Disappointment with Philip Yancey

Earlier this year, it was announced that Philip Yancey, popular and successful Christian author, had confessed to a long term affair and was stepping away from public ministry.  

Not only was he given much grief over his confession, but was also accused by some of just trying to make sure his wife didn't leave him since he'd been recently diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.

Here was the guy who wrote the very impactful book, "Disappointment with God", many years back, and now many people were experiencing great disappointment with Philip Yancey.  The online reaction was surprisingly brutal.

_______________

It's a hard thing to be disappointed.  It does something to you.  I remember other popular authors or influencers over the years having a public fall from grace and the weird times when you'd later want to quote them or refer to one of their previous works and, all of a sudden, you felt like you either could not use them anymore or had to qualify what you were saying in some odd way.

It's interesting how we handle people who mess up. It often is shaped by who knows, what they mess up was, how they responded when confronted or whether they came forward on their own, etc.

When I was growing up, people would "go forward" during the invitation song or altar call near the end of services and, very quickly, people began wondering, "What did they do?  I wonder if it was an affair..." or things like that.

Gossip spreads quickly.  Gossip is the attempt to figure out what's going on by sharing bits of info you've heard and possibly adding your own information or theories to it.  And that's the "good intentioned" version of gossip.  Usually it's not so generous.

Because we have social media, we have access to a flood of information and, unless we take a great deal of time to explore and validate it, we have a hard time of knowing if it's real, valid, or reliable.

And it doesn't take a lot of motivation for a lot of people on social media just to make something up and present it as truth.  There are people who spend their days doing just that.

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If you read through the Bible with an eye for all the people there and what they did at different times, Philip Yancey looks like an Eagle Scout by comparison.

A quick skim through Hebrews 11 - where the "heroes of faith" are listed - it can give you a short list of names of people whose faith stood out and who were said to be looking for a country of their own - a heavenly country.  Therefore, God was not ashamed to be called their God.

Some of them were people who messed up royally.  Really bad.

And yet God was not ashamed to be called their God.

If they lived today, IF people knew about them, they'd be the subject of some pretty awful social media posts and opinions.

So it's good to remember that God doesn't respond like we do to people's gossip or the bad choices that people make.

While we might be disappointed, God is not unaware or ashamed of us.

Peace and goodwill.

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