Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (James 1:27)
We had a guy in the Lamb of God Community named Steve. He was a merry prankster who would call your house and then thank you for calling. He also had some mental health issues and really needed to belong to a structured, supportive place like LOG. Steve, however, spoke a modicum of truth when he constantly brought up the need for LOG to take care of widows and orphans as referenced in the above Epistle and elsewhere in Sacred Scripture.
Steve’s lone voice on this issue reminded me of the drunken man in Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy Of The People. When the townspeople are set to run Dr. Stockmann out of town on a rail for daring to tell the truth about the contamination of the town’s popular baths, only the drunken man asks for both colors of paper to vote on whether to condemn him.
LOG had no use for widows or orphans. Widows couldn’t create the necessary children for the Kingdom (read: CovCom’s self-perpetuation), and orphans just got in the way. LOG did have a Works of Mercy outreach that did some work with the poor, most notably rounding up homeless people on New Year’s Day and bringing them to the cluster area for a good meal and some pro bono medical and dental examination. I’m not sure what LOG coordinators really thought of the few women in LOG who were single or divorced moms with children, but they were certainly not part of the plan for parenting in the community.
One of the reasons I am here out West is to help take care of my mother-in-law, a widow since 2011 (she died on July 2, 2022). I consider that far more important than being in LOG or any other CovCom.
Break the Covenant 