David:     We’re calling this visit the Jonathan prototype.

Karen:     And the Jonathan we have in mind was a truly remarkable young man whose story is found in the Old Testament book of 1st Samuel.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. Karen Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s Karen at Karen Mains.

David:     Let me begin our visit with a question for you, Karen. We have three big holidays coming up soon, Thanksgiving, then Christmas and New Year’s. Rank them in terms of added pressure for say women listening to us.

Karen:     Oh, it depends on the stage of life she’s in. I mean, she’s got a family. Those are busier for her. If she’s single, she may not have that kind of pressure.

David:     What is the pressure?

Karen:     Well, it’s getting the house ready and decorated and planning meals. It’s a project to have a big Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas celebration, lights on the trees. And I mean, it’s a lot if you’re really going full scale.

David:     Making sure everybody has gifts.

Karen:     Yeah, gift buying.

David:     Here’s what I would like to do during November and December on our podcast. I would like to help people: women and men, listening to us feel as though they did a good job of celebrating first, Thanksgiving and Christmas and finally preparing for the gift of a new year.

Karen:     That would be great because it’s very easy for the holiday weeks coming up to just overwhelm people. That’s a good topic. What are we heading into here?

David:     Well, I’m first of all going to read from scripture just to set a scene for what we’re talking about. This is in 1 Samuel chapter 18. I think people know these verses quite well when the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, that’s Goliath. The women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with tambourines and lutes. As they danced, they sang, “Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands.” Saul was very angry. This refrain called him.

Karen:     Saul’s the king.

David:     They have credited David with tens of thousands, he thought, but me with only thousands.

Karen:     And this kid’s just a whippersnapper.

David:     What more can he get but the kingdom? And from that time on, Saul kept a jealous eye on David. In fact, that’s an understatement.

Karen:     So why are we going to the scripture?

David:     Well, this is an incredibly difficult time in David’s life and God provides for him. He provides through the son of Saul whose name is Jonathan. But if you change chapters and go from chapter 18 of 1 Samuel, if you want to read it on your own, over to chapter 20, all of chapter 20 is about the relationship of an intense friendship between David and Jonathan. And what a friend Jonathan was.

Karen:     As I recall, Jonathan was heir to the throne.

David:     Oh yeah, Saul has said to him, you’re never going to be king if we don’t get rid of this guy.

Karen:     Yeah, and yet he loves David and so bad in itself is a huge conflict. A movie could be made up. But he becomes David’s best friend, and he protects him from his father. Right?

David:     Yeah, very much so. What I’m believing, Karen, is that all of us, in those times of tension and too much going on to get everything done, God provides people for us a lot of times. That’s not the only times all through our life. He provides special Jonathan’s. Jonathan is kind of the prototype of God’s goodness through other individuals.

Karen:     So, we thought that a wonderful exercise for you and me personally to do would be to just sort of do a retrospective on our lives and say, okay, who are the people who have stepped into our lives in unaccountable ways that were there for us when we needed them, provided gifts and strength and encouragement when we needed it. In an unusual way, David, our list was huge. Well, I mean, we’re older, so we have decades behind us, but I think this is just a fabulous exercise for people.

David:     Okay, I don’t want it to be busy work for people.

Karen:     No.

David:     I will eventually say, as you have taken time over a couple of days, maybe even to compile such a list, then it’s appropriate to say, “Lord, I want to thank you for each one of these individuals.” You were at the doctor; you wanted a ride there. I said, I’m just going to sit in the car because I want some time of quiet. And I brought a pencil and paper with me. And you were only in there about a half hour. I could have gone a whole another half hour and…

Karen:     you were writing down names that you were…

David:     I was just writing names. Names I haven’t thought of for many years. I was thinking, wow, these are all as fitting to say they’re Jonathan’s in my life. And God gave them to me as gifts and I’m very grateful. and I’m still writing on the list. I may take that and make it a prayer list over time, but it just been something that I’ve wanted to do that was joyous and wasn’t something that was a task.

Karen:     That’s tedious.

David:     Another thing means, has for us to do, you know.

Karen:     Yeah, right. Well, I picked this up from you as you’ve been talking about it. So, I started to think about not so much the people who have been friends in my life, although there are many of those, but people who I encountered in significant ways that sort of shifted my thinking about myself or my role in the world. And the first one who came up was a junior high teacher. I don’t even remember her name. I can see her face. This was at the time in schooling when we went from one classroom to different classes in different rooms.

David:     So, seventh, eighth grade in there. Her name is Jonathan.

Karen:     Good, thank you. We’d all turn papers in. This was after class and she said to me, “I want you to know and please hear me that you will never be happy unless you write.” Isn’t that an extraordinary thing to say? Now my mother was my best writing champion. She was a multi-gifted woman, and she would write a poem every day. She was a wonderful poet. I’ve been going back through her poetry and thinking, “Oh, these are beautiful.” A lot of them are prayer poems. So, I respect her.

David:     But you kind of expect your mother to be supportive.

Karen:     I do. She would ask me, “What are you writing now?” So that was the theme I heard all my life and it sort of verified what this teacher had said to me. I didn’t make a connection during those years. But as I look back, I’m thinking, “Oh, I had really some encouragement to get going in writing.”

David:     I put a name on my list that I haven’t thought of for literally decade. As soon as I say it to you, you will know exactly who he is. Although it was more friendship with me than it was as related to you. His name is Louis Pike.

Karen:     Yes. Oh my goodness. This is the head of Teamsters Union Local 705 in Chicago. And tell why he was so meaningful.

David:     Well, I was working at Moody Memorial Church. It was a very large church.

Karen:     Big. His start church started by DL Moody.

David:     But they didn’t have a pastor at the time, but they were losing staff members and they wanted to start to rebuild staff. They wanted to allow the new pastor to pick his own staff. And that’s traditional. And I have no beef with that at all. But it meant I had to come up with what I was going to be doing. And I felt that the Lord gave me connections with people. None of them were a part of the church where I was that could form a new church in kind of a new neighborhood where all of the expressways meet in the city of Chicago. It’s called the Circle Exchange. And there were not really churches right in that immediate neighborhood.

Karen:     This was also in 1967. That’s when the racial consciousness of our nation began to rise. But there was white flight.

David:     Congregations.

Karen:     Congregations. And leaving the inner cities. And so, there was this huge spiritual vacuum. So, you felt like this was the time. And we had a little group of 27 people, I think it was.

David:     Yes.

Karen:     Who said they would commit themselves to planting a church and help us do that. So anyway, you’re looking for a place to meet.

David:     I had a place. We had a public school that said we could meet in their facility. And then the week before we were to have our first service, they said “We thought this through more. And it’s probably not a good idea to have a religious group meeting in a public school. So, we are sorry, but we are not going to allow that to happen.” I was distraught. I don’t know what I’m going to do. We had moved into the city. We were living in Old Town, the Old Town Triangle. I said, “Lord, I’m going to go through that neighborhood over there one more time and see if I can find a place.” But I’m really at loss. Frankly, I was distraught.

I went to the neighborhood. I was driving around, and my eye caught in one corner of a window of a large building. I hadn’t noticed that much before. It was no bigger than an 8 1⁄2 by 11 sheet of paper. But I thought I wanted what that is. I went in and I found a janitor. I found it was the local Teamsters Union 705 and they had moved into a beautiful building which was the old, plastered union. It was right on the expressway almost the key expressway conjuncture of all of Chicago and they were in process of building this huge new Teamsters headquarters which was something.

Karen:     They moved their offices into the office space.

David:     I went in and the janitor said you’ll have to talk to Mr. Pike. I had no idea who that was. But he was gracious. He was profane. He was smoking and also it was kind of outside of my normal connections. He eventually said to me, “Young man,” he said “How would you think and pay us?

I said, “I have no idea.” I said, “I saw your sign and I was interested.” And he said to me, “Well you know what this neighborhood needs is another GD Protestant church.” He said, “Anytime you want you can come and meet here free.” He was the pastor of that church for 10 years and I never paid him a penny. In fact, on top of that he said, “You need office space.” And he had another building that was vacant. He said, “How would you like to have the upstairs into that office? Then you don’t have to meet in different homes all the time.”

He was incredible to me, Karen. And I look back at it and I say, “This was a gift of God to me.” And he would come to the meetings. And he would listen. You know he didn’t come regularly at all but when we would have a concert or whatever. I can hardly express what a beautiful building that was that we were allowed to. It was the old plaster…

Karen:     So, it was a big hall with huge windows lovely and it’s an old building.

David:     We just had a handful of people and I looked at that. We never filled that.

Karen:     We made it to the corner around dragged chairs into the corner on the piano.

David:     It started but it grew, yeah.

Karen:     There was Della Robia plaster work in this huge hall on the ceiling. I mean it was just gorgeous on the set and like you said we never paid a penny for the whole 10 years that we were there.

David:     He was an incredible friend. He was a Jonathan. He was a lot older. And his background was totally different from mine. But for some reason the Lord provided him for me as a Jonathan, if you please. The Jonathan prototype. That’s just one. I had like 32 names on the list as I was writing these down while you were at the doctor.

Karen:     So, what we’re saying to people is: this is a wonderful exercise to do before Thanksgiving.

David:     Don’t see it as an assignment.

Karen:      No.

David:     We don’t want to add any pressure during these weeks when it’s just intense trying to keep up with everything.

Karen:     I keep a prayer journal and so I have allotted one page to where I can say who are the people who have been Jonathan in your life. And it’s just remarkable which ones got allowed to step into our lives. I remember we were in great financial distress.

David:     Not personal, as a ministry.

Karen:     There’d been criticism of the ministry and it showed up in our donor base dropping off and as a ministry or 2.6 million dollars in debt and you just can’t carry that kind of debt. You can’t pay your staff. You got a contact from a man who was on our donor list, but we had never met him. And he had had an automobile accident. One of the end results of that was his face was badly scarred, but he gave us a gift of, do you remember how much it was?

David:     It was very, very large.

Karen:     It was a 500,000 dollar something like that. It pulled us totally up. And then during that same time when we were going through this distress, we had a man who had worked in Hollywood. Just a wonderful Christian person. His wife and I had become friends through a variety of means and he stepped forward with a gift that took care of all of the debt. I’m getting weepy as I talk about this.

David:     You look back and you think how in the world… you’re at a loss. David say, “What am I going to do?  Your dad wants to kill me.”

Karen:      Right.

David:     You’re in that kind of a situation. And then God steps in, in a remarkable way which is absolutely incredible. But I have a list of these people. They’re not all that spectacular by any means.

Karen:     No, but sometimes the small things that people do at the right time in your life are as profound as those big gifts. You could sort of explain some of the smaller things away, but these two stories were miracles in our lives at a time when we were really at our wits end.

David:     I can think of people who were a part of our staff. At the height we probably had 50 people working for us. But saying, “Lord, I need somebody who can just step in here and take all this off of me.” It’s big enough just trying to get a broadcast.

Karen:      A telecast.

David:      Yes. And the Lord provided that kind of a person. Just an incredible way.

Karen:     A young woman who had just graduated from college, and we brought her on our staff, not to hire her as an office manager, but her capabilities soon demonstrated themselves because she had suggestions how to improve herself. She was an Aggie; she was charming, and she took over our office management. A year out of college she was just an extraordinary person. I still think of her with warm fondness. We worked with her for 10 years, I think.

David:     You can be a Jonathan and be a woman.

Karen:     I have one that I’d like to introduce to our listening audience. This is the friend we have in Jesus.

David:     I didn’t put Jesus on my list but he’s beyond the list.

Karen:     Now, we’re talking about Jonathan as the prototype. But let me read the lyrics of this familiar hymn.

“What a friend we have in Jesus all our sins and griefs to bear. What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer. Oh, what peace we often forfeit. Oh, what needless pain we bear all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

David:     I’m trying to remember that hymn. From my childhood people singing it. I want to put into a sentence what it is we’re trying to say. And I’ll only do it for this podcast because I got another idea for the next week. And then a week after that. So that hopefully, we can keep these holidays. You know Thanksgiving will be truly a time when your heart is filled with Thanksgiving. And Christmas, the wonderful birth of the Christ child; and then the new year. There’s this phenomenal opportunity to start over again. I want to put into a sentence what it is we’re trying to say.

The context to be an awareness on our part that these are going to be very,  very busy weeks. So, don’t in any sense receive what we’re saying as this is something you should do. “It’s an assignment. You got a test coming up.” None of that.

It’s just saying you might find this exercise very beneficial as well. And you just might be made aware of the goodness of God all through your life. If you come up with 10 names, 12, 15, 20 names, you know some of you come up with more than that, I’m sure. Here’s what we’re saying in a sentence.

It is fitting to thank the Lord for special individuals who touched your life for the better. We’ve found it to be quite meaningful.

Karen:     It’s been very meaningful.

David:     I’m still adding to the list. I have a long list and sometimes it’s just surprising. Oh, I forgot about that person. What a timely individual that was for me and my life at that point in time.

Karen:     Yeah, I think memory reconstruction happens in sort of sections. There are things that are more present in the frontal part of our mind. They come to mind very quickly and then if you make it a meditative exercise up to Thanksgiving then you’ll find that there’s another name that pops up. Someone you’ve totally forgotten about.

And then, if the work is being done in conjunction with the Holy Spirit as a prayer exercise, then you begin to be filled with this extraordinary gratitude as far as the all the people who’ve been in your life. For us, for decades. So, we’re just recommending that this has been a wonderful exercise for us and we’re recommending that other people do it as well.

David:     If you weren’t listening when I put it all into a sentence here it is one last time. It is fitting to thank the Lord for special individuals who touched your life for the better.

Outgo:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2023 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.