot today. It was a lot back then too. But he was just an amazing grandpa. I loved him. He was warm, he was loving and he loved Jesus. And he had a really quick wit and he was just wonderful. And I, now knowing what I know about psychology and everything that happened, like how did that happen?

How did a boy that was that abused, that neglected. End up like that and he broke. He broke the legacy that we would’ve had. And can you imagine? And so I tell that story because we’re about to have engage in a sacrament of remembrance, of remembering what Christ did for us. But I found in the past few years, I’ve had to remember.

Because when you see the kind of abuse and corruption and the very thing that you’ve given your life to, that you believe in so much that’s meant so much to your family, this meant so much to you. And when you see people representing the Jesus you love and doing it so poorly, it really does a number on you.

And it took me several years of wrestling through. And as Melissa said, we don’t ever arrive, right? I have days, right? We all have days. But God has been faithful and remembering these stories of how God has worked in my family’s history, but also in my life because there’s no spiritual grandchildren, right?

So if I didn’t have some experiences with Jesus, I wouldn’t be here right now. And I’ve had a lot of ’em. But one I just wanna recount for you was when I was in college and I had a great home, I had nothing to complain about. I had great parents, not perfect. We had our stuff just like everybody else, but they were good godly parents.

But I went off to Wheaton College and right before. I think part of my struggle happened to be just that I went from being a big fish in a little pond. We in a small town in Pennsylvania I grew up in, everybody knew me, they knew my family, they knew my brother and sisters, and then I went to Wheaton and I just felt anonymous.

I just didn’t really know who I was, apart from that, because I’d never had that before. And then. I had done a lot of sports in high school and that was my thing. Basketball was my sport and I went to Wheaton and back then, honestly my high school team was better than the college team and it was just painful.

And so I just didn’t even play that first year because it was just too painful. And then I had a very mediocre career at Wheaton for two years, and then I didn’t play my senior year anyway. Who cares? But the point is. That really caused me to struggle because these things that have been so important to me now were ripped away.

But the biggest thing was, is that right before I went to Wheaton, the summer before, I had met these two crazy charismatics from Oral Roberts University, and everybody in my town thought they were a little weird. I was actually incredibly drawn to them. because they loved Jesus and they had this intimacy with Jesus that I wanted.

And I found out that when they had first moved to Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, this little small town that apparently my dad had some impact on Greg, it was Greg and Nina, this couple, and my dad had impacted them in some way. And I don’t even know how exactly, but I just remember Greg saying I didn’t know what I could do for Dr.

Stern, but I figured I could pray for his kids. This man prayed for me for 12 years. For 12 years, and right before I left for college, he and his wife discipled me. And I just remember spending time with Jesus together with a group of other students, and he would pull out a guitar and we would worship, and it would seem like 10 minutes and three hours had gone by.

God showed up in such a real and personal way, and I had charismatic experiences, whether you like that or not, spoke in tongues. The whole nine yards. Took me a while to put that together with the fact that my parents didn’t speak in tongues, but they were a lot more mature than me. But it was an amazing experience.

And then I went to Wheaton College and charismatic was a dirty word, and it was social suicide to admit that you had been charismatic at all. And so I sucked that down and I picked up that the way to be respected spiritually was to study your Bible. And so I studied and I studied.

In fact, I got up one semester I remember because God started to feel so far away and so distant. And I couldn’t grasp him anymore. I couldn’t feel him. It was just gone. And I began thinking to myself that maybe that everything, that experience I’d had in high school, everything else, like that’s youthful, infatuation.

It wasn’t real. And now that I was mature, it was gone and it was just not real. And so I was so sad and desperate. I got up one semester every day at five o’clock, and I would study the Bible for an hour, and it got worse. And the more I tried, the further God seemed, and I got really depressed.

But in our family, it wasn’t okay to be depressed, or I should say I felt depressed, but I felt really depressed. And I remember ducking into a bathroom four and five times a day and crying. But again, I was so ashamed of being, of feeling that way because we’re supposed to be happy Christians. And so I’d wipe my face off and I would come out and try to look like I wasn’t crying, but I was so miserable and faking it was so hard, and I was really falling apart inside.

But my way of dealing with falling apart is to achieve stuff. So I studied really hard and got all As. And it really fulfilled, no, it didn’t fulfill me at all,

but at least I did as well as my older sister. And that was important to me. But I was so sad. And in the middle of this, Neil and I got married, so he’s been through a lot and he’s always stuck with me. But in the midst of this, I went to, of all places Willow Creek Community Church. It was the summer after I graduated from high from college.

I’m totally miserable and I’m thinking at this point I can’t like renounce my faith because there’d be so much family pressure, they would bug me like crazy. So I knew I couldn’t do that, but I just thought inside I could shift and I could start looking for, fulfill for fulfillment somewhere else because I was so empty inside.

And yet there was part of me in the back knowing that nothing else would fulfill me. Like I had been I was just so miserable ’cause there was just nothing else. And I knew that, but I thought maybe I can try something. And so we’re at Willow Creek Community Church and they’re singing of all things how great is I faithfulness, which you, they hardly ever sing hymns, which is interesting and all of a sudden, and I didn’t have language for it, but I do now, and I just know the Holy Spirit fell on me.

And I cried, and there’s some churches where it’s okay to do that. Willow Creek is not one of them. But I didn’t care. I just didn’t care because I knew that presence. It was unmistakable. I had felt it before. I knew who it was, and I knew he was with me, and I have no idea why. I went through four years of horrible depression.

It was supposed to be the happiest days of your life, right? Those college days. Mine were hellish, absolutely hellish, but I knew he was real in that moment, and I knew that I couldn’t live without him. That’s what I knew, and that’s what I’ve held onto. And I’ve never been depressed again. That depressed.

Depressed, like I’ve been depressed. But it’s different when it’s a state of being that stays with you. I just tell you that because I’m guessing as I’m saying it, some of you are nodding because you know that you have met Jesus in that way. You have known Jesus in that way, and so I invite you as we come to the table, as we do this in remembrance of him to remember his faithfulness to you.

And if you’ve never felt that. You’ve never known Jesus in that way, and it’s only been a system that you were a part of and a system that chewed you up and spit you out. I just want you to know not only did Jesus not die for systems, he died for people. Jesus is not a system. He is a person. He is God, and he wants to meet with us personally.

Thanks so much for listening to this session of Restore 2025. As a lot of conferences charge for resources like these, but we’ve decided to make them available for free because we don’t want money to stand in the way of ministry. That said, these do cost money to produce, and we also feel God calling us to expand our ministry and our production of resources.

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