Category: my experience | Page 22 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

We Find A Hometown

For two years my husband was mostly in military hospitals with only a few weekend passes and I was either in TLQs, staying with family or in rental homes where I could ‘work out’ the rent by fixing up the places. We had three small children and no paycheck because he wouldn’t agree to sign a release for ‘severance’ pay, even though they offered up to $200,000, which at that time was a small fortune. He was wise enough to know that in his condition that wouldn’t last long—I was ready to take the money and take our chances –he was much wiser than I. Most weeks, our only income was $40 the Red Cross would give us for food. I spent $19 on Christmas that year, buying used FP toys and cleaning them with bleach –the kids thought it was a great Christmas. 🙂

Finally, after two years, the USAF put him on TDRL and gave us two years of ‘back pay’ which was several thousand dollars. We moved to the town we lived in until recently because it was close to medical facilities and the climate and area was good for the disabled. We bought a house. Eventually, my husband was put on the permanent and totally disabled list and everything pretty much stabilized –still lots of medical junk going on even today, but life did become more normal and we had a nice income, free medical, benefits, etc.

After a long drama, we finally began to live again, albeit a very different life. Hiding his hip to foot brace under his pants and removable back brace under his shirt, few people were totally aware of my husband’s condition; the kids were always a bit surprised when someone said something about him being disabled, they truly never realized he was.

For several years we went to a pretty normal UPC (United Pentecostal Church) church. The pastor was originally from my home state of Ohio and for the most part wasn’t a bad guy. There were a few incidents, like the time I developed numerous boils. I had never had a boil in my life and these were huge painful ones that put me in the hospital. The pastor in all seriousness told me ‘some people’ felt boils were a sign of sin in one’s life. I am not kidding! We called him a ‘Job’s comforter’ hahaha. One of the doctors thought it might be something in the city water that I couldn’t tolerate and we bought a water system for the house. The boils disappeared and even though we later moved and didn’t have a water system, they never came back. We do drink bottled water and have a filter on the fridge though —just don’t ever want to go through that again!

There were upsets in the church and good friends left (we had no involvement and stayed) but things were never the same after –people became paranoid and things were always tense. We bought a nicer house in a better neighborhood and changed to a different, closer UPC church. We didn’t ask for a letter and had no issues so were pretty much accepted at the new church, but it really didn’t surprise me that we seemed to no longer exist for the friends left at the old church. We had found this to be an expected UPC experience. (Another person recently blogged about the loss of friendships.)

We stayed at this church for several years also; in both churches, we did outreach, taught Sunday School, were totally involved, but in the new church even after several years we had no real friends. Our kids were cute, bright, sweet, well behaved and popular first in their home school groups and then in public high school, winning lots of awards, being president of clubs like National Honor Society and Mu Alpha Theta, Beta Club, Key Club, etc., but inexplicably were never accepted at church. It wasn’t the standards, at this time, we followed them more closely than most of the church. It wasn’t their personalities; our house was always full of their friends, just not generally friends from church.

They were baptized and had the Holy Ghost from an early age. They went to the church camp each summer and participated in all the children’s and youth activities but were never accepted. In talking to other parents later, we found that very few kids in this large church felt ‘accepted’ and most are not in church today at all.

When my son started college on the other side of town, we moved and began attending a small UPC church that was frowned upon by churches in the area because of their lack of ‘standards’. By this time, our standards were slipping a bit, mostly because my daughter and I had done the ‘read the Bible through in a year’ program a couple of times and discovered that some of this stuff wasn’t in there. LOL

I went back to college when she did and we graduated together in 2000. My husband and I were fine with the little non-conventional church. It was kind of like a mission church with no formality and though we participated and helped out a lot, we didn’t really make any close friends, we really just didn’t have much in common with anyone, but I traveled a lot for work and we were fine with everything. The kids married and my son and his wife moved to another state to do church work at a college.

My daughter started a family and then when my grandson was two and there were no activities at the church for him, my daughter and son-in-law wanted to go to another UPC church with more kids and activities. Of course, we were sticking with the grand kids. The new church was known for very strict standards and my husband and I thought this was not a good idea, but decided to go ahead and give it a try. At first it was OK –the kids and grand kids were a great ‘catch’ for this church and though they hadn’t come with a letter of permission, it was obvious the pastor wanted to accept them (they were and are nice looking, bright, educated, successful, what’s not to like hahaha).

We knew the drill, so my husband and I just played nice and ‘attended’ when we were in town. For three years the kids tried to belong, but without changing considerably –they didn’t make the changes of no more trimming hair or pants or makeup for my daughter, no more shorts, movies, etc. for my son-in-law– so they were not allowed to participate or ‘use their talents’.

They went to ‘discipleship’ classes that the whole church was asked to attend. My husband and I passed on these –been there, done that. Finally, they were asked to ‘sign a contract‘ stating they would follow all these ‘holiness’ standards to be a ‘real’ member of this church. That was kind of the end for all of us. My husband and I weren’t even asked to sign, I think it was pretty obvious we weren’t interested.

The pastor told my husband that cutting my hair was a ‘heaven or hell’ issue. My macho husband told him that how I looked was not the business of any man but him! hahaha I really love this guy.

At this point we thought we would just trot right back to the little non-conventional church and my husband called the pastor and was assured they would be very happy to have us back. My husband told him to ‘think about it’ and then let us know; we just didn’t want to cause anyone any problems. A couple of days later this pastor called and rambled on, barely taking a breath about why we were not welcome back –I at first thought it was a recorded message because it didn’t sound real. We were having a family get together and it was hard to hear the message (my husband just brought the phone in and before we realized what was going on, it was over and the pastor had said goodbye and hung up). We all sat there kind of dumbfounded asking each other –what in the world was that all about????

My son-in-law called both pastors to try to get an answer. Both wanted he and my daughter-in-law to come back –one with definite standards requirements, the other kind of ‘who knows what’ but made it clear that neither church wanted me or my husband. OK, this was definitely new; we should have been upset or hurt or something but so far, we just feel kind of a relief that we don’t have to keep trying to make these churches work.

We have been through an awful lot in our lifetime; this blog has many blank spaces because our story would fill a book. We know who we are, we are happily married, we love God, we have great kids and adorable, brilliant, beautiful, sweet grand kids LOL. We have good friends, just mostly not in UPC. I have a great job and my husband loves traveling with me. We also have an adopted 20 year old daughter that I haven’t even discussed here –she would rotate between our house and my bio kids houses and is a happy, well adjusted, very sweet kid.

Life is good. Eventually we will find a group of people in a church we can attend and enjoy. No hurry.

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The saga continues: Looking for love in all the wrong places

So we left and headed back ‘home’. I again learned the meaning of “you can’t go home again”.

After being married five years, we began to doubt we would be able to have children (there were real medical reasons for this) so we adopted a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed five year old problem child. 🙂 We adored him and loved him but after years of problems, he became an alcoholic, generally homeless and passed away in his 40s, but that is an entirely different story. Then almost three years later, God blessed us with a beautiful baby boy. But back to the church stuff.

My dad was ALJC (Assemblies of the Lord Jesus Christ), so my husband applied for ALJC license and got them so now he was both an ALJC and a UPC (United Pentecostal Church) general licensed minister. We did some evangelizing and I did a puppet ministry.

My husband really enjoyed outreach a lot more than pulpit ministry; I felt then and now that he was pushed into the ministry by an overly enthusiastic mother who wanted ALL her boys to be preachers. Anyway, the UPC evidently got wind of this guy with license in both organizations and after ignoring this town for 20 years, suddenly felt ‘led’ to start a UPC church there AND told my husband he would have to attend the UPC church or give up his license. He decided to give up BOTH licenses and joined the USAF –no kidding! Really the license thing was just one catalyst, we also had financial problems and since the town was small, we were occasionally running into our son’s birth family, so put it all together and another move seemed like a good thing to do.

He ended up in special forces on a base out west and I searched for a church. The ALJC was closest but something seemed off. (I soon learned that a couple years prior, the pastor had taken his teenage son to the woods and pretty much beaten him senseless.) I never saw this kid so he must have been put in foster care or something, along with an older sister I never saw. The only child they had then was an adorable little two year old boy that I pray didn’t suffer the same fate.

So moving on, I went to the UPC church across town. They had a daycare sponsored by the state. The state also bought them some beautiful indoor playground equipment that took up most of the fellowship hall. The ‘church’ kids (with the exception of the pastor’s kids) were NEVER to play on this equipment, even though we had several social church events in the fellowship hall, with the kids all looking longingly at the play stuff.

Lots of weird stuff in this church; the pastor even had a problem with watches other than plain banded Timex ones, LOL.

Two good things happened in this town, one is we were were again blessed with a beautiful baby, a girl (after this, my medical condition made it impossible to have any more children), and I met a friend at this church who would become a lifelong friend.

At this time, my husband was on duty 24/7 for three days and then home for six so we joined our good friends and both moved two hours away from his base to a big town with a bigger, more normal church. We really never got too involved at this church, I don’t think we were there long enough, so I don’t know a whole lot about this church.

Something happened then that would totally change our lives forever. In a freak accident, 42 sheets of plywood fell on my husband’s head and fractured his spine in five places. Being the tuff guy he was, he shrugged the whole thing off and went on a scheduled tour to Iceland with a load of morphine for pain. He soon OD’d on the morphine and was medevac’d to DC where he spent the next year and a half in a military hospital in a full body cast with metal rods in his spine.

I stayed there most of the time in a TLQ with three small children waiting to see what would happen next. His appendix burst while in the cast and he ‘died’ twice. I didn’t know until it was over and came to visit, finding him in a pitch black room thinking he was dead and that there was just nothing (we laugh now but it was not funny then).

Our baby turned two there. Daddy would spend the next few years in and out of hospitals and most of the time in body casts and wheelchairs. We spent a lot of time in different places, mainly having to do with his treatment, rather than churches, and at one point relied on $40 a week from the Red Cross for food.

I repainted the house we rented in lieu of rent. He was in the hospital and I was just doing the best I could –I went to church but wasn’t focused and the churches we went to were a lot more interested in what we could do for them than what they might do for us –for us they did absolutely nothing. A not in church sister-in-law brought us dinner many nites, showing more Christianity than anyone else in the area that I knew.

I am going to skip years here because while we both continued ‘in the faith’, our focus was more on just surviving and making sure our kids were OK than on anything in the churches where we were pretty much just a number. My husband says to remember there were also a lot of ‘good’ times and yes there were–they had really nothing to do with church, but a lot to do with God and we were definitely blessed with a lot of good times and our kids don’t even remember any bad times, so we did something right.

(one aside) At one point we had the kids in a UPC ACE school, my then three year old son completely memorized all the morning scripture passages. The pastor would put him up front on Sunday mornings and have him quote whole chapters from Isaiah and the old ladies in the church would follow along in the Bible –he never missed a single word. 🙂 He is a computer tech today and was an ALJC minister, albeit a bit unorthodox in some areas.

Ok, I’ve talked enough for now –there may not be many patient enough to read all this but it really is kind of a catharsis for me even if no one reads it. 🙂

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Backtracking: Where It Began For Me

My story began a really long time ago with two grandmothers influenced by Bro. Witherspoon and Bro. Fresh and a very young S.G. Norris and other early Oneness preachers. One grandmother was ‘shouting her hair down’ in a Methodist church prior to Oneness and the other came into Oneness with my great grandmother. No grandfathers in the picture –they all died really young.

My great grandmother died in the parking lot of a Oneness camp meeting; she had quit taking her heart medicine because this was a ‘healing’ camp meeting. My very young mother found her dead in the car. One of my grandmothers died in a car/train accident on her way to VBS –it was two blocks away and I remember all the kids (I was ten) going to the altar to pray. My grandma and my best friend (a cousin just a couple of weeks older than me) were two who died in the accident. I still mourn the loss after 50 years.

So I am 3rd or 4th generation Oneness before there even was an ALJC (Assemblies of the Lord Jesus Christ) or UPC (United Pentecostal Church) and of course my dad was a preacher, as were some of his brothers. By the time I got here, it was ALJC for us, but we had friends in the PA of W (Pentecostal Assemblies of the World) and some UPC, though in my area the ALJC and UPC were pretty strong rivals. We were the less strict but still plenty weird.

At one time, the Rambos went to our church and Bucky was our children’s orchestra leader (I played the cymbals 🙂 ) I remember Dottie’s song ‘Come Spring’ was written for my grandmother or dedicated to her. Reba and I were fast friends. I remember Reba contracted meningitis and almost dying. They left around that time and became famous but of course were ‘lost’ 🙂 We absolutely loved Dottie’s singing –especially LAZARUS 🙂 . As a teenager, I sang a lot of her songs at district youth and fellowship meetings.

I grew up having a rare haircut, sometimes wearing pants and my mom even sold Avon at one time and put lipstick on both of us then- almost rubbed my lips raw getting it off before my dad came home LOL. I wore miniskirts as a teenager and had a page boy haircut and wore powder and mascara with no real consequences but I did not get ‘saved’ until I was 18 and in Bible school (ABI- Apostolic Bible Institute).

I went to Bible school because it was my mother’s dream to go and she never had the chance (I just wanted to get away 🙂 .) On my application to Bible school, I remember writing –“I am coming to find out if there is a God and if there is, I will serve him”. I am sure S.G. Norris (then a much older man) got a kick out of that.

I was miserable at Bbible school –still had a page boy haircut and wore ‘natural’ makeup, but felt like I was the only sinner among a bunch of young saints (this is too funny now but then I took it very seriously). I cried nightly and begged a close by friend of the family to come and take me home.

Of course, he called my parents and they called my preacher uncles who called S.G, and without me knowing, the whole Bible school began around the clock prayer and fasting. S.G. called me into his office and told me his ‘story’ of how he received the Holy Ghost –if anyone is interested let me know–it was pretty cool. I had been begging God to speak in tongues ever since I was baptized at eight years old.

Anyway, after a week of the prayer and fasting, I skipped church to play board games with other less spiritual girls in the dorm and got conned into going to the prayer room where I was absolutely struck with tongues and a very personal interpretation and spoke in tongues for over an hour. It was real and changed my life.

I never did really ‘belong’ at ABI but I did get ‘saved’ and made some close friends (some still in church and some not) and then like most of the kids, I found my husband –we all called the school Apostolic Bridal Institute.

My husband was also 3rd generation Oneness but he had been AOG until he was twelve and then his parents were finally won back when he and his brothers went to a Oneness church camp with his preacher uncle and all three received the Holy Ghost and came home wanting to change to UPC. We were a good match –still are –it will be 45 years this December.

OK, that is all the good stuff, it kind of goes down hill from there, but it took me 40 years to finally say enough! I will start the rest of the story later. Thanks for listening –this might just be cathartic. 🙂

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Beginning Our Work For God

Ok, here goes our United Pentecostal Church story.

In the beginning, newly out of Bible school and desperately wanting to work for God, we had several ‘offers’ to come help churches. We accepted one in Ohio but my husbands District Super uncle convinced us to come to another state and work the campground that summer–he would ‘make it worth our while’. Sounded like fun–but it wasn’t.

I was six months married and pregnant but didn’t know it. I was exhausted but the uncle demanded I get up each morning and help clean and prepare the campground; I literally dragged myself through the tasks assigned, becoming more and more exhausted, but still not knowing it was because I was pregnant and should be resting.

I worked blisters on my hands, had a sunburn, and at one point was stung multiple times by a nest of ‘mud dauber’ wasps flying up my skirt while cleaning a bathroom. After a month, I miscarried on the 4th of July. I was left alone in a strange state, strange city, strange hospital, to watch the fireworks in tears from my hospital bed. My very young inexperienced husband was still ‘working the camp’ as demanded by his uncle.

When I got back to the camp, I couldn’t call my parents because the uncle had a block on his phone (this was before cell phones). It was at least a week before I could let my mother know and by then I was very sick. Our conversation was in front of the uncle and aunt so I was very limited on what I felt comfortable saying and my parents had no idea what was really going on.

I would go sit in a very hot car with all the windows up trying to get warm (in this state small children and dogs died when forgotten in locked up cars) but nothing made me warm. The uncle’s wife demanded I do my husband’s laundry, so I literally dragged myself to the laundry room.

She washed uncle’s white shirts after I finished and they came out with ink on them. She went into a rage and blamed me even though NONE of my husband’s clothing had any ink on it. She demanded I ‘clean’ the washer and dryer of all the ink. I waited until everyone was gone and then actually crawled to the laundry and cleaned the machines.

I felt very alone and desperate. I ended up back in the hospital with an infection and finally got some medication to begin healing. When camp ended, I still wasn’t completely well and we got an offer from a church a few hours away to come help.

The uncle gave us $100.00 for our summer at camp and ‘very generously’ another $100.00 that he said was ‘under the table’, oh and a bag of the disgusting yellow rice we had been eating all summer, along with a pound of butter.

We couldn’t leave fast enough! (an aside) The uncle had adorable twin two year old daughters –he played teasingly with them until he was tired of it and then if they didn’t stop immediately, he beat them with a belt. I cried as much as they did. Neither is in church today. He is dead. The aunt is raising one of their sons; I don’t think they ever married or had other children.

So, the new town was really awesome. The pastor seemed like a nice guy. The pastor’s wife was weird –like the little girl with the curl, when she was nice she was very nice and when she was bad she was TERRIBLE. I was still sick, tired and thin.

They helped us find a roach infested apartment above a garage for around $40.00 a month. I had NO experience with roaches or palmetto bugs and nightly sprayed a ring of bug killer around our bed, blessedly unaware that these things could fly. There was no air conditioning or heat. We had a fan in summer and bought a kerosene heater when winter came.

We both found jobs. Our apartment was painted black and dark purple by the former hippie inhabitants, so the pastor’s wife loaned us money to buy paint to repaint it. We were expected to and did pay 10% tithes and 5% offerings.

I had a car accident and totaled our car. The pastor convinced us that the rapture would happen very soon, so we should buy a van to do church work (we would never have to pay it all off because of the rapture. Oh how young and ridiculously dumb we were.

We worked in the church preparing it and the Sunday school activities and canvassing for children to bring to Sunday school every Saturday pretty much all day, but we were happily married newlyweds and it really was fun a lot of the time. We picked up people for church every church service and a host of kids on Sunday mornings.

The church people seemed to like us a lot and were kind, inviting us to dinner or to go out to eat. We worked really hard and at one time actually had 39 kids in our VW van on a Sunday morning!

The pastor’s wife varied between loving the church people and chasing them off with her sharp tongue. Looking back, I am pretty sure she was manic/depressive but that was before this was such a well known condition. After a couple of years, she had really worn us down and we decided to talk to the pastor; she came in at the end of the talk, and realizing it was likely about her, she attacked. She told me I had a mental problem and needed ‘help’.

I was again devastated and my now getting older and wiser husband decided it might be time to move on. We bought a tiny camper trailer (you could almost touch all walls when standing in the middle of it hahaha). We lived in it while we saved enough money to leave –of course still religiously paying our 15% to the church each week and continuing to donate all our free time.

A lot more happened at this church but I would have to write a book to cover it all. The Sunday before we left, the pastor’s wife organized a ‘going away’ party. Our gift was a painting of the Bible with Acts 2:38 highlighted, painted by an old Oneness preacher, Bro. Hudson I think, in the congregation. We eventually donated it to a Oneness church. It was only 1973 and we had no idea what we would eventually live through 🙂 ; our ideals and altruistic desires were still firmly in place, as they would be for years to come.

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