Verily, after hardship comes ease. ~ Quran 94:6.
What we are not told is that the “ease” after we leave an abusive church (or other situation) may be awhile coming. It does not (usually) happen the moment we walk out the door of that church.
I think the “ease” comes once we can start to forgive people for what they did to us and our families. That can take a long time sometimes. For me I am still working on it. Distance in time between me and the time I left (November 2012) is making things easier. Once I stepped away from that group of people and got my mind started thinking without the United Pentecostal Church glasses on, things seemed better.
One thing for me was that the last couple of years I was thinking “Where is Jesus in all of this?” I was losing sight of my Savior and was believing that the whole church had lost sight of him too. Preaching seemed to be all about hair, clothes, standards, tithing. Things that have nothing to do with salvation. I realized that I had bitten into the apple of a belief system that was not healthy. Gossip was rampant. People strived to be like the Pastor or his wife, not like Jesus. It was automatically thought that if you leave the building, The Church, you are leaving God. Because God can only live in a church where “All the Truth” is told. It isn’t so.
I left to reconnect with God. To see Him the way I did before I joined this cultish religion. Once out of the confines of a place I once thought of as a safe haven, a place to be with God, I discovered once again that He is everywhere all at once all the time.
Yes, things are getting easier day by day. But I still have more of my road to travel.
