Chapter 9 ~THE FORBIDDEN THOUGHT~

During the years of 2008-2009, Mike and I settled into being married and our positions within the ministry. He worked very long and emotionally taxing hours as a boy’s dean, and I ran the girls’ school. I enjoyed teaching, and honestly felt like I learned and began to understand so much more academically as a teacher than I ever did as a student! We also now were back in the same singing group again…Mike had toured for 3 years with another group while we dated, and he was put back into my group, our original group, once we were married. It was wonderful to be back on the road together, and now we were roommates in hotels! It felt so right, and being able to be in that kind of ministry side-by-side as husband and wife was a gift. At the same time though, we weren’t teenagers anymore. By the time I was 21, I had been traveling, touring, singing and sharing for 8 years. For the first time, I started to feel like I might be ready to pass the torch on to someone else. As I’ve said before, the faces in the singing groups were always changing, with very few people being constants. Mike and I were really the only constants in our group, and now we were mature adults touring with teenagers like we once were. I began wanting to move forward and settle down. We had a lot on our plates. We both had full time jobs within the ministry, and we still toured full time. I knew that if we had a baby, something would have to give and I was ready to be a stay at home mom.
There was a problem, however. There was no way I would ever be let go from my singing group. I had already seen how other staff women who were lead singers in groups were required to keep singing and touring WITH their kids, even if they wanted out. I knew that if Mike and I ever did have children. I would be one of those women. In the spring of 2008, Mike and I decided to start trying for a baby. We didn’t tell very many people and tried not to get our hopes up. I would daydream endlessly about how it would feel to take a pregnancy test and see positive results.
I always knew that I wanted to be a mother at some point in my life, but I was never desperate for children. I actually was on some level very intimidated at the thought of being a mother. I have never babysat a day in my life. I worked occasionally in the nursery at the ministry and did not enjoy it. Babies cried as soon as I’d hold them, and I never really connected with young children. Everyone knows those people that LOVE working with children, and babies immediately calm once they hold them in their magical soothing arms. I have never been that. On some level, I was kind of terrified that I would be a horrible mother because of my lack of connection with kids and babies. Despite that fear though, I knew I wanted children and I wanted to build a family with Mike.
 In December of 2008, we were all in full swing with Christmas programs. We toured a massive Christmas Cantata every year, and it involved nearly every program kid and staff member. Because the ministry was not government-funded, it relied upon donations from supporters to keep its doors open.These Christmas Cantatas were a HUGE fundraiser for the ministry.  In those days we would do a Christmas shows in Canada, Buffalo, Watkins Glen, and 3 locations in Pennsylvania. It was a massive undertaking as we transported busses and vans hauling over 100 singers, sound equipment, Christmas decor, and merchandise to these venues. We would setup and tear down ourselves. Since my husband was a boys’ dean, he was usually put in charge of keeping track of all of the program boys at these venues. Since we were married and still very involved in singing, I went along as he drove a van and trailer to all of our shows.
Now, I had taken a pregnancy test just about every month between May and December that year, each time hoping that this would be the time I found out we were expecting. Mike and I were driving a van full of program boys way to a cantata in York, PA when I realized I was a couple of days late. Our whole giant caravan of vans and busses stopped at a Walmart parking lot for lunch, and I decided I would sneak away into the store to buy a pregnancy test. I didn’t tell Mike, and I stuffed the test away in my bag, telling myself I’d take it the next morning after we were back from the trip. I think I had read somewhere that pregnancy hormones are more detectable first thing in the morning or something. We got to the venue, set up, performed, tore down, and began the journey home. It was as exhausting as it sounds! On the way home, I started to feel cramps like my time of the month was happening after all. “Well, it was a waste to buy that pregnancy test,” I thought to myself. I even felt bad for buying it because we were always so poor…spending $15 on a pregnancy test was ALOT of money to me when we never knew if or when we’d be getting paid.
We got home in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. Poor Mike, who had driven all the way home, was also on duty to start his dorm shift at 6 am. He was up and out the door before I woke up to get ready for church. There was no rest for the weary in this place. Despite being extremely exhausted, the entire ministry did as we were told and were wherever our pastor wanted us. There was no staying home from church. People who did that would be the topic of the next staff meeting, or worse…the object of his next Sunday sermon. So, I woke up that morning and immediately grabbed my pregnancy test, even though I was pretty sure it would be another negative. I tried not to look at it while I counted the minutes, but I peeked. Two lines. TWO LINES! I could barely believe it. I felt like I was in a dream. I was pregnant! I went to church that morning and sat with Mike and my family feeling like the news was going to explode out of me at any moment. I knew I wanted to surprise Mike though, so I decided to wait until he came home from his dorm shift that afternoon. In the meantime, I asked one of my friends to borrow her maternity jeans…you know, the ones with the big elastic tops to make room for a big preggo belly. I laid them out on our bed, and once Mike came home (which felt like an eternity as I sat at home waiting) I told him to check out my new pair of jeans on the bed. It did take a few moments for him to register what was actually happening, but as the news hit him I grabbed the positive pregnancy test to show him. We were both so happy. Anyone who has ever found out that they’re going to be a parent knows that mixture of extreme happiness and fear! I was so excited, while at the same time feeling like I was climbing the steepest hill on the highest roller coaster.
Strangely enough, the lack of money in our lives didn’t really worry me right away. I have the unique perspective of growing up in this place since birth. We always had what we needed growing up, and I was kept blissfully ignorant of how hard it actually must have been for my parents to raise us with no financial security. Since we made pretty much nothing on paper, we qualified for healthcare that was completely free. I’m embarrassed to say that I was so ignorant and didn’t even realize that most people who work as much as we did actually pay for health insurance.  I even believed we were so blessed that we didn’t pay a mortgage or rent, we were blessed to qualify for free healthcare, we were blessed to receive tax returns (that we would literally pinch every penny to live off of) and we were constantly told how thankful we all needed to be that we lived this way. Even beyond being thankful, I felt like I was this “next level” kind of Christian…that because I was in a full time ministry, living with no money or “nice things” that meant that I was somehow better than Christians out there in the world. We worked so hard there, for virtually nothing. I still to this day have trouble getting over the mindset that it’s ok for people to work and give their time and energy for no pay. I guess if there’s an upside to it all, it’s that I will always appreciate any money we do have. In the early days of our marriage, I took a calculator to the store with me and would figure each item into the amount I could spend. That amount is mind-blowing to me now that I’m in the real world. I never really understood that for normal people, the money they spend is replenished. They get a paycheck at the end of the week. For us, any money we spent was gone, and it would probably be another 2-4 weeks before we got another paycheck (I was not on payroll ever, and Mike was paid about $200) and even then we had to beg for it. It did teach us to live by faith. I know that finances were one of biggest reasons for marriage problems in the ministry. Since this had always been my life, I didn’t have much bitterness about how poor we were. It was normal to me. It did, however, serve as one more thing that created a hostile environment between staff people. There were some families that got paid every week. The pastor himself was very well taken care of by supporters who gave him missionary support. He always had very nice vehicles. People he favored always seemed to have enough money. I started to realize this, and something new in my heart began to grow. Resentment. I remember coming out of the grocery store once, spending probably $50 for a week’s worth of groceries. I could only buy what we absolutely needed. I noticed another staff person in the parking lot and he had just finished loading his groceries into his car. He had so many bags, they almost didn’t fit into his car. This man was single, no wife or kids, but he was in one of the “favored families” that were on our pastor’s good list. How was it that he could afford all of that, while I struggled to pay for 3-4 bags of necessities? We had a baby on the way now. How would we live as a family of three while being paid $200 every 3-4 weeks?!
Common sense and fear started to rise up in me as I progressed further in my pregnancy. When I was around 7-8 months along, I developed a urinary tract infection (UTI). These are super painful, but not really uncommon in pregnant women. Luckily, with our insurance coverage, the doctor visits were free and most prescriptions were free as well. I went to Walmart to fill my prescription for an antibiotic and the amount came out to $1 that I had to pay out of pocket. I never had cash on me, so I swiped our bank card. It was denied. Completely embarrassed, I said there must be a mistake and moved out of line to check our bank account balance over the phone. We had something like 37 cents available. I broke down and cried at how ridiculous it was that I couldn’t afford medicine to heal an infection that cost one measly dollar. “Lucky” for me, our pastor’s son happened to be in the store at the same moment and saw how upset I was. He had plenty of money. He gave me a dollar.
It was times like these that my resentment began to into bitterness. But it was also these times that I would believe I was in sin for that bitterness. We were taught over and over again that if money mattered to us, our hearts were not in the right place. We were on the “front lines” of spiritual battle. More was expected of us, and if we allowed ourselves to become bitter at our pastor, it was the same as being bitter at God. I will never be able to explain how we didn’t just leave. You still won’t understand unless you were there. I’ve heard it said before that often, people’s view of God is sometimes influenced by their experience with their own earthly fathers. If people have abusive fathers, they often have a skewed perception of God as an angry tyrant. If they were abandoned by their father, they may struggle with feeling like God is this unreachable, absent being. I believe that much of my perception of God was linked to my pastor because sadly, he held more authority over my life than my own father. He could be your best friend and your greatest encourager. He could also rip your spirit to shreds if you crossed him. It was a constant game of trying to please him, but everyone knew at any moment you could finding yourself in his bullseye. There was no worse place to be than in that bullseye. Sadly, I often felt this way about my own Heavenly Father.
 That constant psychological link kept at bay any questioning of our pastor, and why he lived a different lifestyle than all of us. He didn’t hesitate to preach about it either. I can’t even count how many times he would explain that he had nice things because he had served God for so long. He had a particular sermon he preached often about how some Christians would be living in grass shacks in Heaven.
Yep, you read that right.
“Don’t be surprised one day when you see my mansion and you get lead by one of the angels to your grass shack because you didn’t serve God full time or enough.”
“There won’t be room for some of you at the banquet feast in God’s kingdom because your hearts weren’t in the right place. You’ll see me dining with Jesus and you won’t get a spot at the table because you worried too much about paychecks, or you left God’s will and He took his hand off of your life.”
I had friends from another staff family who had left the ministry, and several years later their mom died of cancer. I can’t count the number of times he preached to us that she died because their family left God’s will…aka, his ministry.
Another red flag that appeared for me was on a Monday morning in staff meeting. I was nearly to my due date, and I had been planning on taking time off from teaching in the school indefinitely so I could be a stay at home mom. A lot of other women did this and I was looking forward to being home with our baby for as long as I wanted. That Monday morning though, our pastor made an announcement that women in the ministry would not be allowed to be stay at home moms anymore. We needed to pull our own weight. Staying at home was backing away from our calling to those teenagers God had called us to minister to. It was taught to us there that our order of importance needed to be this: God first. Ministry second. Family third. It’s actually taken me a very very long time to realize this is wrong. However, it was effective in making sure that anyone who attempted to put the needs of their spouse or children ahead of their dorm shifts or singing trips was immediately reprimanded and told that their hearts were not in the right place. My heart sank as I realized I would get 3 months of maternity leave, and then I would be back to work in that school while traveling full time in my singing group….whether I wanted to or not.
It was a hot August day when our baby decided to start her journey into the world. To be honest, it was ROUGH. From my first contraction to the actual birth it was around 46 hours. My labor wasn’t progressing quickly enough, so I was given meds to speed up the process. I feel like every “thing that could go wrong” we heard about in our birthing classes happened to me in that labor. It was all worth it when we met our sweet Leah Rachel at 2:00 am on a Saturday morning! I would never be the same. Mike and I began navigating the waters of parenthood together, and the first few months were pretty smooth. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but it was a nice respite from working in the school at the ministry. I tried not to think about how I only had three months to stay at home before I was required to go back to work. We had a full time nursery and daycare on campus, so once my maternity leave was up, Leah would go to daycare everyday from 8:00-3:00. I was already watching and hearing about other women who resisted this new rule of not being allowed to be stay at home moms…it wasn’t going well for them. It seemed to me that people either left the ministry once they challenged our pastor on his rules, or they conceded that he was right. Maybe it was wrong for me to want to stop touring and singing full time? Maybe it would be wrong for me to leave the girls’ school and my dorm shifts so that I could be home to raise my baby? The pressure increased as time went on. It seemed like the more we grew into being a married couple, now with a family of our own, the more demanding the ministry became. The deans were now required to work night shifts, doing night watch duty. This was something that was ordinarily done by higher level program kids, but for some reason now our pastor wanted the deans to do it. It pulled Mike away from home even more than he already was, and now we had a couple of nights a week where he wouldn’t even be in bed with me all night. His work shifts varied from 3-11 pm, 5 am-3 pm, 8 am-5pm, or night watch from 11pm-5 am.
I worked in the school from 8 am-3pm every day, did one weekly dorm shift from 5-11pm, and still sang full-time in church and toured on the road. Mike and I would still load into the 12 passenger van for a 5-6 day tour…only now we had a carseat and diaper bag with us. We were so busy. I was beginning to feel how consumed your life becomes within the ministry, and there was very little time or allowance for us to do things for our family. Most days, I would get home from working and I wouldn’t see Mike until he climbed in bed at 11:00 pm. We were both exhausted in every way possible.
It wasn’t long after returning to work full time that I began to develop extreme anxiety. I have always had general anxiety problems. Most of the time, it manifested in social situations where I continuously over-analyzed myself. I always err on the side of believing people are mad at me, and I easily feel like I’m doing everything wrong. I have also always been a sort of fearful person. I’m always careful and I don’t like taking risks. As far as performance anxiety goes, I love the process of art a whole lot more than the performance aspect! I love singing and ballet equally, but I have never loved performing. Even after so many years singing and touring, I still would get bad anxiety before each show. Sometimes I would blank out on lyrics I had sung hundreds of times and wouldn’t know the words until I opened my mouth to sing them! It was the same with dancing. I will always love the process of ballet the most. I love the studio, the ritual of ballet class and the work of it. It’s a time where you must forget about every other thing going on in your life, and you become incredibly in-tuned with your body. I have never loved dancing in front of people. It almost felt embarrassing to let other people see my process….the recklessness of expressing my emotion with my body feels vulnerable. I feel like these types of anxiety have always been a part of who I am, but the anxiety I began to have after having Leah was a whole new level.
I began to have all kinds of irrational fears. A friend would ask to hold the baby and I would pass Leah to them. I would then have a whole scenario play out in my mind of them throwing my baby into the wall or something and I would start to panic. Sometimes I would get the most horrific, graphic images in my mind and I would have to stand there and fight it all in my mind. If you’ve read every chapter till this one, you’ll remember my skills of hiding whatever I was going through in life. I settled back into my patterns of putting up that “Everything’s OK!” wall because I was ashamed. Once again, I felt like something was very, very wrong with me and I told no one. I wasn’t sleeping, I was pulling away from friends, and Mike and I started drifting apart. I was so convinced that everything had to be 100% right with Leah at all times, and if it wasn’t I would completely melt down. I worked really hard at getting Leah on a schedule so that she fed and napped at consistent times and she was actually sleeping through the night by 8 months old. I had to have some semblance of a reliable schedule with work and all the traveling we did. But if just one thing happened that altered my schedule for her, I would panic. If she missed a nap, it would be the end of the world. If she cried when I was out shopping with her, I would think that everyone in the store thought I was a horrible parent and I would leave a full shopping cart there and get out as fast as I could. I started to feel like a crazy person.
I knew it was affecting Mike. It was literally like I hadn’t relaxed in a solid year. I was always really high strung, and he was really the only person who saw it since I can’t hide everything from him. I started having more irrational fears that I could hardly hide. We would travel to church or visiting family and when Mike drove I would be convinced we were going to collide with other cars. It sounds so stupid when I explain it, but I was so convinced that horrible things were going to happen, all the time. I would ride out times of sweaty palms and chest pain in total silence, never letting anyone see what was going on inside me. I was fearful about being fearful, if that makes sense. I didn’t want anyone, including Mike, to see what I was going through, but it was exhausting hiding it. The more I sank into this hole of anxiety and resulting depression, the more the ministry was demanding from both of us. Between our jobs, we rarely saw each other so when we did get to spend time together as a family, we didn’t want to fight. It was tense though. I felt crazy and he wondered where in the world his wife went.
Mike was having more and more responsibility as a dean, and he eventually needed to stop touring with our singing group. That was really hard for me. By that time, I had virtually no ambition to sing and travel anymore. I was a young mom who hardly saw her husband, and I now had to take my baby with me on the road alone. Sleeping in hotels, long van rides, setting up and performing in a school, tearing down and going to a detention center and doing it all over again, then going back to the hotel….I didn’t want to do it anymore. Worst of all, I felt spiritually guilty for all of it. The more I sank into this state of being panicked all the time, the more I felt farther away from God being able to help me. I allowed shame to once again convince me that I needed to fix myself before coming to Him. I was working day in and day out pouring myself out in the name of “ministry,” but I was spiritually empty. I was afraid of being the next staff person to get my face ripped off. I was afraid of asking to be out of my singing group. I was afraid of my marriage being strained because we never had time to properly communicate. I was afraid of ruining our kid. And I think on a much deeper level than I even realized, I was afraid of this being my life.
Nothing rocks a person’s world more than having children. The husbands, wives, and parents in this ministry bore a constant burden that I was only now beginning to feel the weight of. This burden manifested itself in different ways for everyone. The truth is that the atmosphere there created a constant, subtle erosion on families. The man over us had a broken family and used his ministry and message of “serving God full-time” as a means to control and break other families. Something had to give.
 I remember clearly the very first time I thought about leaving. This seemed like the forbidden thought. I was in the bathroom of our house and I thought about what life would look like 20 years down the road. It felt like the heaviest weight on my heart to imagine my kids being teenagers in this place. The trouble was, I had been so trained to counsel people immediately once they had thoughts of leaving the ministry. I believed and told people about the dangers of leaving full time ministry. As if I didn’t have enough anxiety already, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving and risking being out from under God’s hand. Looking back now, I can see how God knew me so well. I can see how His light poked through my own darkness, because I remember vividly that moment when I thought of leaving for the first time. Even as I felt a fear that was not of God, I also felt this strange sense of peace. It was as if God met me there, and I knew that wherever we ended up, He would not leave us. I was in darkness, but it felt like it was almost time for the sun to start rising.
That was a moment I would have to cling to as things would begin to fall into place that would be our stepping stones to freedom. My next chapter will finally tell of how we left this place…the only place I had ever known. It is by far not the end of my story, though. It was really just the beginning.

Until next time 🙂