We left off on what was easily the best day of my life, my wedding day. That day was May 5th, 2007, and I was 20 years old. My life was about to change in more ways than I could have counted. After Mike and I returned home from our week-long honeymoon in Breckenridge, Colorado, it felt like my life as an adult had officially begun. Looking back now, I see how much of a kid I still was. I had lived at home with my parents until the day I was married, and now I was moving into a home of my very own. Our first “home” was a two bedroom apartment in the boys’ dormitory, right on campus of the ministry. The apartment was separate from the actual boys’ dorm…but by no more than a door that opened to a hallway. Many times I would leave our apartment for work in the morning, and the hallway door would be open. I’d be awkwardly greeted by program boys ironing their shirts or roaming the dorm hallways….fun. Still, I loved that little apartment. In the months leading up to me moving in, Mike and I fixed it up the very best we could. We painted walls, renovated the bathroom, and tried to put homey touches here and there. The early days of marriage were wonderful. From the moment we were married, it just felt right. It felt right to finally live together, and after the hell we had been through in our dating years, it felt like Heaven that we could spend as much time as we wanted together and no one could hurt us.
Once a couple begins living together though, you enter into a whole new realm of knowing each other. Something I really struggled with for a long time was how to keep a home. Anyone who knows my mom knows that she is essentially Martha Stewart. For some reason, I did not inherit her love of cooking, cleaning, baking, gardening, ect. I will say plainly that I am a mess, a hot mess! (In recovery now) Mike, however, is a neat freak. Before I moved into his apartment, everything was always spic and span and there was a place for everything. I literally hadn’t even done my own laundry yet or kept my room consistently clean….and now I was a wife! So needless to say, I had some growing up to do.
More of that growing up was finding my way as a new staff member of the ministry. All of my life, I had been the “staff-kid,” sort of there by default. But now, I was an actual staff member. I told you that when I was 18 and had graduated from our private high school, I did want to work in the department that booked tours for our singing groups. However, they needed help in the program school one day and recruited me. I continued to work as a teacher’s aide there for the next year. In the spring of 2007, I was 19 when I learned that the teacher who I worked under was leaving the ministry. Bad terms, of course. Our principal sat me down and told me that I would take over as the head teacher come Fall. I was gobsmacked. I was only 19! This meant that I would be in charge and answer for around 60-75 program girls between the ages of 13-21. Let me give you a little background on the school there:
The program girls all went to school in one big room. The room had individual cubicles that lined each wall, where each student would sit. We used the same Christian curriculum that I had graduated from. It was designed to be done in a way where students essentially “taught themselves” and worked through individualized subject workbooks. Anyone out there familiar with PACES?! If you completed 12 Math workbooks ( It took about 2 weeks to complete one) you would achieve 1 Math credit. As the teens worked at their own pace, on various subjects throughout the day, the school had school staff in the room to assist and answer questions when a student needed help. I was made the head teacher, and I was responsible for the education of these teenagers, in every subject. There was usually 1-2 other teachers that were aides, and it was up to us to be able to help anyone with any level of any subject. Once a teen entered the program, I would give them a diagnostic test to see where they placed. Most kids between the ages of 14-21 would diagnose at around 5th grade. So many were former dropouts and hadn’t cared about school for years. That was a huge challenge. Sometimes I would have to place someone in 4th Grade Math, 6th Grade English, 8th Grade Social Studies and Science, and 3rd Grade Spelling. It was a challenge having such a crazy teacher/student ratio…75:2!!! Another hard thing was the fact that most of these kids hated school and wanted nothing to do with it. And there I was…having just graduated, really, and being put in charge of all of it. I did end up enjoying it though. The summer of 2007 was right after Mike and I married, and I knew I was going to be the head of the school. I spent the whole summer repainting and improving my school room. The room itself was a massive rec room in the basement of an administration building. Above us was the chapel and the cafeteria. I did enjoy those early years of teaching. I realized I am totally suited to be a teacher. I love helping people understand things. I love the challenge of teaching the same concept to different people in different ways, and discovering how individual people learn.
The first year of being staff in this place went smoothly. After three months of living in the dorm apartment, Mike and I were even given a staff home off campus. The ministry purchased several homes in the area, and staff families would be given these homes to live in rent free. Staff also didn’t have to pay electric, water, or heating bills. If families even wanted to eat each meal on campus in the cafeteria, they could. SO MANY expenses were covered. Sounds great, right? All of that came with the fact that the staff rarely were ever paid, despite being hired with the promise of pay. I never really understood this as a kid. I never knew just how poor we always were, also because my mom had her ballet school. That was really the only source of income my family ever had, which was more than most of my friends. Now that I was grown and staff myself, I started to learn more about the inner workings of staff people’s lives. I was odd in a sense that I had never known life apart from this place. I honestly did not comprehend how people (out in the world) got paid every week at their jobs.
At this place, there was alot provided for you. This is where the KOOL-AID starts to factor in. The pastor and the ministry would tell its staff how lucky we were to have housing and utilities paid for, and that we were ungrateful if we questioned the system. They did have a payroll for staff, but nobody ever knew when they would be getting paid. If people complained about the lack of pay, we were told our hearts were not in the right place, and if you count up the cost of all they paid for in regards to housing, it would even out to a generous paycheck. Yes…..but people still need money to live. My own parents lived this my whole life. I never knew it, but there were times my mom couldn’t buy diapers. There were times they simply could not make car payments. There was no money.
Now, I’m not even going to get into the corruption of use of funds at this ministry. The ministry did need supporters to exist, and the pastor was VERY good at using the stories of his “kids” to get people to donate to support the teenagers. The truth is that very little of that money actually went to the teenagers. Most of it went to ministry bills, and to the pastor himself. Staff knew it. It further created an atmosphere of confusion and bitterness. Staff would go sometimes 6 weeks without receiving a single paycheck and watch as the pastor bought new cars or took people to dinner and bought steak dinners for everyone, because he could. He preached that someday, when we all had served God as long as he had, we would have these blessings too. Remember that this type of environment was the only one I had ever known. I didn’t think it was odd that I was never put on payroll. Once married, Mike was on payroll and on paper was supposed to make around $200 per week. He worked around 60-70 hours per week. Again, totally normal to me. I was so brought up on the preaching Kool-Aid of my pastor telling me that we were actually so much luckier than the rest of the world. We had no housing costs. We had no costs of living, really. Unless we wanted to maybe go do something, like a vacation, or buy a car, or you know…live. It certainly kept us all there so no one left much. And I actually felt bad for that outside world that didn’t have a man who cared for his staff like our pastor did for us. Kool-Aid tasting good yet?
The longer people lived there, the more it severely handicapped everyone in terms of how to live responsibly, or handle and save money. Most staff were on food stamps. Nobody had good credit. No one could have a savings account because whenever we were given money, it was gone in an instant. This is such a shame too, because nearly 80-85% of the Staff in this ministry had come through the program. There was alot of emphasis on the world “out there” and how hard it was to make it. There was no teaching on being financially responsible, how to go to a job interview, ect. If someone graduated the program and wanted to leave, they would be HEAVILY counseled to stay. Remember these kids had already been burned by the world, in a sense. So it further worked in the pastor’s favor to build a staff of graduated program kids who were already uneasy about going back into the world they had come from. Looking back now, it makes sense that “outsiders” who came to work as staff as adults didn’t usually last long. They must have realized quickly that the place was run in a ridiculous way. You had pastors who never actually graduated seminary. You had counsellors who never received an ounce of training. You had principals and teachers (me) who never went to college. And at the very top of everyone….a man who was running it all exactly how he wanted it.
My life from 20-21 was not bad, really. I started to understand how things worked as a staff member. Every Monday morning, I now attended “Staff Meeting”…which was where the pastor would gather all of his staff together. We would fill each other in on what was going on in each department, and talk about the program and the program kids. It was usually however, the most unnerving part of the week for everyone. This was the time most often reserved for our pastor to tell us all how much we were completely failing. Nothing was ever good enough….as if I needed to feel like that more!
I remember one staff meeting where he tore everyone’s faces off for a good 45 minutes because staff people were standing in the aisles talking for too long before church services. Visitors from the outside who came to our church would be stuck waiting for someone to move out of the way for a few seconds, and he was LIVID. You see, what mattered most to him was his reputation. He cared more for people on the outside who might want to join the ministry and work for him, than he did for his actual staff members. He would call us stupid, incompetent, sinful, or a phrase that got tossed around alot: “Your heart’s not in the right place.”
This began the years of working there. Even though I had grown up, I was still a scared little girl. I loved God, and I wanted to serve Him full time. I knew I loved helping people and living every day for a purpose that was higher than me. A problem with my thinking, however, was that this was the ONLY place someone could do that. It’s very hard to explain. It’s like I was genuinely grateful for my abusive environment.
As much as I feared my pastor, I also believed every word he said. My view of God was what I learned from his sermons. I didn’t buy a dress without wondering if he would approve. I didn’t confide in a friend without some part of me wondering if they would tell him my secrets. The way I felt about my peers and fellow staff members was based off my own inner sounding board of what he thought of them.
Or what they might tell him about me.
Or what he might tell them about me.
Or what he might think about me and them.
Everything that ran through my mind was somehow tainted by him, and what he would think. I’ll say it again, as I often say…it’s hard to explain. I almost cared more if he thought I was a hard worker, than if I actually was a hard worker. There was no more flying under the radar, as I had done when I was younger.
It might seem like I like to talk about this man, or that I blame him for anything wrong that’s ever happened to me. I am well aware that people are exactly that, people. Human. Pastors especially are way too often put on a pedestal and held to a standard that no one can keep to. And yes, people love to see pastors fall. I know my pastor was just a man, and I don’t necessarily blame him for bad things in my life. I never held him to a standard of perfection, but that is what I felt he expected from me. And it wasn’t until I became older that I have realized he is no mere man who was misunderstood. He is not a pastor who fell into sin and yet came out the other side in humility.
He is a manipulating narcissist that believes his own lies. That is a dangerous type of person. When a person like that is free to create their own environment where they can never be challneged, twists their ideals into Scripture and preaches it from the pulpit, people will be abused. I speak for NO ONE but myself, and I understand now that I was abused. I understand that many of my patterns of thinking to this day are because of him.
That’s wrong.
The miracle through all of this was that I somehow managed to cultivate my own authentic relationship with Jesus. I don’t know why He allowed that abuse to happen. I don’t know exactly why I had to wade my way through a warped view of what a Christian’s life should look like. If you’re wondering if I’m bitter towards my old pastor, I can honestly tell you I’m not. You might not believe me, or you may think that the sole purpose of this blog is to “out” him for what he’s done. If that were the case, I would do what many others have done and I would be naming names and seeking justice. I want to tell my story. Unfortunately, I can’t do that without talking about him. I do forgive him…even though I still feel nauseous to say that. Spiritual abuse is extremely complicated, and difficult to make people understand how it feels if they’ve never experienced it.
THAT is why I am telling my story. I have received messages upon messages from former friends and ex-staff telling me thank you. They believe they can find healing and maybe grasp who God actually is. There is still so much in me that I long to be free of. The common theme of it all is FEAR. I lived in fear, and I have only recently begun to see that maybe it is possible to not live like that.
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I wasn’t going to tell this story on here, but I think I will after all. Open book, err…blog, right? The process of writing this blog has been very therapeutic for me. God has swept through my life lately, and has used all of this to grow me in unbelievable ways. I have felt braver with each chapter I publish. I started to feel like maybe the chains that man put on me were finally being broken and I can live without fear of man or my *constant* and *exhausting* self-awareness.
Well, after the release of my last chapter, I ran into him. I came face to face with my old pastor for the first time since the last time I saw him, over 7 years ago. How I have lived 10 miles from him all this time and never run into him is a miracle in itself.
But it happened. All this time, I was thinking to myself how if that were to happen at this point, I could handle it. Maybe I could even tell him what I really think. I know him well, and I have always wanted to avoid him because I know that I’d have to put on a fake face and give him a hug and pretend none of these things have ever happened. That’s just what people do with him. I don’t think I’m capable of that, so I would rather just not see him or have him see me. A few weeks ago in Walmart, however, I turned my cart into the soap aisle and ran smack dab into him. I immediately pulled my cart and back out of the aisle, but as I turned I saw that he saw me and braced myself to hear, “Why, it’s Mary Siegfried!” Strangely though, I didn’t hear it. I ducked into the next aisle and proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. My entire body shook. I felt like I actually might pass out. I was so mad at myself. Wasn’t I stronger than this after all these years? I needed to get out of there, so I bee-lined to the nearest register. To my horror, he then came into my checkout aisle behind me! Please know that ‘m not over-dramatizing this. I was panicking. And I hated myself for it. The strangest thing happened then. He actually avoided me too, and backed his own cart out, went to the one next to me, and turned his back on me. I was so confused because this is not like him. He is good at making everyone around him know that he is right, and he is superior. But here, he was avoiding me like he was afraid….of me? I don’t know if he knows about my little old blog. I don’t think he’d read it if he did. But as I stood in that checkout aisle and watched my old pastor turn his back on me and refuse to acknowledge me….I felt strength rising in me. I felt God telling me that I indeed have grown out of the scared little girl, and perhaps can become a force for good to be reckoned with. I have brought to light things that he wishes to keep in the dark, and I must keep telling my story. I got into my car and felt every emotion in five seconds. I thought things like, “I wonder if he will go tell people that he saw me and my clothes were tight. I wonder what he will preach about me now….”
Then I cried.
Finally, I prayed.
All alone in a Walmart parking lot, God met me. I immediately felt that supernatural presence and felt Him tell me, “I will heal you from this. I will take away your fear and make you stronger than you ever thought possible.” He is still writing my story. I have a feeling He is going to take me places emotionally that I didn’t think I was capable of going to. That man will eventually have no more power over me. It might not be today, but I know it”ll be someday and I can’t wait.
The story continues. The next chapter of my life would be for Mike and I to start having our own children and what it was like to raise them in this environment. I have loved writing these chapters. Through it, I can see exactly how God held me in His hand. Maybe you wonder how if God loves us, why does He allow all of these messes?!
All I can say is that knowing Jesus personally does not guarantee that He will shield you from life and its storms. The only beautiful guarantee is that you don’t face them hopelessly. I have never once been abandoned. The more I face all of the things that I would rather just pretend never happened, the more I find freedom…and the Kool-Aid continues to wear off.
If I could go back and get to erase it all….if I could just never have met that pastor…if I could erase the scars or undo the emotional abuse….I wouldn’t.
Because, I’d rather know the indescribable feeling of being set free from fear. I know that I will feel that someday. If I had never known abuse, I wouldn’t know the joy of someone really loving and caring for me. You can’t have true joy without true sadness. I’m finding this true joy more and more each day, and I hope through my story, someone else can find it too.
Until next time. 🙂
