Please be blessed by the words of my niece Anne Gould on Facebook.  She is a 45-year-old evangelical Christian mother of four children living in Boise, Idaho.  She was born and raised here in Show Low, Payson and Pinetop-Lakeside.  Married to a Hall of Fame punter from NAU and now in business with her husband as a real estate agent.  Her oldest child is in secondary school.  Her words brought me great hope this morning that there is a world wide outpouring of the Spirit of God calling His people to repentance and revival.  Let us join our prayers to those of the youth of our nation and speak life and hope to all who will hear.  Nancy Stidham

Anne Foil Gould, September 13, 2025

Much has already been said and said well regarding this month of sad news. I have tried not to write or post as quickly from my reactive moments the last couple of years, and maybe it still would be wisdom to hold back. Relative to so many more informed and eloquent people, I certainly have ignorance and expansive blind spots. Still, the tension inside compels me to get my thoughts out, even just for my own release and processing.

I recall feeling this sort of helpless sickness of the soul a few times in my life. When footage of the Afghan people surfaced as we pulled our troops out. Earlier, when the terror of ISIS filled the news. The Sandy Hook shooting. Something about the brutality of humans to other humans, and it being current; the recognition that violence and heinous hatred isn’t something relegated to the distant past, but here today. Often close by. Grappling with the idea that we are still the kind of fallen, sinful humans that don’t outgrow or evolve past barbarianism and the dehumanizing of others based on race, ethnicity, values, religion and sex.

This month, the combination of a few news stories piled upon each other put me in that place again where I could barely sleep. I tend to look too closely and deeply into footage until I’m haunted. Just as I was telling Mark I couldn’t get images of Iryna Zarutska out of my mind, I received word of Charlie Kirk. Later the same day, news of the couple stabbed and burned in their home by an intruder, and then another school shooting, and then a co-worker machete and decapitate another man, casually kicking his head around a busy parking lot. Next, to wake up on the anniversary of 9/11.

It's better, of course, to not pay attention. Had I not been on the news for the first two things, I may not have been exposed to the others. But that is the reality of trying to be informed - you end up shocked and taking on the active depravity of the whole world through our ubiquitous and perpetual eye on all of humanity shot through millions of private lenses. Neither souls nor minds were ever designed to carry so much awful information.

It got me thinking, though. Assassinations go back as far as leaders go. Murder as far as the first family created. Tribes and ideologies have always driven people to hatred for the “other.” And, lately, poor mental health is so prevalent, it’s no longer exceptional for killers of random, innocent people to be devoid of remorse or self-reflection. What seems different now, if these things go back as far as time?

It's the inhumanity in the response, I think, that has shocked me even more than the facial expression of Iryna as she tries, in shock, to come to terms that she’s bleeding out. It’s that the 6+ people around her didn’t act. Whether they knew initially she’d been stabbed or not, they knew at least that she’d been hit or groped violently. SOMEthing had definitely occurred and she was definitely in a fetal position crying...then, there was blood and her crumpled body and nobody acted. Most moved away. One pointed. It’s how many news organizations aimed to never mention it at all, until word got out despite them.

It's the inhumanity in the response that has me even more sick to my stomach than seeing a bullet rip through a truly decent man’s neck and blood spurting, knowing his wife and kids were present. It’s how people in the crowd were laughing and cheering, how staff at some news sites could be heard rejoicing as the news was confirmed he was dead. It’s how professionals saw it appropriate to post their satisfaction in the karma of it all. 

It's how, on the story of the beheaded man, on social media there were already comments comparing it to a good horror movie scene with laughter emojis. 

It’s the inhumanity in the response that worries me even more than the ongoing dying and starving and fear and destruction in Israel and Gaza, and that, depending on which you side with, the other is worthy of being wiped out if that’s what it takes. It’s the comments that it’s all simply the “nature of war” and self-defense as if that makes it all ok. 

And much less weighty, but also sad, is the vitriol against a bitter and badly-behaving woman for arguing over a baseball. It’s the notion that the country can fixate on something so trivial amidst so many deeper issues, and label a human being as “scum” for her unfortunate, public, worst moments. It’s that an entire society has determined women from about 45-70 are a worthless nuisance. Nobody asks what made her bitter that day, or cares.

What’s different? It’s the sad recognition that criminal lunatics and extremists and mentally unwell people aside, regular human beings seem incapable of caring about one another. People don’t see other people as humans anymore. Or if human, the word holds no weight. This was the case with the brainwashed Nazis to the Jews, but there we thought it was an anomaly. Are we all that different as a society? We divide over politics, mainly, with gender and race and religion and lifestyle falling under that umbrella somehow, labeling all of us as the “dangerous other” to someone else. Words are believed to be weapons and people’s psyches so fragile, their entire identities hinge on the acceptance of others. Suicide is high alongside murder, because people see no inherent value in themselves or others. Family is something oppressive, babies are a parasite, teaching religion is equivalent to waging war, the elderly and middle-aged are dismissed or degraded as ignorant. 

Have we not been clearly warned? The further we move from the foundational truth of humanity according to our Creator, the worse our depravity gets. Sin has always been, but what about the callousness to sin? That’s something that develops over time, when we are given over to the hardness of our own hearts. 

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God...burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3).

I can try to understand why one side, which overtly states they reject the things of the Bible as oppressive and antiquated and dangerous, has come to devolve into dehumanizing behavior and thought patterns. What I cannot understand (and what might bother me even more) is how Christians, who claim to believe that everyone is made in the image of God, that man cannot possibly obey God aside from a work of the Holy Spirit, and that we are charged to display the truth of God through directness AND love/generosity/self-sacrifice like our Savior did for us, can spew such hatred and vitriol just as easily. 

This is who man is without God. Those of us who have Him but do not seek to obey Him or love others, aren't looking all that different, sadly. There is SUCH a need for sweeping repentance and revival. Without it, there is no human effort that can reverse this spiraling. 

"Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon Him while He is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord that He may have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon" (Isaiah 55:6-7).

September 

September 21--12:30 pm last pot luck at Fool Hollow

September 28--Final church service at the Hampton and

         Group photo

        Last day for donations and giving

        Services will be broadcast through September 28

        Radio show "Morning Light" continues on 88.5 fm and 89.5 fm

September 30--website shut down, broadcasts on YouTube suspended

October

October 4--First Saturday 10-11 am at DR Plumbing:  "Come to a Wedding Feast" Del Lewis leading with prayer, worship and teaching

October 11--Second Saturday 10-11 am at DR Plumbing:  Pastor Clay Stidham

November 1 to May 1 Stidhams in Mesa

November 1--First Saturday 10-11 am at DR Plumbing

November 8--Second Saturday 10-11 am at DR Plumbing

December

November 1--First Saturday 10-11 am at DR Plumbing

November 8--Second Saturday 10-11 am at DR Plumbing

December 31--Cornerstone bank account closed

Final distribution of assets and donations to our partners and charities.  

Corporate dissolution papers filed

January 2026

January 31--Letters sent to all 2025 donors

Opening prayer

Open church--What have you seen in the Bible concerning justice or vengeance?

Prayer and Share

Worship in song

Message--Pastor Clay Stidham

 "Treachery and Justice in the Bible"

Psalm 119:27

2 Samuel 15:30-31; 16:5-13

Romans 12:19

Jeremiah 38:2-6

Mark 11:17-18

Acts 12:1-3

Luke 6:27=28

2 Thessalonians 2:7-8