Have you ever experienced a situation like the circumstances Mark, Paul, or Barnabas faced? How did you resolve it? BIB536-01-04

This is story of four good friends in Arizona. Friend 1 was born and raised a Mormon and converted to Christianity. Friend 2 is pretty much a lifelong born again Christian. Friend 3 was born and raised Jewish and now is a Messianic Jew, also known as a completed Jew. Then there is me, raised in a conservative Protestant church, a limitation that I’ve since overcome. Our little group is retired with the exception of my Messianic Jewish friend who makes her living traveling the country selling mostly upscale jewelry and mineral specimens. After early retirement from the corporate world I also sold jewelry for a number of years.
In the spring of 2011 friend 3 and I decided to do some of the same markets in the state of Texas. Good friends and fellow Christians or not we were competitors and had one or two rough days. Other than that we were very helpful and supportive of each other on the road. We did have a fairly unusual disagreement when we met a hermaphrodite at a market. I’ll refer to him as a man as he was so dressed when I met him. Now I couldn’t make this up if I tried. He was in love with a lesbian and he hated men. He was thinking of having surgery so he would become a female only in the hope that the lesbian would accept him. My friend was tortured mentally over this disclosure. She counseled him that, should he choose to become a female and have a relationship with the lesbian, he would be a lesbian. He would then be under condemnation as a homosexual. My friend was so distraught over this, that she called our other friends in Arizona to pray for him. I was asked repeatedly what I thought of the whole situation and wasn’t it wrong? I said God created him a hermaphrodite and God could best sort it out. I guess that’s how we resolved it, as we haven’t talked about him for some time.
Meanwhile, back in Arizona our other friends were getting involved in seminars held by Patricia King. That is Patricia King of visiting the third heaven fame. I could see the earmarks of the New Age, with just enough truth in it to be persuasive. Now these good friends are very mature Christians and we’ve had a number of discussions. They still go to Patricia King seminars. Luckily, both friends are fans of CM’s teachings, so I steer most the conversations in that direction. I guess the resolution here is just the fact that I trust that given their deep Christian beliefs, their brush with the New Age is a passing phase. Meanwhile, friend 3 wants me to join her in an intervention with them this winter, resolution to be determined. If my word count were not approaching 500, I could also share their efforts to get me to speak in tongues as they do.