Church Hurt

I sat in shocked silence while I listened to someone I thought I could trust relay a private conversation I had just had with them, to another person.

I was sitting in my living room. They walked outside to the front porch and made the call. I still don't know if they know I heard what they said, but I did. 

I was hurting, and trying to process what was happening. I turned to someone I thought I could trust to process through it. They shared what I said with the person that some of the processing had been about. 

I wasn't even allowed to think through things in a safe environment. When I didn't immediately choose the side they thought I should, they didn't give me the basic rights of relationships. I felt hurt on top of the pain I was already going through, and it made their side of the argument seem less right and clear. It muddied the water further, which made it even harder to discern what was right.

This isn't the worst thing that has happened to me in the church. It's the thing I feel comfortable sharing about.

While I believe that there is a degree of truth with the above graphic. I think it dismisses the responsibility that we have to make amends, and it allows people who run over other people with their verbal/mental car in the name of Jesus to run rampant and unchecked. 

I have sat and listened while people show contempt for others who have left the church, but I know the circumstances from the other side. 

People did hurtful and wrong things in the name of Jesus. They ran over people with their car in the name of Jesus and then show contempt and a lack of compassion when the people they ran over and others who saw it happen don't come back to have a relationship with them. 

Being right doesn't give anyone the right to act wrongly. 

I wonder how many people who were "right" are going to have to give an account to Jesus for their actions when they were "right"?

Let's love people and make amends instead of shaming people for how they reacted to their pain. Expressing remorse and gentleness can go a long way to healing and restoration. 

I have received two apologies from people about ways they had hurt me because they thought they were right. When the Bible says that love covers a multitude of sins, it ain't lying. I never expected to get any apologies, but these two apologies made it so much easier for me to forgive all the other people. It works, and it should be done.

Scrupulosity

I counted on the belief that being baptized would solve the problem. It didn’t. Before I got home from church on the night I submitted to baptism the first time, the overwhelming sense that I was unworthy of God’s love and so full of sin that I was too rotten to save engulfed me like a title wave of quicksand. Over the years, intrusive thoughts that I was unsaved because of my inability to perform perfectly to a standard that I wasn’t quite sure of led to cycles of depression, hopelessness, giving up, deciding to retry, depression, hopelessness, and on and on and on. I was a compulsive confession-maker in my mid-teens. I remember feeling the compulsion and wracking my brain to think of what to say in the confession. I often resorted to “I haven’t been a good example” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. In my late teens, I gave up. It felt useless and hopeless to try. I couldn’t gain any ground. I resorted to seeking comfort where I could find it. I did things that a person caught in the clutches of satan would do. Desiring reconciliation, I resubmitted to baptism at twenty. Consolation eluded me entirely. I’ve had two periods of peace that each lasted about two years. The last five years have been the hardest of my life. My lows got lower than I thought were possible. All of these intrusive thoughts led to a dark period of doubt, endless rumination, and trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. Words have so much power. Reading this one and learning what it means felt like a plug I didn’t know existed was pulled from my spirit, and all of the anxiety drained. I felt seen for the first time. Scrupulosity. It’s under the umbrella of obsessive-compulsive disorder but seems to affect religious people particularly. My story with this word is way too long to tell in one essay, but it’s been life-changing. Realizing that all of these terrible thoughts aren't true, that there is a name for this, that I'm not the only one, and that there is an established protocol to help is an answer to prayer. The level of gratefulness I feel is indescribable.

Value: Perception Vs. Reality

She asked the question. 

I gave an answer that I hadn’t rehearsed and didn’t know I could give. 

I was experiencing flow. The sense that energy spills from my spirit without incurring a debt against the stores that exist there. My heart, mind and soul were in communion and produced a result that none could give on their own. I was truly and entirely myself. 

But the space and people that had supported and assisted in the laying of the foundation, the ones I thought were safe, became unsafe. The ground encompassing my foundation began to quake. It could no longer support me. So I hefted that foundation and everything laid upon it to another location. One that wasn’t prepared for the relocation. 

What had felt beautiful and whole, began to feel haunted and flawed. Like a restaurant that thrives, so the owners open a second one in another location and it…flops. Like regional fare that is passed over outside of the place it originates from. 

I’ve felt lost and unseen. Stuck inside my “shell”. 

I’ve inspected the foundation and house I had built on top of it over and over. Was it what I thought it was? Was I mistaken? Was it an illusion? Did I see a castle where a haunted house existed? Was my foundation flawed and the structure built upon it shabby? 

I think the answers are: it was what I thought it was. I was not mistaken. It wasn’t an illusion. I saw a house, not a castle and it isn’t haunted. My foundation wasn’t flawed and the structure isn’t shabby. 

I just can’t allow other people's opinions and perception of my usefulness to define the reality of those things. Because they don’t.

Sometimes people just don’t have experience with something so they don’t recognize what they have. Maybe the people who first discovered coal didn’t know its purpose. Maybe it took a while for cotton to reach its full potential as a useful material. It took a while for Cincinnati chili to grow on me. Now I look forward to a visit to Skyline. 

It’s just taking a while for people to recognize the design and value of my foundation, structure and the amenities and resources they provide. Or maybe the people in the place where I moved won't ever find me valuable or useful. That also doesn't change it, and it doesn't mean they are bad. Not everything resonates with every place or person. There are no Skyline Chili's in Texas, and that's okay.