I lived in fear – fear to the point of physically shaking and getting sick – for several years after I realized something was really terribly wrong at my former church. Doctors told me something was creating too much stress in my life. I thought surely I could make things better if I ‘just held on.’ I was stalked at church. I thought once people really knew, they’d stop it. They just laughed. I even heard a sermon that specifically told me it was ok to leave and I STILL stayed.
I thought if I just kept my head down and kept a low profile, everything would work out. I was in THE Church, after all. If I just prayed, just had faith, just trusted God, just repented and asked God to change me to fit in the church, everything would be OK. God wanted me to go to church, surely. He surely wanted me to go to the RIGHT church, to maintain a good witness by staying there. Surely he’d fix any problems and would ‘fight my battles if I just’ [shut up and did nothing]. It was easier to do nothing and stay than to face leaving and all that entailed (shunning, additional gossip, loss of a way of life even if that way was killing me).
And then there were the questions. ‘What if I’m wrong?‘ ‘What if the real problem is there’s something wrong with me?’ Surely I wouldn’t be so stressed or deal with depression, anger, fear and so forth if there wasn’t something wrong with me.
What if I was wrong? What difference would it make? Is it ever really wrong to leave a place that is unhealthy? Leaving meant getting away from the situation that was harmful to my health and well being. How would taking care of myself be wrong?
Even greater than the self-doubts were the other concerns. I thought I faced huge losses if I left. I wouldn’t be able to marry someone with my beliefs (not that I was able to find anyone I’d want to marry in the church). I would lose all of my friends (or acquaintances. In what life are people who stop speaking to you because you stop going to a certain building considered friends? Real friends don’t stop speaking to you because you don’t go to their church, anymore than they’d stop speaking to you if you stopped shopping at Wal-Mart.) And I’d lose my self image, that of the faithful super-Christian that would keep going to that church no matter how bad things got. (After I left, I realized it was self image and not a “witness,” because to those who were not attending, going to that church was NOT a good witness.)
In comparison… I’m dealing with a neighbor’s newly planted bamboo. It spreads quickly by underground rhizomes. You don’t know it’s invaded until plants start popping up, and once the rhizomes are there, it’s very hard to remove them. He should have installed a rhizome barrier or sand trap around it, or planted it in a container. He refused. It will cost me several thousand dollars to stop it, but at least I can stop those roots. If I don’t, the cost of getting it off my property once it’s there is even more… and the cost of the damage it can do is even greater. The neighbor’s response is he likes it and I can just mow everything in my yard off to stop it from growing all over my yard – my flower garden, my shrubs, my trees… I can mow them.
Churches plant invasive thoughts and expectations in our minds that may look nice on the surface but are insidious in reality in our lives. And they tell us to just keep smiling, just keep acting as though everything is fine, and teaching us to take care of the surface but allowing the roots to continue invading our lives. So we cope, at least awhile, by putting time and expense into keeping those “roots” at bay while they shrug and say it isn’t their problem.
And so, OK, I’m not moving. But I am stopping the roots. There are ways I can keep his stupidity a certain space from my house. There’s no way I could sit in a church that kept telling me any problems in the church must be ‘just me.’ There is unfortunately no root barrier for words or judgmental attitudes.
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