She Has Been Rescued

Joni Lamb, the watching world, and the mirror the church will not hold

REFLECTIONS

When the news came that Joni Lamb had stepped from this life into the next, I felt the kind of grief that arrives in two waves. The first wave was for her — for a sister in Christ whose laugh I remembered, whose tears I had witnessed, whose love for the Lord had shaped a network that, at its peak, carried the gospel into more than two billion homes. The second wave was for us. For the Body of Christ. For what I knew the next days would look like on social media. For what the world would see when it watched our reaction.

I was right to brace.

Within hours, the comments began. The think-pieces. The whispers dressed up as discernment. The hot takes from accounts whose entire ministry seems to consist of cataloging the failures of other ministries. Joni’s body had not yet been laid to rest, and already her marriage, her family rupture, her network, her decisions, her late husband’s decisions — every breath she had drawn — were being dissected by Christians who would never have spoken so freely if she had been in the room.

I sat with that, and I grieved.

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I Talked with Her about Heaven

A few short years before Joni was released into eternity, I had the privilege of sitting with her and talking — really talking — about Heaven. About what waits on the other side. About the testimonies of those who have died, met Jesus, and returned. About what we both knew, in different ways and from different experiences, to be true: that the moment a believer’s heart stops in this world, they open their eyes in the next, and the face of Christ is the first thing they see.

I cannot escape the thought, in the wake of her passing, that God rescued her.

I believe every believer who leaves this world is rescued into Heaven. That is the promise of the gospel and the witness of more than six hundred testimonies I have personally interviewed. But Joni’s rescue feels distinct in tone, because of what she walked through here. Because of the years of public criticism. Because of the family rupture that played out on platforms and podcasts and in headlines. Because of the loneliness I suspect she felt even at the height of her audience.

I think God said, “Daughter, that’s enough. Come home.”

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The Pile-On

Joni’s life was not without its complications. Her marriage to Dr. Doug Weiss after the death of her first husband, Marcus, drew sustained criticism in certain Christian circles — questions about timing, questions about Doug’s previous marriage, questions that morphed quickly from theological inquiry into open hostility. The painful estrangement from her son Jonathan and his wife Suzy played out in public, with allegations and counter-allegations that I am not in any position to adjudicate. Police investigated. A case was closed. Wounds remained on every side. Hearts broke that I cannot heal with a paragraph.

I am not writing today to relitigate any of it. I do not have the standing — and frankly, neither do most of the people who have appointed themselves judges in these matters.

What I am writing about is what the world saw.

The world saw believers — who claim to follow a Savior who said the world would recognize His disciples by their love for one another — instead picking apart a grieving family in the comment section. The world saw “discernment” ministries whose discernment never seems to turn inward. The world saw the church doing what the church too often does: devouring its own.

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

— JOHN 13:35

And the world is not impressed. The world is watching, and the world is taking notes.

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I Was One of the Watchers

I do not say this from a posture of superiority. I say it from memory.

For many years of my life, I was an agnostic. I had been raised in the church, but I walked away. People sometimes ask me what pushed me out, and the honest answer is uncomfortable in religious company: I liked the Jesus Christ that Christians talked about. I just couldn’t find Him in them.

The Jesus they preached forgave sinners; the Christians I knew remembered offenses for decades. The Jesus they preached touched lepers; the Christians I knew avoided the wrong sort of people. The Jesus they preached told a crowd ready to stone a woman, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone”(John 8:7); the Christians I knew were always reaching for rocks.

I could not reconcile the gap, and so I closed the book.

It was a near-death experience in 2005 — more than thirty minutes of clinical death — and a face-to-face encounter with the One I had abandoned that drew me back. Christ Himself, not the church, brought me home.

I do not say this to wound my brothers and sisters. I say it because what drove me away then is driving people away now, in greater numbers and at a more dangerous pace. Every day on social media, I watch the church do to itself what no enemy could accomplish from the outside. And every day, I see watchers — people who once loved the idea of Jesus, who would still love Him today if they could see Him in us — quietly close the book.

If we cannot right our own ship, we cannot sail to foreigners who need to hear the truth. Our voices are silenced by our accusations.

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The Greatest Accusers Were the Religious

It should chasten us that the people who plotted Jesus’ death were not the pagans. They were not the Romans, not in any ultimate sense. The ones who whispered against Him in synagogues, who watched Him with narrowed eyes from the back of every crowd, who finally organized His execution — these were the religious leaders of His day. The most theologically literate. The most ceremonially clean. The ones with the strongest positions on Scripture and the loudest opinions about who was in and who was out.

Jesus reserved His sharpest words for them.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.”

— MATTHEW 23:27

And on the cross — bleeding for the very crowd that had organized His execution — He said the words I find myself praying over the church almost daily now: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”(Luke 23:34).

It is happening again. The harshest accusers of Christians today are very often other Christians. The same pattern Jesus exposed in His day has come around again in ours, dressed in modern clothes and amplified by algorithms. The “gotcha” influencers. The professional dissectors. The accounts whose followers grow every time another brother or sister falls.

I have been on the receiving end of this. I have written before about teaching the eternal security of the believer — the unshakable, immovable love of Christ for those who are His — and the messages I have received in response from professing Christians have, at times, been the most vicious I have ever encountered. That is saying something, coming from a man who spent decades in the cutthroat world of Fortune 100 corporate America. The corporate combatants generally tell you they are coming for you. The Christian variety often arrives with a smile and the phrase, “I’m only saying this because I care.”

I happen to know, in some cases, about the secret sins of the people firing those messages. I would never expose them. That is between them and the Lord. But I will name the pattern: accusation as deflection. “At least I’m not them.” It is a balm we apply to our own conscience by pointing at someone else’s wound. It feels like righteousness. It is anything but.

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The Plank Before the Speck

Jesus gave us, in His own voice, the diagnostic tool we need:

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged… Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?… You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

— MATTHEW 7:1–5

This passage is so familiar that it has almost been domesticated. We nod. We move on. But Jesus is being precise. He is not saying we should never speak truth into another’s life. He is saying the order matters. The plank comes out first. Mine first. And only after that humbling, blinding, painful self-surgery — only after the world has tilted on its axis because I have honestly seen myself — am I equipped to help my brother with the speck.

How many of us do that work? How many of us pause, before we type, before we forward, before we share, and ask, “What is the plank in my eye?”

Paul wrote that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). All. Not most. Not the people on television. All. Including me. Including you. Including the brother or sister whose failures we are about to broadcast.

James — the brother of Jesus, who knew Him longer than any of the apostles — wrote:

“Do not speak evil against one another, brothers… There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?”

— JAMES 4:11–12

Who are we, indeed?

There is an older phrase — older than most of us — that captures the right posture. When we see a brother or sister fall, the only honest words on our lips should be these: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Not in the cheap, performative way. In the way that knows it is true.

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What Repentance Actually Is

If the church is going to rise from this — and I pray we still can — it will not happen because we get better at public relations. It will happen because we repent. And by repent, I do not mean the diluted, throwaway version of the word that has crept into our vocabulary.

The Greek word is metanoia. It does not mean “I’m sorry, God.” It is not a polite verbal acknowledgment we offer up before returning to the same patterns the next day. Metanoia means a complete transformation of mind — a turning of the whole person. A change so deep that perception itself is reordered. A re-mind-ing. A spiritual conversion that does not stop at remorse but pushes through to a fundamental shift in how one sees, thinks, and lives.

Paul described its source plainly:

“For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”

— 2 CORINTHIANS 7:10

The difference between godly grief and worldly grief is the direction it points. Worldly grief mourns the consequences. Godly grief mourns the offense itself — what it cost God, how it grieved His heart. And out of that grief, real change walks in. Lasting change. The kind that requires knowing God’s heart well enough to feel sorrow over having disappointed Him, and loving Him well enough not to want to disappoint Him again.

So many who preach on repentance have made it a transaction. A formula. A moment of “I’m sorry” that costs nothing and changes less. But that is not what Peter meant when he stood on the day of Pentecost and cried, “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). He was calling for a turning.A reversal. A new direction of life.

If we are honest about how we have treated each other in the public square — if we are honest about what unbelievers have witnessed in our timelines — then metanoia is the only response that meets the moment.

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I Felt Her Tears

I met Joni. I saw her tears more than once. And in the days since her passing, I have remembered them, and I have felt them again — because I know what it is to be a Christian who is publicly torn at by other Christians. The wounds are not the same as hers. I am not comparing. But I know the shape of that pain, and I know how alone you can feel inside it even when your name is on a ministry that reaches millions.

I think of what Christ said as the nails went in: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

I think He says it still. Over Joni. Over me. Over the brother who wrote the cruel comment. Over the sister who shared the ungracious post. Over every one of us who has stood in the crowd while someone we should have loved was crucified in slow motion on a screen.

That is the prayer I want to leave on this page today, more than any other.

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A Mirror, and the Daystar Door

By the time these words reach you, I will be on my way to Daystar to speak about my new book, Heaven Encounters: 140 Near-Death Experiences Revealing the Afterlife. The book releases May 26. I have spent more than a year preparing for it. But honestly, the part of this trip that occupies me most is not the interview. It is the hope that I will sit, quietly, in a private room, with members of Joni’s family and her closest friends — and I will get to do what I most love to do.

I will get to tell them what Heaven is.

I will get to tell them what Joni saw when her eyes opened. I will get to tell them, on the authority of more than six hundred vetted testimonies and on the authority of my own dying and coming back, that she is more alive in this moment than she has ever been. That the noise of this world has fallen away behind her. That the criticisms can no longer reach her. That she is in the presence of the One whose face she had longed to see since she first surrendered her life to Him.

I will get to tell them she has been rescued.

That is what I want to do — not just at Daystar, but every day God leaves me on this side of eternity. Bring the hope of Heaven to a heavy-laden world. That is what Jesus did, in the profoundest way the universe has ever witnessed. And it is the mission He gave us in His final commission — “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19) — built on the two commandments He said every other commandment hangs upon: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself(Mark 12:30–31).

Nothing saves souls quite like the testimony of the afterlife. Every time I hear from a reader, a viewer, a stranger who tells me their faith was reborn through these stories, the fire in me that the world keeps trying to extinguish flares back to life.

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Why I Keep Going

I will be honest. I would happily talk about Heaven all day. I would happily spend the rest of my life telling the world what waits on the other side. But I keep getting pulled back into the evils of this present age — the wars, the deceptions, the church’s self-inflicted wounds — and there are days I want to lay it down.

Every time, God admonishes me, quietly but plainly. The sense of it is always the same: “Did I quit?”

He did not. He took the nails. He took the spear. He took the words of the very religious authorities who should have known better. And He said, “Forgive them.”

So I keep going. Not for accolades — there aren’t many — and not for the comments, which are increasingly cruel. I keep going for Him. And I keep going because of the friends, fewer in number but truer in heart, who pray for me, encourage me, refuse to let me fall. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). I have a few of those. They are the kindling God uses when my fire grows low.

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What I Am Going to Do Today

I am going to look in the mirror.

I am going to ask the Spirit of God to convict me of my own sins so that I can repent of them in the full metanoic sense — not a hurried apology, but a turning, a change of mind, a reordering of life. I am going to mourn what grieves my Father’s heart, because that is the gateway through which real change walks in. I am going to ask Him to make me less like the watcher I once was, and more like the Savior who forgave me when I had no business being forgiven.

And I am going to mourn for what the church did to Joni — what some in the church did to her. I felt her tears in life. I feel them today. I will not pretend, in the cleaned-up tones of an obituary, that everything was fine. It was not fine. But she has now received the only verdict that will ever ultimately matter, and it is the one that will echo when ours have all faded into silence:

“Well done, good and faithful servant… Enter into the joy of your master.”

— MATTHEW 25:23

I do not know exactly when Christ will return. I have written and spoken much about His coming, and I believe it is closer than many imagine. But I also know that until then, the work in front of us is the same work the Master gave us at the beginning: love God, love each other, take the gospel to those who have not heard, and — for the love of Heaven — stop tearing each other apart in front of the watching world.

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A Closing Prayer

Father, forgive us. We have not known what we have done. We have raised our voices against our own family while the world stood watching, and we have given them every reason to walk away from You.

Heal what we have broken in each other. Soften the hearts that have grown sharp. Give us tears for what grieves You. Give us courage to turn — truly turn — and not merely apologize.

Receive Joni. Comfort her family — every member of it, on every side of every disagreement. Hold her son. Hold her daughter-in-law. Hold her husband. Hold each child and grandchild whose grief is its own.

Make me, today, more like the Savior who forgave me. Less like the accuser who never has.

And come, Lord Jesus. Come.

AMEN

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Walking with you,

Randy Kay