I’ve been away from writing for a little while, and what has gone on with me in the meantime has pushed me full force back to this laptop, bursting with the best part of my story that’s yet to be told.
I believe this is the most important chapter I’ve ever written. I’m writing specifically to any of you who were in this ministry with my family. I’m writing to you if you have ever been mentally or spiritually abused, or taken advantage of by legalistic people, views or churches. Lastly, I’m writing to you if you have lived life up until this point in FEAR. I know what it feels like to live through days at a time with a weight on your chest and a sinking feeling in your heart.
For the rest of you who don’t match up to that criteria, but still want to find out the end of my story (up till now, of course!) I’m happy if you don’t identify with that I’m talking about! Keep reading, and buckle up! We’ll pick up in the season of my life that I (surprisingly, given my horrendous teen years!) look back on as being the hardest time of my life.
We had just moved into our beautiful rental home after leaving that ministry. My husband had gotten a job at Woodtex, a local shed and log home building business. A huge plus to our place was that it was diagonally across from my parent’s house! I had the comfort of my childhood home right across the street, and my mom! It was that first winter in our new home that my life took a hard, sharp turn into what I now refer to as, “The Blurry Years.”
December 24th, 2011, I was 24 years old. I had Leah, a 2 year old, 40+ extra pounds on me, a husband who worked his arse off, heading to the shop at work at 6:00 am, doing hard labor and coming home shot. I also had Noah, a 4 month old, who was super fat and had JUST gotten over being the world’s most colicky baby. Our lives had gone through a dramatic change only three months prior….we had left the full-time ministry that I was born and raised in until now in the story. If you’re just now picking up my story, you can find the beginning of it in my previous chapters, 1-11. I’d recommend going back and reading them when you’ve got the time…everything will make much more sense!
Anyway, here I am…(sorry about my overuse of my fave ellipses.)…spiritually reeling from coming outside of my “bubble”and stepping into a new, totally different life. I also struggled with postpartum anxiety after having Leah, and I was just starting to try and wade my way out of that. More on that struggle to come later. We were receiving backpay from the ministry. It turned out we were not the only ones who left. I think about 85% of the staff left, and many of us had no resources or experience being out on our own. Mike had an entry-level position at his job, making minimum wage and physically working like crazy. Things were tight, but we had stable pay….something we had NEVER had before! To me, it felt insane that Mike would have a paycheck coming in every single week.
Let’s get back to Christmas Eve of 2011. I went to Walmart alone to grocery shop, which was rare and wonderful as a young mom of 2! Noah was four months old and I was finally starting to be able to exercise again and climb my second mountain of losing baby weight. When I stopped dancing in 2006, I weighed about 115 pounds. 5 years later, I was now about 150 pounds. The struggle is real.
While grocery shopping in Walmart that day, I got hit by a wave of nausea. I realized instantly that I was late that month. I was on birth control, but was in the middle of switching to a new one, since I had stopped breastfeeding Noah. (Don’t judge me!) I beelined over to the pregnant-people aisle, and bought a test. Overflowing with anxiety, I went into the bathroom right there at Walmart and found out in that funky spot that I was going to be a mom of three……much sooner than I had ever planned.
I drove home crying so hard that I couldn’t see the road. Let me say something before I get accused of not appreciating the gift I was given. I know fully well that there are women who struggle for a lifetime to get pregnant, and can’t. My sister is one of them. I won’t tell her story, but I’ve seen her be absolutely heartbroken that she hasn’t been able to conceive with her husband for 12 years. It was bittersweet both times when I told her about my first two pregnancies. Again, I’m not going to tell her story, but pleas know that I know. I felt horrible about feeling horrible. I did not feel ready in any way for another baby. I was already struggling every single day to stay on top of everything. I was often depressed, leaving dirty dishes for days in the sink, and mountains of laundry to grow in every corner. I was always almost to the point of breaking down, it seemed. I was obsessive about feeding, play and nap schedules for the kids. If they cried instead of napping I would feel a rage like I’d never felt before. It wasn’t a rage at them, it was my anger at having to be in a circumstance that I couldn’t control. They’d now miss their nap, and thereby ruin the entire day. (Or so said my maniacal brain!) The schedule would be shot, and I’d be stuck home alone with a whiney, overtired 2 year old and a cranky and teething 4 month old. I was exhausted to my bones. I see now how much more I could and should have reached out to my mom then! I am me, though. And when I get overwhelmed and depressed, I hide away and don’t ask for help.
I honestly don’t remember much about that Christmas, or my pregnancy with Claire, for that matter! I remember being stunned that I would have three August babies…for some odd reason I only ever got pregnant in November! My babies were born on August 15th, 25th, and 27th! I also remember craving only ice and the smell of basements, ha!! But by the time Claire came into the picture, I had accepted the idea of another baby joining the roost. Mike had stayed with the same company for nearly a year at that point, and my mom and I had reopened her old ballet school. I’ll do a whole different chapter someday about my story of redemption with dancing! Anyway, we reopened the school together, this time as a multi-arts school. I was thrilled to be dancing again, and I loved teaching so much. My body was very, very different, obviously! But we, uhh, made sure that Claire was our last baby…;) so I felt ready to finally get some semblance of my old body back, with no more surprises!
Once more, I was in the trenches. I was now 25, with Leah who’d just turned 3, Noah, who’d just turned 1 (and was too fat to walk), and Claire, a newborn. Yeah. YEAH! Now you can see why I call them the blurry years. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. My need to have control and security in my life died a slow and painful death as I couldn’t possibly have it the way I wanted it all the time. The kids ran my every waking moment. This was not always a bad thing! Lemme just say that my kids are freaking awesome kids. They all have magnificent senses of humor and imagination. Those days had some of the sweetest times I know I’ll never get back. I nursed Claire while I watched Noah learn to walk, and Leah start to become a little person. We had picnics in the yard and played with our neighbors chickens, who freely roamed all over the place. I’d pull all three of them in the wagon and take long walks along our quiet country road. I felt like I had my body back to myself in the way every mom who has ever had their last baby feels. I soaked up the moments as much as I could because I knew there would be no more new babies to repeat it with.
I’m going to be transparent! Before I had kids, I seriously feared that I wouldn’t like being a mom. I never babysat once when I was a teenager. I’ve never liked to hold babies, and I had never had a special connection with a kid…ever. I got married at age 20, and was really immature in alot of ways. I had only begun learning how to live as a married adult when we started having babies. I was messy, lazy, and anxious. I had no idea who I was. That usually wouldn’t be the recipe for the world’s greatest mom. Despite all of that, I loved my kids so much! What a relief! It was a truly an unconditional love, and good thing, because those years brought me to some seriously low places as I grew up and learned about myself.
At least I was finally out of that ministry. My “pastor” could no longer control a single thing about my life, or so I thought. I should have foreseen how hard it would be to get him out of my head. I was out of my lifelong environment where I was constantly insecure and on the verge of getting into trouble. Still, I was living in fear and anxiety was the loudest feeling I had most of the day. My pastor was gone, but his thousands of sermons remained in my mind. Being totally blinded by fear, I was left victim to the accusing voice of condemnation. I had moments of wondering if he had been right all along, and we had just made the biggest mistake of our lives. What if we had left the will of God, and now we would struggle forever out here, in God’s silence forever. We heard from people who had stayed in those early days that our ex pastor had predicted that he would stand over our children’s graves one day…our consequences for leaving the will of God (his ministry).
Those thoughts wouldn’t stay long in my mind, though, since I truly do have a relationship with God. Even through the thick fog of anxiety and depression, I knew I had felt utter peace and love from God when we left that place. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of someone always being mad at me. Condemnation was always eating away at me. I began to have mild panic attacks in the car, being SURE every minute of a long drive when Mike was at the wheel that we were going to get into an accident. Mike, I’m sure, was wondering what the heck had happened to that girl he fell in love with years before. His frustration over our messy, oppressed-feeling house fueled my insecurity, making me believe the lie that Mike hated me. I lashed out at him, and I lashed out at the kids. I look back now, and I see how fear began to taint every single thing I did. I had crawled out of one hell, only to realize that the same demons who had haunted me in one place were going to follow me wherever I went. Even my dreams weren’t safe. I started having dreams where I would beat my kids. I’d wake up from the nightmares, shaking and petrified.
I told you I was going to be transparent. It sucks to tell you all this. I would love to say that I left that place and immediately saw clearly who I was spiritually. I’d love to say that my pastor was the reason I had become an anxious fearful Christian and person in general. If that had been the case, I would have ceased being anxious the moment I left. It wasn’t my pastor that had filled my head with lies about myself and my God. It was evil. It was the Accuser, trying to make me believe that God was always on the verge of being angry with me, that I was just one sin away from earning His consequences. That consequence be my kid getting cancer, or Mike dropping dead at work..who knew? All because of my anger I couldn’t get under control. All because of my sin. That Accuser manipulated my pastor to spread His lies to good hearted people.
Why?? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why did God, when I was trying to serve Him and please Him every day of my life, allow me to believe a lie about Him? Why did my parents come to a ministry to work nearly their ENTIRE lives at, with little to no pay, loving and trusting God with their whole hearts, only to be in their 50’s and 60’s with no credit, no money, and the threats of being kicked out of their ministry-owned home…the only home we had ever had as a family?? (That’s another whole story)
Where in the world was God, you may ask? We were all serving Him full-time! I don’t have some earth-shattering explanation of why God “allows” bad things to happen. God originally created everything to be perfect, and I know that Evil ruined that. But Evil seems to forget that even it, God created. Our Enemy was once a beautiful creation…an angel! Still, God wrote this story. We are all His story. Even as Evil was born, God had already written its Defeater. God set the stage, gave Evil its time to have some control, and has allowed thousands and thousands of years to pass in the meantime. That sounds a bit dismal until you learn that God may give a smidge of control to Evil for the time being, but He has this special super power of being able to turn EVERY. SINGLE. THING. our enemy corrupts, into something even more redeemed and beautiful than it was before it was ruined. I imagine this drives the enemy crazy.
No one wants to acknowledge the degree to which Evil has manipulated people through THE CHURCH. It makes sense that our enemy would consider it the highest priority to prevent us from discovering that this whole story of God and His glorious, romantic pursuit of us is in fact true! Number One: Keep them blind and believing God does not exist.
If he cannot accomplish that, and you happen to be someone born or called into a ministry that is all about God…I wonder what his plan would be, then? I think it goes something like this. Blind Them. Blind them all. Preachers preach about a God who is nothing but a judge, constantly offended at our human condition.
“Ahh, but He is good!” they preach.
“If you can live by faith, keep yourself unspotted by the world, serve Him, win souls for Him, tithe 10%, and sing in church every week, He will reward your obedience with blessings.”
However, if you go too many days without reading your Bible, watch an R rated movie, or leave Christian “service,” your disobedience will inevitably bring consequences. You will find yourself a sinner in the hands of an angry God, so to speak.
Yes, I believe if Evil cannot win by keeping us from the knowledge of there being a God, it makes sense that he would then distort our perception of that God. This is where spiritual abuse comes into the picture and we get to the crux of the matter and the whole point of this tiny, low budget blog.
I pray with all my heart that every single staff member and staff kid that has ever been in that ministry I grew up in will see this blog chapter.
You guys….we’ve been lied to. It wasn’t our pastor, I actually feel pity for the guy. The only thing I fear nowadays is the thought of becoming as blind as he is. What could the enemy want to blind us to so badly? I’ll tell you if you’re ready to hear. And don’t assume I think I know it all, I literally just discovered this two weeks ago, and learning one simple truth changed me completely. I know I can get over-dramatic sometimes, but I have lived the past ten or so days, and I’m not insecure anymore. I haven’t felt anxiety, which for me….well, if you know me, you know that’s not the norm. I haven’t slipped into a depressed lazy streak, where I don’t want to do the things I love doing.
Here’s what I learned and what I’ve been getting at for the last year and a half that you’ve been reading this chapter.
The church itself has been influenced by Evil, and it happened to us. It was very severe to people like me, who only had one pastor, one main source of teaching to my whole family about who God was, and who we were as His children. It happens to millions of other Christians too who grow up in churches pushing their legalistic views until they have their congregations shaking in their boots, terrified of sinning or making a mistake that would reap condemnation and consequences. They preach that your life will consist of a never-ending cycle of doing and earning. Backwards.
A few months ago, I realized that I viewed God just like I viewed my old pastor. By the end of my years in that ministry, I had given up on trying to always be on his list of people he favored…I wanted to be invisible to him. It seemed like every time I would make eye contact with him, he would inevitably find something wrong with me. See the correlation? I realized that I felt like that about my God….and that couldn’t be right. I dove deep in prayer and begged that if He wasn’t in fact {that}…that He would show me who He really is. I begged, actually. Truthfully, I was starting to wonder what the point of all of this was. I couldn’t possibly live “right enough” for Him. I was so conflicted and tired of spending FAR too much time in my own head.
Guess what! If God’s people seek Him for truth, ANY truth, He will give it to them! If my kids asked me for food would I give them a stone to eat? Of course not. If we as fallible humans know how to treat our children, how much more will God give the gift of truth-seeing to those who ask Him for it?! Yeah…Matthew 7:11. 🙂
God will not allow you to be blinded by lies if you ask to see the Truth. So He showed me the truth about Him, and thus the truth about me. I had believed the lie that God was not perfect love. My perception of God was a love that was conditional on me making Him happy. I may not have ever admitted that then, but I see now that I believed that. Believing that produces such a sense of depression, lostness, and general hopelessness, because we are human! We can’t always be perfect. (I hope some of you are identifying with me, here.)
Everyone’s own blinding lie is different. But the Truth it’s blinding us to is the same for all of us! Great news! Here’s the TRUTH: Go grab a Redbull or something if you’ve been fading up until this point, I promise I’m getting to the important part! Freedom!
God is Infinite, no? He is complete and whole, pure Light, and perfect Love. He wouldn’t be God if he wasn’t. He cannot be threatened by Evil. Maybe you don’t believe that…but I believe He wrote this story, including the ending, where He already decided the fate for Evil. Darkness does not threaten Him…darkness is only a shadow. Here is a whopping truth that made my head spin…my sin does not threaten or “hurt” God in any way. My sin hurts ONLY me. I believe it saddens God to see us living in sin and our resulting blindness, He hurts for us, as our loving Father…but He Himself is not hurt in the least. He is infinite and cannot be threatened. Remember way back when I mentioned that He had already written the Defeater of Evil into the story, even in the beginning? That was Jesus. When He died, God sealed His promise…the promise that the whole Old Testament points to. Why did Jesus say “It is finished” right before He died, if it was not in fact, finished?!
When He came back from the dead, Jesus did what no other religious figure ever did. He defeated death! God raised Him back to life, and through that, offered redemption and new life to all of us. When we accept that redemption, Jesus said (over and over) that we would know that God was in Him, and He was in God…and that He was in US! Through salvation, we are made righteous, holy, free, blameless, perfect in the sight of a loving and just God. This is NOT our doing, but this was His Promise all along! His Good News was not dogma and religion that leaves its people feeling just as lost and hopeless as nonbelievers. No, we are forgiven and blameless in His eyes.
It is only through the Accuser and his lies that we become blind and think we are anything less than utterly loved and spotless to God. When we believe lies, we walk in darkness. We feel lost, confused, keeping record of all the wrong done to us, and living in in constant judgements of everyone and their perceived offenses against us. We are then blind to the best news ever…that we aren’t simply Clark Kent, we are Superman! And we have been ever since the day we experienced salvation. We have only forgotten we could fly and walk on water.
This all became clear to me within the past few weeks as God orchestrated a bizarre string of events that helped me unlearn the lies. All of a sudden, it just clicked. I know who I am. I have “known” alot of this my whole life. But, if knowing something means to really experience it, then I have not known it. All of that Infinite power that is God, not bound to the systems of this world, was given to me. My heart is not dead, it’s alive and new in Christ, and that gives me constant access to that power. I can personally say I’ve witness that now-unbound power at work in me lately. I have joy I’ve never had before, that isn’t dependent on my ever-changing circumstances. I’ve had true peace, and have not been resentful towards anyone…even my road rage is gone!
I know I am still bound to this life, and I will perhaps yell at my kids again. I’ll mess up and be temporarily blind again…I’ll sin. But we have grace covering our offenses, if we’ll only accept it! No need anymore for condemnation and shame.
Up until this point, I have been a girl who lived in conflict. I knew God, I loved Him, I love my life. But I have struggled terribly…as we all have, if we’re being honest. A song I know goes, “Hallelujah, we are free to struggle, but we’re not struggling to be free.” We’re already free. It’s done.
The only effort anyone who calls themself a Christian should be putting forth, should be the constant effort to remember who we are. We don’t have to wait to be made whole in Him, we already are! We’ve forgotten who we are. Our identity is the gift God gave us to get through this life. Most don’t remember the gift in the first place.
I remembered. And that simple act opened the windows and doors of my heart, it flushed out every bit of fear, and that little girl who always felt unworthy and disappointing was gone. Certain lies have tried to come back to haunt me, but my mantra over the last few weeks has been “Let me see truth…don’t let me be blind again.”
I can confidently say, that girl is gone. She’s been replaced by a woman who knows exactly who she is. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. The difference I’ve felt lately is only Christ in me, who is now able to move freely and help me learn.
If you related to any of this, the solution is incredibly simple. Ask your Father to show you Truth. It may be painful to see the lie…it takes a raw and ready heart. But then you will see clearly, and you’ll then know exactly who you are, too. Forgiving does not lead to freedom. It’s the other way around! Believing the truth about myself has produced true forgiveness in my heart towards my pastor and anyone else that hurt me there.
I am just one more who can see now…one less person for the enemy to keep blind. I bet he hates it. You can be next. Please believe me that Evil can do what feels like burning our souls to ashes, and God can make beauty from those ashes! He can heal every broken thing, and write a new ending to our stories…one that is a little messy with lots of plot twists, but ultimately one that He is beyond proud of.
Thank you for reading this. It probably took forever for you to finish! I know my heart, and I know that I want as many people as possible to read this if they have been spiritually abused. If that’s you, please share this. I don’t ask because I want recognition, but because I know FAR too many people living blind. If you were in this place and grew up with me, I have a special heart for you. I pray everyone else can find this feeling I have now. I am also free to chat with anyone who wants to continue the conversation…message me please! And help me spread this little message.
Thanks for reading, friends.
Until next time 🙂