PUFFED AND SQUASHED 

A man was having serious financial difficulties after retiring. He had served a company for over forty years of his life and in that time he had managed to raise a family. Just as he was about to turn sixty, he was retired. His retirement benefit was paid to him, and a proper farewell was organized by the company, where he was given a deep freezer as a parting gift. He had three children, and the first child had just gained admission into the university, his severance pay was a healthy sum but it was meant to be invested. If he spent it, his family would be in abject poverty within three years. The problem was, having worked in the factory as a supervisor all his life, he knew nothing about investments and he had heard a lot of sad stories about recent retirees rushing to invest in businesses without proper counseling and losing all their money within a year. Even though the man was not a Christian, his house was located very close to a church, the church was quite big and popular, and the pastor was also someone from his village. He had heard about the church and the pastor from many people but he had never attended the church and he had never introduced himself to the pastor. He had no other person to turn to for counsel, he discussed the options he had with his wife and yet they couldn’t find a solution to how they would pay their bills going forward especially with the children’s university education staring them in the face. He really wanted his children to be well educated, they were bright, and they deserved to be properly equipped to do well in life. He has also his rent to contend with as he never got to own a house before he retired, the future looked very bleak. The next morning, he dressed up and went to church.
 During the service, he indicated that he was a first-timer and also indicated that he needed counsel. After the service, he was ushered into the pastor’s office. The pastor received him well and asked him what he would like to be counseled on, he told the pastor about his predicament. The pastor listened to him attentively and told him about a thrift and cooperative society he was about to establish. The pastor told him to pray about becoming an investor in the project, the man said he didn’t need to pray even though he didn’t know the pastor that well and he had never really been a believer before that day, he trusted in the pastor’s reputation and committed himself to the financial project. He gave all his gratuity to the pastor and the pastor invested the money.

 Every month he got a certain amount that was equal to the salary he was earning while he was still working. His investment remained intact and he could apply for loans to fund his children’s education with the repayment taken out of his “salary monthly” with very minimal interest. It was a very sweet deal that allowed him to use the time on his hands to do other things so that he earned extra income to cover the shortfall in income. Whenever he took a loan, He and his family joined the church and they quickly became very fervent members. The pastor had proven beyond anything that he was a man of integrity and great wisdom, this man loved the pastor with all his heart and he became one of the most dedicated members within the first year of his joining the church.
 A year later, the pastor’s wife suddenly decided she wanted to further her studies abroad. The pastor was caught off guard by the decision. His wife has an elder sister in Ghana who was very close to her. The pastor went to Ghana to meet with his wife’s elder sister and asked her to intervene in the matter. The pastor said his wife had not worked for many years as she was a full housewife and he had made sure she lacked nothing, of what use is a foreign degree to a forty-five-year-old woman who has no previous work experience. The wife’s elder sister told the pastor that it was the decision of the family that their daughter must get a job and stop being dependent on her husband for sustenance .“We want her to study nursing, settle abroad and work. Whatever money you are giving her is not enough to meet the needs of the family at large. She will earn in dollars and that way she will be able to stand on her two feet. That way she will secure her future. 
She is from another country and if anything happens to you, your family may throw her out empty-handed. It is not too late for our daughter to start making a living on her own.” It was a shock to the pastor. They had two children and the two children were already in senior secondary school. He was a good provider and had ensured that his wife lacked nothing. The children had gone off to the boarding school and it seemed to him that his wife was just idle or bored. He promised to register a company for his wife and set her up in business, but his wife said no.

 A month later, his wife told him she had secured admission to a University in America and would be leaving in a few days. He had no option at that point but to rally around and support her financially as much as he could with promises of visiting as often as he could. He knew the marriage was over, his wife didn’t say so but her attitude and body language was very evident. His wife went off to the USA when he was forty-eight years old. It was a very trying time for the pastor, he needed a lot of counsel and support and the only elderly man around him who he had also taken as an older brother was this retiree who had joined his church just a few months before then he had always kept his family affairs private but he felt safe with this man from his hometown. He was left in Nigeria with a seventeen-year-old daughter and a fifteen-year-old son.

 A year after his wife left, the pastor traveled to the USA to visit his wife. When he got to her campus, he found her cohabiting with another man unrepentantly. She told him he shouldn’t have come as that chapter of her life was over. The pastor returned home and shared everything he experienced with this elderly man. The man consoled him and counseled the pastor to focus on his children and his ministry. The pastor was very grateful. The man had a very good shoulder for the pastor to cry on in that season of crisis. A few months later, the pastor ordained the elderly man as a pastor in the ministry. In his assessment, the man had a good head on his shoulder, he was elderly, he had a passionate love for his wife and family, he was financially stable and he had conducted himself above reproach in the time the pastor had known him. Around the time of ordination, some members who were close to the pastor’s wife had tried to call her to check up on her and they had gotten the feedback that all was not well with the pastor’s marriage. The pastor’s wife didn’t want them calling her or being in her business, so she told those who called that she was no longer married to their pastor and that they should stop reaching out to her. A rumor mill began to turn in the church. Some of the other pastors and ministers decided they needed to inform the pastor of what they were hearing among the congregation. They, however, didn’t feel the pastor would take kindly to their meddling and discuss their concerns with the elderly man, who they had noticed had a very special bond with the pastor. The pastor, at this point, had no option but to disclose to the church the developments around his marriage.
After informing the church of this development, he told them he had made arrangements to resign as the pastor and hand over the reins of the church to one of the senior pastors of the same church who had been pastoring another branch of the church. The church members protested, they said they wanted their pastor to continue his work because the marital crisis he found himself in was not of his making. The elderly man was right at the center of this support for the pastor, he ensured that every dissenting voice met with reasonable responses. He proved himself to be a very astute crisis manager. The whole church noticed it, it was as if God sent the man to that church so that he could help the pastor navigate that season of upheaval. What the pastor thought would be the end of his ministry became a fresh start for him and his children. He survived a hurdle that he knew destroyed the ministry of many others who faced the same challenge before him. The ministry stabilized after this and even began to grow in leaps and bounds. The pastor established branches of the ministry in the UK and the USA a year after the crisis, the church dedicated three new buildings in three country capitals in Africa.

 One Sunday, the pastor returned to the church with his new wife, a South African. The announcement was shocking to the church because none of them knew he was dating again, however, they all welcomed the development with joy. Two weeks later, it was revealed that many ladies who were hoping to marry the pastor had identified this elderly retiree as the key to the pastor’s heart and had heavily invested in him and his family to help them convince the pastor to marry them. One of the ladies who had high hopes of being chosen by the pastor made an issue of it, and others came forward demanding that all the financial gifts and incentives they gave this elderly man, his wife, and his children must be returned to them. It was a scandal that stank to the high heavens. The pastor had no option but to suspend this elderly man with immediate effect. The total amount of money money that was collected was in the excess of forty million Naira. The total number of ladies he “defrauded” was twelve. All of them had given this man gifts due to the influence they believed he had over the pastor and his assurance that he would convince the pastor to marry them. 

After his suspension, he was removed from the board of the Cooperative and Thrift Society which led him to join the church. He sold everything he had acquired and emptied his bank accounts to refund the people he defrauded. At the end of the day, he was back to square one. The only progress he had which could not be reversed was the education of his first child. By the time this problem surfaced, that first child was in her third year in school. This challenge was why the man came to see me in my office, he needed to pay the daughter’s school fees that would cover her final year. He said he had invested the cash he got back from the cooperative society in a banana plantation business, but unfortunately, he lost all his money. He said he regretted getting involved in church issues and politics, if he had only stayed on course and minded his business, he would still be in that church and his investment would still be intact while his needs would be met. He said he didn’t ask the ladies for anything, members including elders and pastors of the church just started turning up in his house to see him and his wife and they began discussing church issues with him. He said he didn’t know what was going on until they began to bring issues to him to discuss with the pastor because the pastor listens to him. Before long they began bringing gifts and giving him envelopes full of money just to say thank you for helping them resolve issues. He didn’t know that they were just using him as a cannon fodder. I explained to him that it was not entirely his fault, he didn’t grow up in church, so he didn’t understand how church politics works. He was also ordained too soon based on the wrong criteria.

Morality and age have nothing to do with spiritual maturity. He shouldn’t have been ordained and given such a prominent space in the eyes of the people based on the fact that he and the pastor came from the same village. Spiritual authority has nothing to do with blood ties. An ordained minister must not be a new convert, if he is, the ordination may bring to him certain responsibilities which he would then use worldly wisdom to handle because that is all he knows, and as a result of this, he would fall into error simply for trying.If he had been in the Lord for some time, his orientation would have changed and this would have helped his decision-making.

 PS: I remember a very well-known Minister of the Gospel whose wife died some years ago. Six months after the wife died, he remarried. Some people all over Twitter started writing threads protesting that the man remarried too soon, how is that their business? Death had parted them; the living must, however, live on. People love majoring in the minor. One of the members of the ministry led by this man met with me on a flight and started talking about the scandal of it all, I asked him three questions. When you joined the ministry, was it to monitor his marriage? Were you at any point appointed to be the judge over how this man conducts himself after the death of his wife? Before, during, and after the remarriage process, did the Lord ask you to leave the man’s ministry? His reply to all three questions was No. How then did the man’s business become the major discussion you are having with me? I prefer to discuss the gospel, establish the new life reality, and prove the efficacy of Zoe over the Bios reality. People should learn to keep themselves out of the personal business of others. Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. 2 Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full[a] respect. 5 (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. 7 He must also have a good reputation with outsiders so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap. 1 Timothy 3.
-GSW-