I am an “outskirts millennial” and used to think that people running around constantly on the phone must be really important, cool people. How I desired to be special! Beginning to watch “Homecoming” on Amazon Prime, triggered memories I had long forgotten. Oh how Julia Roberts character just craved to be part of something meaningful! Oh how the Colin character reminds me of the leader of my cult. He would call her constantly at work and at home, and while he was multitasking a birthday party of his kid, managed to smugly impose himself into her life, and finally tear her apart while he was at a dinner gathering.
How excited I was to get my first cell-phone contract set up when I started out as a student in a new city. Back then in 2005, they offered both a landline and a cell-phone number from one phone, that was cool. What freedom I had found! Now my mind wanders and imagines how the leaders could have never taken over my life like they did, had I not owned a cell. Owning a cell placed me in a prison.
While my starved for attention self enjoyed and welcomed frequent phone calls at first, I realized quickly that with a call or a text came an interference or a request. Whatever I had planned, had to be interrupted, and most often canceled, because via phone I would be informed about an upcoming trip to some special place, or town, or that I needed to show up at the leaders house asap. As a student, I had flexibility and time on my hands but this level of assumed consented spontaneity made a social life difficult. Not showing up was not an option.
At first, excitement and a sense of adventure made the interruptions to my day fun. Eventually, the men would go off on their own (women asked too many questions about what’s appropriate behavior and reported men’s behaviors back to the wives at home), leaving us damsels to ourselves. At times the leaders called to confide in me or ask for feedback but that changed after my first year with them.
With less phone contact came a new level of phone calls. Tormenting phone calls. Someone had passed on something I said or had done, or the leader had witnessed it himself, and I would get a personal admonishing phone call session, leaving my insides turned upside down wherever I had been naive enough to pick up the phone.
Like that one day I was going to see a professor about an exam, and while waiting in the hallway, I was called and told that on my sister’s wedding day there would be a mandatory seminar that I had to pay 100Euro for to attend. Of course I mentioned my sister’s wedding but the leader, busy and sweet, shrugged the wedding off saying, “I guess you won’t be able to go then.” My heart sunk so deep into my stomach, I had to compose myself before meeting the professor. Or that other time, awhile before this event, when I was visiting my sister who lived about 6 hours train ride away from me, and I was called late at night and told after I arrived to come right back the next day, even though I had planned a longer stay.
Or that day my fiancé and I went out looking for an engagement ring. The night before, we, like real adults, had been invited to dinner at the co-leaders house. The casual dinner conversation, in which I shared my dreams to do charitable work all over the world, came to haunt me as my comments apparently warranted an admonishment for not being focused on the town God had placed (imprisoned) me in. I still remember that moment, having stepped outside the jewelry store to pick up the phone feeling on top of the world and not expecting anything could change that, looking into my reflection of the store window. Gazing back from the laid-out jewelry to myself in the window reflection, I felt like a fool and a fake for the life I yearned to live for God was ironically out of reach because God said so. It broke me.
Now I know that all these moments (and so many more) were spiritual assaults. Their actions are the definition of unhealthy, intrusive, manipulative, controlling leadership. My freedom as a mere human being was taken away from me. My free time, my family, my future, and my identity were taken over. Rather than helping me discover who and how God had made me, they thought they knew, and they surely weren’t wrong. I had given people whom I trusted the power to speak into my life in the name of God and that was the result. They redirected my steps. They decided where I would go. Until the phone call that would be the last. Then they told my husband and me to go away. That is my favorite phone call of them all.
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