The Summation of the Life & Times of Wilson Hines

...Part Deux

The Retreat

Don't you just love the English language. The title "The Retreat" could be taken at least two ways:

• To pull back and get out.
• To take a vacation.

I mean both.

We went to Gaylord, MI in 2001 with the intent on finishing our education, raising a family and hopefully one day getting on the faculty at the church and college, while raising a family in a fantastic winter wonderland with a summer as cool as the spring time in most places.

That last paragraph was the truth, if I have ever told the truth. The trick was I was extremely naive.

It was a Retreat for us as a family. We really fit in well, or at least my wife fit in well. Due to some missteps, it took me about two months to find a job and when I did find a job I found a fantastic one. I was working for a company out of Indianapolis, IN as a regional salesmen that served Ford dealerships throughout the lower peninsula of Northern Michigan. I would leave everyday around 7:30 in the morning and I was back at the house on some days as early as 1:00 PM and some days as late as 6:00 PM - it all balanced out.

The pay was not only sufficient, it was great. We bought a nice home that had 1,500 sq ft finished and 1,500 sq ft unfinished on a four acre spot out in the country. We actually lived at the highest spot in the lower peninsula of Michigan; thus, we got the most snowfall in the state. When Gaylord got six inches of snow, we got eight or ten. When Traverse City got six we got fourteen. The snow came almost every day from around Christmas time to the end of April. It was gorgeous. I even had to buy a pickup truck with a 8' Western snow plow on the front to manage the 300' driveway. When Anna was born a major snowstorm came in and on the day we took her home everybody had to wait in the car for several minutes while I dug our way back into the house. The snow was a serious thing to deal with and with the help of our neighbors (thanks Grumpy and the Cooks) and friends we learned how to deal with it all. Lets just say we were frequent browsers and customers of L.L Bean! Blue Jeans with flannel liners were common! I had a black lined Carhart set of outerwear that would make you sweat sitting on a stump in the woods in -15 degree temperature. As far as "church clothes," you learned quickly that the Johnson and Murphy's Wingtips of which I was so proud of wouldn't make the cut for almost five months to the year. I found myself wearing some nice cowboy boots that were water proof. We got prepared!

Church in Gaylord was fantastic. I think Pastor Jenkins was really trying to bring the church back to a theological ideology of the mid to the late 19th century. And over all, I agreed and still agree with that philosophy; yet, he would pick and choose what he wanted to take from the era. The church sponsored a Camp Meeting which was in the spirit of the old Billy Sunday meetings of the early 20th century. They even had a couple of "prayer benches" from the original Sunday meetings. I was all for it and enjoyed attending and participating. Some of the best preaching I've ever heard was under that tent.

Where The Retreat of abandonment comes in after two and a half years. I had been running a bus route for a bit over a year and a half. I was burned out and to be quite frank about it I thought that somebody else would have better success and therefore would have a better chance at impacting a child's life for Christ. It was a 50/50 opportunity, in my mind. I get away from the bus ministry (my flesh) and my spirit knew that the full potential of the route wasn't being taken advantage of, thus possibly souls were in danger.

I phoned the pastor who was in charge of the bus ministry and asked to be taken off the route. In a time when good people who would show up and work were hard to find, he was reluctant to "let go" so quickly. I will confess there were other issues, as well. And to be honest, I don't even remember what those issues were. That is how petty the issues were. Suffice it to say, I was ticked about some "personal issues" with the Pastor and a few other details. I had lost confidence in Pastor Jenkins and some of the staff; I do remember that much. I didn't want to explain these issues to him on the phone, or really at all. Because of the reluctance of the assistant pastor to let us out of the bus route and because of my reluctance to spell out my problems - I didn't want to start anything - he pressed me harder and harder asking for details on what the reasons were for me wanting to step down.

All of a sudden, I let those details loose. That was a grave error. Without my knowledge Pastor Jenkins was in the office with the associate pastor and the speaker phone was turned "on." Eventually, at some point, Pastor Jenkins stepped in and turned me inside out and said something I'll never forget: "Brother Wilson, you've got a bad attitude." I have never forgotten that, and it was really the truth. But, so did he. I lost all confidence in them, and in me, really. I was embarrassed. I couldn't go to church there anymore, in my mind. I didn't know what to do. I made a big mistake: I didn't communicate with my wife. She felt the same way I did, but I didn't think she did. She was highly involved and stayed involved in different ministries. I fully withdrew. I stopped even going to church just so I wouldn't have to deal with the Pastor. It was stupid.

I spent about four months of not going to church and my wife, years later, and I were talking about this and she told me "You know, we could have gone to Petoskey to church." I felt like an idiot because I was thinking this the whole time I was sitting at the house, but I was afraid to bring the idea up to her. The moral of that story is this: Men, communicate with your wife and take the initiative. At Petoskey, about 25 miles away, was a good small hometown church named Landmark Baptist. Over the years, more and more people find there way to Landmark from Grace for one reason or another.

Time heals all wounds and time also shows the truth. "Hindsight is 20/20" is a very true old saying. In all retrospect, I don't regret leaving the church, but I regret leaving the way I did. I am no longer mad at anybody and truthfully, my anger was unnecessary. If the associate pastor and the pastor would have handled the phone call (the whole "speaker phone business") differently, I would have never been angry at all). I believe in my whole heart there were things about the church management that were being handled wrong and were resulting in a very bad testimony in the community. At the very tip of all of that, the cherry on the top of the management issues could be spelled out with these words: You shouldn't have a deacon in the church working on the staff as the full time accountant, even part time. It simply is "an appearance of evil" - I Thess 5.22. Even if nothing ever is "fishy," the act in and of itself is fishy. In another instance the church couldn't pay it's heating gas bill and were having emergency offerings to pay the bill, and just weeks or days before were announcing plans (and fund drives) to build multi-million dollar buildings - that were never built. Things like this drove me mad, but the people there were so comfortable with things it was spooky.

The "institute" (the night college) was so poorly put together it achingly hurt. After I got a job and the semester started, within a couple months of us moving there, we enrolled in the institute. I went to four nights of classes and on the fourth night the teacher (Difilipantanio) didn't show up, unexpectedly, and left us with a test, not a quiz. Nobody in the room was prepared, at all. I looked at the test and realized that there were several things on the test that we hadn't even ever been over. I just got up and walked out. It was useless. I never returned, either. During the classes, I think it best to say that the teachers, all of my teachers were church staff members, just preached through outlines of the Bible. I took a class on Romans and that was all it was, a man preaching through the book of Romans expositionally The whole program was administered in such a way. I can honestly say, the only good programs were for the ladies which were geared to teach them what Christian ladies were all about. They were more "talks" and prescribed reading by some of the older ladies than anything else. My wife enjoyed those classes, especially by Mrs. Jenkins, the pastor's wife.

This was a church with a Christian school with such deficiency in their education of students that I personally knew a couple of seniors that couldn't read and write. They were functionally illiterate. I don't think this was the entire fault of the school and the teachers, as the parents were that great on the educational front, themselves. But, the school should have seen that aspect and taken up the slack. Another fine example of weird financial practices was they would hire teachers with an emphasis on trying to hire married couples. They would pay the husband a "bread winners" salary (which was by all accounts flat out poverty, somewhere around $15,000) and then only give the wife a token to work - something in the range of less than $8,000.

This church, with this Christian School, a church that couldn't pay the bills, with all of its deficiencies - and there were many more than these - wanted to start a full blown college. How?

We couldn't figure it out, either. Was it the providence of God that I was laid off of work almost simultaneously? I would say not. After a short spell of looking around for work and finding none that could support my family and bills, we decided to sell the house and move back to North Carolina three years after we had left. We had a child, Anna, and our parents were ready for us to come home, as well. I made one single phone call and the house was sold for the asking price - just like that. God is amazing.

We moved back home and I was back trucking in the family business. Want to know the weird thing about it? I was driving back and forth from Rose Hill, NC to Grand Rapids, MI every single week. That is weird. The search for a church to attend came up front on the to-do list. I didn't want to go back to Unity.

More to come, including the transformation of my views on the King James Bible...