I’m happy to share my latest published article, “Hostility at the Crisis Hotline,” Now What? 

As Christians we face persecution. This personal experience article is of one such experience when I was brand new in the faith. 

Hostility at the Crisis Hotline

Posted on November 1, 2024

Confronting spiritual warfare in the workplace.

by Christine Rhyner

“Every time you say, ‘God,’ I want to curse,” said Hector,* my fellow crisis hotline counselor. And he did, profaning the Lord’s name. I winced, no longer able to tolerate that language.

As I suspected, Hector’s hostility toward me had to do with God. In recent weeks at the office, he bumped into me with an air of disgust. He muttered under his breath whenever he saw me. I could hear his mention of “God” a few times.  

Disturbing threat

“I want to strangle you and throw you out of a window,” Hector continued.

Sitting at the opposite side of the conference room table, I looked at him for some sign that he was joking. When I realized he was serious, my mind pictured Hector with his thick hands wrapped around my neck, squeezing the life out of me beside the third-story window.

All I could do was stare back in fear at his espresso-colored eyes, laser focused on me.

Provoking animosity

The moment I accepted Christ as Lord and Savior, the angels in heaven sang, while the devil shrieked.

Christian author Max Lucado has written, “One of the most potentially frightening aspects of being a Christian is knowing that when you put your trust in Jesus, all of Hell takes arms against you intending evil upon your life. And, yet what trumps that fear is knowing that, no matter what comes, God is the Master Weaver. He takes what was intended for evil and reweaves it for good.”

I wish I had known this truth early on. I was so new to having Jesus in my heart, I didn’t know much, like mentioning God could provoke animosity in others. But I didn’t yet have a church home or mentors to set me straight.

Constant witness

I accepted Christ through a co-worker at another workplace. This person told me I must evangelize all the time now. If I was sitting on a subway, I needed to witness to the person next to me. If I went to a restaurant, I must witness to the waiter.

According to the co-worker, even one minute in someone else’s presence is an opportunity for me to share the gospel message.  

Fear of Hector

Our supervisor at the crisis center, Elaine, suggested I have a little chat with Hector, and I asked her to attend. She declined, despite my expressed fear of him.

“Hector is totally harmless,” she said, with a hint of irritation in her voice and a wave of her hand.

He didn’t sound harmless to me, but irrationally homicidal. Had she joined us, Hector wouldn’t have spewed such fantasies in front of her. Had he mentioned his struggle with my often mentioning God to callers at a Christian-based organization, she would have supported him instead. Elaine supervised our calls so that we provided only secular help. 

Warning

Calling me up to her glass-enclosed office, where she could view all the staff, Elaine warned me countless times, “No proselytizing.” A scripture verse hung above her head that spoke of God making a covenant with His people.

I would glance at that sign and feel unsettled. This organization began as a means to reach out to runaway youth with the love of Christ. How was I to live out my faith if they refused to let me utter God’s name?

Restrictions

Elaine even prohibited me from talking about God if callers brought Him up themselves. I would hear her voice break into my headset, muting the call with instructions to redirect the caller to secular services.

It wasn’t uncommon for callers to express anger, disappointment, or resentment toward God for their situations. I simply wanted to help them see God in a true light as their hope, strength, and comfort.

And while I always provided appropriate resources to those in need of shelter, psychiatrists, or rehab programs, callers were not often receptive to them.

Conflicts

So I had no choice but to engage in my newfound duty to talk with callers about the Lord. This resulted in Elaine commanding me not to and Hector expressing contempt that I did. The conflict bubbled and brewed.

I struggled emotionally, shamed for being a rebellious employee who broke the rules. But I was also irritated that at a faith-based hotline I couldn’t talk about a God who transforms lives. I feared disappointing God, losing my paycheck, and missing the opportunity to witness to people needing help.

On top of all this, I contended with Hector’s seething contempt.  

Spiritual war

All my appeals to Hector’s humanity — the part of him that, like me, took calls from hurting, confused, lonely souls — failed.   

I learned that accepting Christ put me in the midst of an invisible spiritual war where the devil worked to drag me back into the pit that God had scooped me up from. But I took comfort in the truth that no one will snatch me out of His hand (John 10:28, 29) and that my name is engraved on the palms of His hands (Isaiah 49:16).  

New insights

It wasn’t long before I left that job at the crisis hotline, knotted up with stress to the point of getting physically ill there.

As I regularly attended a good church and grew in my faith, I learned that the instruction I had received to evangelize at all times might have been a tall order. It’s not that God can’t use baby Christians to plant seeds in unbelievers, but I knew next to nothing about the Holy Spirit. We need to be in tune with Him for discernment to witness.

I didn’t understand how crucial prayer is before we put ourselves in situations of potential conflict. Or how we need the body of Christ to pray for us, just as we pray for them to lead people to the Lord. Neither was I well versed in the Scriptures.

Rather than fearing Hector, I could have spoken the Word proactively to address whatever God-hating spirit resided in his heart. I should have remembered Peter’s words: “Even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. ‘Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened’” (1 Peter 3:14).

Blessing in suffering

Being rejected or hated because Jesus lives in us and because we want to tell others about Him means we can be grateful that God counts us worthy to suffer for His name. Acts 5:41 says of the apostles, “So they left the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy [dignified by indignity] to suffer shame for [the sake of] His name” (Amplified).

If the apostles could rejoice after being flogged, surely I could have been thankful in the midst of Hector’s verbal venom.

Lessons

I know God didn’t regard me as the failure I saw myself to be during my spiritual infancy and naivety. He looked on me with compassion and promised to never leave or forsake me (Deuteronomy 31:6).

Persecution made me hungry for godly wisdom to understand and handle mistreatment. The Lord directed me to a church where older women mentored me. He developed in me discernment for churches and organizations that say they are one thing but are another, according to His Word.

He showed me that sometimes it’s necessary to develop rapport with others before sharing the gospel message with them. And He made me better equipped to deal with further persecution for my faith.

Changed life

That hunger changed my life. It has created opportunities to witness to and plant seeds in others in the midst of being disparaged for my born-again Christian faith.

Max Lucado is right. God, the Master Weaver, took what the enemy meant for evil and turned it for good.

* Names have been changed.

Scripture quotations are taken from the New International Version, unless otherwise noted.

Where human life exists the spirit coexists. But what about the estimated one million souls in limbo? They’re locked in frozen embryos kept alive by the fridged nitrogen abyss within cryopreservation tanks.

Curiously, each frozen embryo possesses all of the genetic material necessary to become an artist or athlete, doctor or writer, politician or evangelist. And yet, they are none of the above because they are indefinitely suspended in a kind of eerie aluminum world where their future demise may be determined by personal choice, a court’s decision, or a power failure. Some might be artificially supported into the future, born as siblings to the elderly.

The one in six infertile couples in the U.S. have a daunting task in attempting to understand all of the legal and ethical issues surrounding frozen embryos. As it now stands, medical and legal experts are grappling with them regularly, rapidly, and on a case by case basis, as one unforeseen consequence after another arises.

To date, the fate of tens of thousands that exist in this nation, hangs in the balance. Recent states’ decisions continue to reflect a societal reverence of individual adult rights, while rejecting not only God’s Word regarding the origin of life but that of scientific evidence as well.

Our reproductive technologies continue to win at their exuberant game of leap frog with an overburdened court system. This area of medico-technology has progressed with one thrilling jump after another in a wide-open field free of legislation or even of standardized consent forms at the clinics where astonishing things are happening. The ever-broadening definition of family combined with biological barrier-breaking techniques within a cultural framework of tolerance are providing equal opportunity parental status to those heretofore excluded. Through the ability to freeze an embryo, parental rights are open to all of us in a diverse and non-discriminating culture: the single, same-sex partners, women well beyond menopause, the fifty percent of us that will divorce, the murderer, the dead, and even a combination thereof. To realize a dream of parenthood is to potentially experience the demise of multiple embryos, which are simply put, premature infants. This is yesterday’s news in reproductive success.

In an information age in which today’s news passes through our already overloaded psyches at a dizzying speed, important bits of our news-byte diets sometimes don’t get properly digested. Individuals contemplating these technologies don’t always have the opportunity to assimilate the old news: God-given scientific intellect has already concluded that frozen embryos are completely established in genotype or genetic makeup. And in this genotype, writes author and bioethicist Gilbert Meilaender, “lies the uniqueness, the novelty of the individual, and we can think of the rest of life as working out and developing what has been established in conception.

Best-selling author Og Mandino paints a compelling picture of what doctors and researchers at fertility clinics might see, if only with spiritual eyes, at the moment of conception in his book, The Greatest Miracle in the World. Upon fertilization of an egg by a sperm, says Mandino, all of the genetic material necessary to determine which person, out of some three hundred billion humans possible, has already been determined. When these two cells unite, each contains twenty-three chromosomes which each possess hundreds of genes, already governing every characteristic of this one human being’s eye color, manner, height and the rest of his or her traits. Of all the vast possibilities, God brings forth this one. “One of a kind. Rarest of the rare. A priceless treasure, possessed of qualities in mind…and actions as no other who has ever lived, lives or shall live.” And so it is that “men are without excuse” for their lack of understanding because even though God in His totality is incomprehensible to man, His invisible qualities-His eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen by what has been made.” (Romans 1:20)

Are you one who keeps a journal? Maybe you hope to one day write a memoir or autobiography to hand down to your kids and grandkids? Nothing you'd want to publish for the world to see. Just preserving stories of faith and family history for future generations. At the 2024 VIRTUAL Write His Answer Conference, Robin Grunder will teach you how legacy writing can help you live better in the present and impact the future. Sign up for the conference today!