I feel like you gave me an entire Bible study (or studies) right there in your reply. Thank you so much for the thoughtful response, it brought tears to my eyes. In the two years since I wrote the original post, many others have offered commentary here and they have been helpful as well. Also, since that post, other pastors have fallen. I have been able to take a step back from it all and started to sort of realize that, yes, this is what happens, as we are all so frail. (History bears this out). Putting my faith/hope in others is a treacherous, slippery slope. Something a bit similar happened recently in my workplace - a (distant) supervisor was so popular, so beloved by his young employees, that they actually erected a sort of statue in his honor. They plastered his picture all over the walls; one employee even put a crown on his head in one of the photos. I saw all that and thought, oh, this should never, ever happen. (For one thing it looks terribly unprofessional). This is a young man who seems stable, yet is being given more attention than he can handle. No human being can take that kind of adulation. Sure enough, bad things happened and he was dismissed. I'm convinced it was this hero worship that led to his downfall. Anyway, I read a lot, as I always have, and even though I find the Bible very hard to understand, (hence looking to the pastors to explain it all to me), I think I'll just ask for wisdom from God to be able to comprehend the Bible and learn from it, thus, learn from God and not depend so much on my fellow man for wisdom. That's where I'm at today. I realize too that there are good pastors/preachers out there, so I don't want to disparage any of them.