“So, Mary, did you go to school right here in town?”
“Tell us how you and Mike first met, were you high school sweethearts?”
“You grew up right here, but you don’t know many people from around here….?”
I know this is the point in whichever light conversation I’m having while meeting someone new that I have a choice to make. I’m a pretty good discerner at whether or not someone actually wants to know anything about me, or whether they’re just making polite conversation. If the latter is true, I shake my head, shrug my shoulders and say, “It’s a long, long story!” If instead, I see that they really do want to know more, then I begin to rack my brain for ways to put it all in order.
I don’t have some sensational life story that you’d find in a New York Times Best Sellers novel, but in the past 6 years I’ve come to realize that my upbringing is fascinating to most people. Should I choose to open my life storybook and tell someone new about the place I grew up in, it will inevitably lead to an hour long conversation, this new person staring at me with ever-widening eyeballs, an ever-present “Whhhaaaaaatttt?” forming on their lips, and the question I almost always am asked…”Why didn’t you leave?” Hey, at least I always have a great conversation starter in my back pocket, right?
Another thing I have been told over and over is that I should write a book. First of all, I don’t have time for that. I’m a mom of three kids, ages 8 and under. I co-own a performing arts school that I teach in, founded a locally-touring arts company that I choreograph and dance with, work a part-time job at a cafe, and try to keep up with what all of that entails. Finding time to write and publish a book sounds like trying to climb Mount Everest in flip flops. Not to mention, I have ZERO training as a writer. I have always enjoyed the process of writing for myself, in journals, and through poetry, but if I forget a comma here, or a semicolon there, please forgive me. 🙂 I also wander off on rabbit trails often…..anyway!
Writing a book isn’t happening right now. But I did start a blog a few years ago, and this was the format that seemed to make sense when I contemplated putting all of this out there. Many times I’ve wished I could just write my life story on a t shirt for people to read so I didn’t have to repeat all of the details over and over again. Instead, I figured I would come back to my old blog, blow the dust off, and tell my story chapter by chapter.
This is MY story of growing up in a full-time Christian ministry, watching my parents pour their everything into helping troubled teenagers, living under the control of one man who governed the way everyone who worked there lived, surviving assault after assault of spiritual and emotional abuse from that man on my family, finally leaving this place in 2011, and most of all, this is my story of feeling the hand of God over my life through it all.
I stress that this is my story, and I will tell it exactly how I lived it, through my eyes. Thousands and thousands of people have come through the place that I grew up in, so many kids, teenagers, parents and staff people. Few of us can say that they were born and raised there. (I lived there from birth to age 24.) Even fewer have really shared their stories of the place. Now, MANY people have tried to bitterly air its dirty laundry, attack its “pastor,” or write posts on Facebook that would make your eyeballs fall out. I’m not doing that. I won’t share names of people or even the place itself. I won’t tolerate people who have been to this place commenting their own feelings about it. I’m simply telling my story, because it should be told. I’m not afraid of who might come after me for writing these chapters, because they are true. If anything, I’m excited to give people more perspective into who I am, and maybe why I am the way I am. I’m excited to reach people who have been spiritually abused or taken advantage of. I believe God has given me a love and a gift for storytelling, and it finally feels right to tell my own story. I’m looking forward to answering people’s questions, and maybe even have closure from all of this.
Chapter 2 will arrive as soon as I can find a way to put my story into more words! Stay tuned 🙂
