Category: recovery | Page 18 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

A Time To Heal – A Time To Build Up

“To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:
‭‭…..“A time to kill, And a time to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up;”
‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3:1,3‬ ‭NKJV‬

This is my story of healing my heart and soul and rebuilding my mind and emotions….

For me recovering from spiritual abuse was very personal and private. I knew I needed healing and I needed to repair my relationship with God, which was my first priority. The problem was I didn’t know how to begin. So I started working on developing my relationship with God through conversations with God. To me this was more than just prayer like I had done in the past, this was actual conversation and telling Him about everything that I feared, my anxieties, my anger and I didn’t hold back anything. Then I would spend time in reflection, trying to hear his voice, sitting quietly outside on my deck looking at my gardens and letting his nature calm my soul and emotions, then I turned to scriptures and just began reading and meditating on his word. I felt like I was in that place where God was telling me to “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) .

I also read books: False Holiness Standards, Healing Spiritual Abuse, The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, and a few more but I can’t remember their titles. I surfed the internet reading all I could find on the subject and joining support groups. I was not going to a church and had not attended a service in over six months so the guilt was very high. Was it guilt from not attending service or was it the guilt and anxiety because I was enjoying not going?

My daughter and I had tried a couple other United Pentecostal churches but there was nothing there but dried up bones and that was six months ago. I knew I was not going back to the UPC. Been there, done that. But I was still trapped in their legalism of dress and hair, simply because that’s all I knew and the only clothes I had. It had been 32 years that I had been in the UPC. I no longer needed to dress this way but I didn’t know how to take that first step to change and that seemed to be the hardest step to take. Although my daughter wasn’t having any trouble giving up standards and she seemed genuinely happy as she searched for a church. She kept saying, Mom, all I want us to be are normal Christians.

Normal was good I thought, problem was I didn’t know what normal was. I did receive a few emails from my former church friends, asking why I left and I should come back and repent and not backslide and blah, blah, blah. I didn’t respond and I unfriended them because I didn’t need the distraction. It wasn’t like I was friendless; I had a lot of good friends at work, just nobody I could talk to about why I left my church and religion.

One of the first things I did was purchase a new Bible, a NKJV, and began to study it with an open heart and mind. I wanted my quest in God’s word pure and fresh so I could see His grace. It was like the word came alive to me and the first scripture I read was: “I am the LORD, that is My name; And My glory I will not give to another, Nor My praise to carved images. Behold, the former things have come to pass, And new things I declare; Before they spring forth I tell you of them.” (‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭42:8-9‬ ‭NKJV‬‬) This gave me a lot of hope that I was still in His will by leaving and searching for truth.

My daughter found a friend, Anita, from Youth Camp online and she explained that we were looking for a church that was “normal” and Anita invited us to visit Crosspoint Church, which was where she went after leaving the UPC. So on Palm Sunday we went and sat in the back row by the door, just in case things got hairy. But from the first beat of the music I could feel the strong spirit of God in a good and loving way; not in a frenzied emotional way. My daughter and I cried all through the service.

When we got in the car to leave, I remember my daughter saying. “Mom did you notice how happy and friendly everybody was?” I told her yes, but it could be a fluke because nobody I knew was that happy about their salvation. Although I saw how Anita was and she was very happy. So we decided to visit again the next Sunday on Easter and bring my granddaughters. The next Sunday was a repeat of the Sunday before and we decided to give it a try and see if this could be our church.

The Sunday following Easter, the church had a ministry fair and I signed up for a ministry called Thyme In A Garden and I registered for a summer ladies bible study to be held in a home close to me. Now I was really putting myself out there because I didn’t know anybody except the associate pastor and his wife and that was only because I grew up with them and my daughters friend Anita.

I’m very thankful for Dave and Ronda because of their wise council to me and the help and love they showed to me during this time. They also had made the same journey I was making. I remember one Wednesday night prayer meeting they both came and prayed for me. None of that grabbing my arms and spitting in my face or yelling in my ears type of praying. They simply put their hands on my shoulders and asked for God to lead and guide me down the right pathway.

After service I asked Ronda how did she overcome the dress code of the UPC? She just smiled and told me I would know when it was time to let go of the past and she assured me when I got rid of the trappings of dress and released the vestiges of legalism, then there would be nothing between God and me except for grace. She said his word would come alive to me like never before because I could no longer hide behind a facade of self righteousness.

A few weeks later I went to my first meeting to Thyme in the Garden and I was a nervous wreck about going into a place I didn’t know. But in I walked and said Hi, I’m Cindy. I was greeted so warmly and friendly by all the ladies and they accepted me right in and I’m still going 6 years later. I met the best group of Christian women that day and they prayed for me after I told them I just left the UPC.

Being a former pastors wife, you know a thing or two about people and of course the shunning and shaming you get when you leave a church. But my biggest shock came from one friend from UPC, we’d been friends for 30 years and I had visited many times since my divorce. She was emailing me at work and I was answering her and I told her that I was going to a new church. She asked me where and I told her and I guess she looked it up online and literally became a wild woman telling me I was backslid if I could go someplace that didn’t teach standards and now I was going to be a reprobate.

Then she finished by telling me we could no longer be friends because we have nothing in common anymore. I couldn’t believe it just five minutes prior to telling her where I was going to church we were chatting away. Now we had nothing in common? I knew I was going to lose friends but I never imagined her. We haven’t spoken since that day and she, along with her family, unfriended me on Facebook. The pain of it still hurts at times but God has given me more friends than I can count now. During this time, I continued to search scripture for reassurance and God never fails:

Do not remember the former things, Nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, Now it shall spring forth; Shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness And rivers in the desert. (Isaiah‬ ‭43:18-19‬ ‭NKJV)‬‬

I held on to his promises because I was in uncharted waters.

I again showed up at the home where the summer woman’s Bible study was being done and again God put me in touch with Steve and Helen, former UPC Pastor and wife, who left the organization years ago. God knew exactly who to put me in touch with. I don’t know how many times I’ve called upon them to calm my fears and doubts.

“Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity? Unless the LORD had been my help, My soul would soon have settled in silence. If I say, “My foot slips,” Your mercy, O LORD, will hold me up. In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comforts delight my soul.” ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭94:16-19‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

Steve and Helen prayed for me and with me, gave me scriptures to read and taught me about healing and forgiveness. I told them I wanted to start over as a brand new Christian and they even signed up to take a new Christian Bible study with me.

I started feeling more at peace every time I went to church and finally I felt the freedom to get rid of the old clothes and buy new. My daughter and I had fun shopping and there wasn’t a dress or skirt purchased. My daughter was getting ready to graduate from Beauty School, so I was her model to demonstrate a hair cut. I donated 24 inches of hair to Locks of Love and felt so light and free. I was her model for color demo and she made me a beautiful blonde. I hadn’t felt pretty since my wedding day until that day. I sat and looked in the mirror and cried.

I took the church’s Welcome to the Family class, which is a four week course that explained the history of the church, their beliefs, their staff and what was expected from a new member. Again I had to brace myself against the anxiety, but my daughter took it with me so I wasn’t totally alone. During the first class we found out the church came out of the United Pentecostal Church about 30 years ago and my pastor was also former UPC and that explained a lot of the teaching. It wasn’t legalism at all, it was grace and mercy. It was Christ and him crucified. It was no big “I”s and little “U”s. But it was salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. It was humility and servitude and living within your means. There are no thrones on the platform, the ministers sit with the congregation. They teach commitment, connection and contribution. Everybody dresses casual so all that come feels comfortable. They were answering all my questions one by one. It was amazing and wonderful all at once. I finally felt at home, that I was in a safe place and I had a place where people cared and prayed and loved each other.

My final confirmation that I was in the right place for me came in September at our ladies retreat. My pastors wife wanted all of us to go outside and enjoy nature alone with God and our Bibles. I remember sitting at a small table looking over the lake and asking God one more time, is this the place you want me to be? He replied with his word: “You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, And called from its farthest regions, And said to you, ‘You are My servant, I have chosen you and have not cast you away: Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’ “Behold, all those who were incensed against you Shall be ashamed and disgraced; They shall be as nothing, And those who strive with you shall perish. You shall seek them and not find them— Those who contended with you. Those who war against you Shall be as nothing, As a nonexistent thing. For I, the LORD your God, will hold your right hand, Saying to you, ‘Fear not, I will help you.’” (‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭41:9-13‬ ‭NKJV‬‬) With tears streaming down, I lifted up my hands and praised him for always being with me and leading me out of darkness into his marvelous light.

That was six years ago and do I still have anxiety from the past? Yes I do and I still have fear from time to time. And yes I suffered with nightmares for several months, but I put my trust in God and he never failed me.

Last year I was reconnected to a dear friend from the church we had pastored and we’d been apart 18 years, but our friendship is closer now than ever before. She has been delivered from legalism and spiritual abuse.

A few months ago I was able to call my ex-husband and forgive him for everything and he started crying and saying he was sorry for what he did. We talked for over an hour about our children and grandchildren.

My daughter met a really nice man and they were married two years ago. She has 3 girls and he has 2 girls, so now I’ve been blessed with 5 beautiful granddaughters.

Has it all been a bed of roses? No it’s not, life is still life. I lost my father and step mother within two days of each other through cancer and pneumonia in October 2011. My mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and is in stage 5-6 of the 7 stages. I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011 and had to retire in 2016. And I lost a dear uncle to cancer last year (2016). But through all the trouble and tribulations, God has always been there with a comforting word and prayers, visits and ministering from my church friends helped us get through those tough times. There’s been good news, too. My aunt and cousin have accepted the Lord into their hearts and attend church with me. I helped a dear friend escape from my previous church and she is healing and attending Crosspoint, along with her grown children, who were also spiritually abused and hurt. My dear mama has also accepted the Lord.

Yes, when you’ve been in an abusive church for any length of time, things are killed in your heart and soul and things are broken down in your mind and emotions. Eventually you become spiritually crippled and emotionally damaged.

But the Lord gives us a time to heal and a time to build back up. It does take time and patience and a renewed walk with Jesus and the right church and people. And a whole lot of trust in God. It wasn’t easy and it has taken me six years to get this far, but with God all things are possible.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. ‭‭II Corinthians‬ ‭5:17-19‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

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Book Review: Spiritual Sobriety by Elizabeth Esther

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on June 2, 2017.

I love so much of Elizabeth Esther’s writing because what she says fits my experiences in unhealthy churches.

I preordered her book Spiritual Sobriety: Stumbling back to faith when good religion goes bad in spring of last year, around the same time that I interviewed her on my blog.

Recently I re-read my copy before sending it off to a couple of friends who are also unpacking unhealthy spiritual things they learned.

Elizabeth talks about how belief in God can become an addiction, and worship just another way to get a high–she calls this a “transactional use of God.”

She also doesn’t blame us, the religious addicts, for this.

“We didn’t make a conscious choice to treat religion this way. At whatever age we veered off track, we were just doing the best we could.” (p. 11)

“How were we supposed to know there were healthy ways of approaching God when the people we admired taught us that living intentionally with God looked like anything but freedom?” (p. 12)

She argues in the first few chapters that it’s basically a process addiction–an addiction to a behavior rather than a substance.

Elizabeth also says we should pay attention to that drained feeling, the letdown after religious services and events.

“This letdown is an important indicator that something is wrong. If we behaved in healthier ways, we wouldn’t feel the gnawing despair of having spent ourselves on a mirage.” (p. 8-9)

She says that a loving God will respect our boundaries (p. 61), and how she is learning to embrace a sense of mystery and be okay with not knowing everything. And she cautions us against buying into the American idea that our self-worth is tied to our productivity and how that leaks into our spiritual practices, too.

Religious addicts, according to her research, often have problems with excessive daydreaming and living in obsession, fantasy, and magical thinking.

This really resonated with me since I used to use fiction as my drug. Being a bookworm in an unhealthy household wasn’t just me being an adorable, academic kid, it was an escape when I felt like my home was a prison.

Elizabeth also writes about recovering from the shame of a legalistic upbringing, learning to acknowledge a mistake, and move on.

“When I feel myself saying ‘I am a bad person,’ that means I’m internalizing my mistakes,’ she says. ‘I have to remind myself to stop the Shame Brain.'” (p. 78)

“Shame tells us that we are lovable only when we are performing well. Admitting a mistake means admitting we aren’t worthy of love.” (p. 77)

Religious addicts also have the tendency to demand that others believe exactly the same way that they do and feel responsible for saving the world.

“Driven by fear, the religious addict feels responsible for the eternal salvation of every soul. Different beliefs must be confronted (and eradicated!) because they signal a hellish trajectory. In the pursuit of saving the world, the RA behaves as if the ends justify the means. Judgemental rhetoric is a small price to pay for snatching sinners from the fires of Hell, amen?” (p. 89)

We get drawn even further into religious extremism through this thinking.

“For Christians, being lukewarm is almost as bad as not believing at all. We’d rather burn out for Jesus than take the seemingly lazy road of moderation.” (p. 98)

She takes a similar approach to other addiction recovering programs, encouraging recovering religious addicts to avoid trying to fix everything all at once but and resist believing that we have to recover quickly to meet God’s approval.

She references Nadia Bolz Weber, who said, “the sacred rest that is yours never comes from being worthy.”

Once we learn to move away from relying on high intensity feelings and unstable extremes, we can learn healthier ways to cope. Sometimes too much structure is bad for us, too. Elizabeth says that she was raised with so much rigidity that her twelve step recovery program began to harm her (p. 106).

“Whenever we find ourselves slipping into extremes, we need to realize we’re headed toward an unstable state that could compromise our spiritual sobriety.” (p. 107)

These extremes, she explains, might manifest in our lives as

black and white thinking
catastrophic forecasts of the future
attacking tasks with a vengeance
trying to change things that are entirely out of our control
staying up too late because we need to get more done, not exercising (or overexercising)
starving ourselves, overeating
not letting ourselves reach out for help, not talking about what we’re going through
paranoia

Religious addicts may be especially prone to relapse when hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

Here’s some little pieces that resonated with me.

If you are recovering from a legalistic, cult-like church, I’d say read Elizabeth’s book. She’s been there herself and she understands that recovery is a journey.

Significant Quotes:

“I was consuming God. I didn’t have access to chemical substances – we were intensely devout, conservative Christians – so I used what was available: religious beliefs. I habitually “used” God and all things church to numb pain and feel good.” (p. 3)

“Maybe we identify so closely with our sick selves that we don’t think we even deserve merciful loving kindness. Maybe we agree with those who say we need to be punished (especially if we’ve begun to seek spiritual sobriety). Maybe we’re so tired of trying to stop our addictive behaviors that we figure we might as well go full speed ahead.” (p. 28-29)

“Accepting help for my depression was also the first step toward accepting my religious addiction.” (p. 29)

“I saw that my relationship with God wasn’t a partnership, but one based on fear of punishment. No wonder I’d felt abandoned by God: I couldn’t trust Him enough to let Him love me. No wonder I sought relief in secretive behaviors: when I couldn’t find the love I needed from God, I tried to find it elsewhere.” (p. 50)

“This idea–that a human being represents God for you–is a dangerous lie, because if someone controls your concept of God, he controls everything. But all the control and scrupulosity didn’t take away my deep, real need for love. Once out of the cult, I turned my focus to relationships: seeking friendships and romantic love that would fulfill, heal, and make me whole. My emotional intensity enabled me to become deeply intimate with people very quickly. But when someone got too close, I pulled away–true intimacy was terrifying. I was afraid everyone was abusive. Over time, I transferred my abusers’ traits to my concept of God.” (p. 51)

“We feel safe in the presence of nonjudgmental compassion.” (p. 54)

“If we are to achieve spiritual sobriety and live successful, productive lives, we need to meet a God who tells us we’re unconditionally loved and infinitely valued, no matter what we do, accomplish, or feel in one particular moment.” (p. 55)

“Now I know very little about what there is to know about the true God, and I’m learning to accept that reality. I no longer believe there are simple answers to complex questions, but I’m still sure that God is somehow good.” (p. 73)

“But if our mistakes are strong enough to compromise God’s acceptance of us, isn’t that the same as saying our mistakes are stronger than God? This is similar to believing we are born inherently evil. If that were true, then it would mean God created depravity. But just as it is impossible for God to create evil, so it is impossible that our mistakes are stronger than God’s hold on us.” (p. 78)

“Religious addicts are especially prone to self-neglect because Scripture texts are frequently misinterpreted to equate self-hatred with godliness. Calvinistic doctrines like ‘total depravity’ reinforce self-loathing. God intended for us to need Him because the beautiful plans he has for us to find their fulfillment in communion with Him—not because we’re bad.” (p. 104)

“Frankly addicts expend a lot of energy on not feeling their needs. RAs feel guilty for being human. We believe others are worthy of having their needs met but we aren’t.” (p. 108)

“We learn to hold relationships loosely, lightly. We discover that other people are not ours to manipulate or control—even when we think we know what’s best for them. A spiritually sober person respects the personal boundaries and inherent dignity of others. By unclenching our hands, we actually enjoy our relationships more.” (p. 115)

“We may feel really uncomfortable with the terms self-forgiveness and self-love because people in many religious circles mock those terms as empty pop-psychology.” (p. 116)

“Verses like Proverbs 3:5—“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”—were used to warn us that trusting ourselves would make us vulnerable prey to Satan. But usually, the people quoting these verses to us weren’t teaching us to put faith in the Lord, they were teaching us to trust our church leaders. Ironically, placing blind trust in other humans is exactly what made us vulnerable prey—not to Satan, but to addiction. These leaders didn’t have to earn our trust. We just had to believe in them because, well, they were the leaders.” (p. 117)

“If we are to recover trust in our gut instinct and our ability to sense truth, we must practice owning, honoring, and validating our experiences as true and real. We don’t have to wait for others to corroborate our experience before we trust what we experience.” (p. 118)

“And yes, learning to trust ourselves might mean making some mistakes in relationships but making mistakes is okay, too. It’s how we learn.” (p. 119)

“This is how we forgive abusers: we allow ourselves to see their humanity. I forgave my abusers because I realized that they weren’t evil; they were simply terribly sick people.” (p. 132)

“It seems that some Christians attend church meetings disproportionately to the amount of time that’s actually spent serving others—you know, being the church… Many have become keepers of the aquarium instead of fishers of men.” – Pastor Michael Helms (p. 138)

“This is because true religion and true spiritual sobriety, can never be bought or sold. Spiritual sobriety is the slow, difficult work of walking the narrow way.   Of course, the addict in us may want to make a grand, splashy gesture and commit everything to Jesus. But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t want our big, showy, public surrenders. In fact, emotionally fraught, stadium-style altar calls and gospel meetings can do more harm than good because they make a grand, public performance of what should be a private, inner transformation.” (p. 139)

“They simply shouldn’t have so much power that they are free to shame, threaten, and manipulate the flock. The greatest danger to a church’s spiritual health is a pastor-centric church model.” (p. 141)

“If you want to know whether a church is healthy, look at how it treats people who have little or nothing to offer. Are the homeless welcomed? Are the disabled offered a front-row seat? Do children look forward to going to church? Does the socially awkward college student get invited to coffee? Would members of the LGBT community feel safe attending services? If you’re looking for a spiritually sober church, look for grace.” (p. 141)

“The christian church’s ongoing obsession with sex and sexuality, the centrality it has put on controlling and forbidding sexuality in its message of sinfulness, is a suspicious sign that religious addiction and sexual addiction have been regularly reinforcing each other.” (p. 159) – Richard Minor

“It might seem wise to punish ourselves into sobriety; but as we’ve learned, punishment isn’t love. Punishment can teach us an important lesson about real life consequences, but it can’t rehabilitate our souls; that’s what grace is for.” (p. 166)

“Sobriety is about gentle self-examination and, most of all, a desire to stop living in pain.” (p. 158)

You can order Spiritual Sobriety here on Amazon.

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The hardest thing about spiritual abuse

In early 2000 I was thrown out of a church. The process lasted several agonizing weeks, but things had been very bad for months. There was the man who kept telling me he was praying I’d lose my job because I was a woman and should work close to the church. There were the high standards that made no sense to me, the preaching about begging God for a special revelation of oneness because if you didn’t have that you would surely go to hell… after all, if you didn’t have that, you surely didn’t know God. The pastor bragged about his long fasts and groaned about people not wanting to ‘hear the truth.’ He didn’t share information with everyone, just with the men. The men were to tell their wives at home, which excluded me as a single woman. He told me that I needed a man over me, that I should either get married or move home to my dad’s house. Neither of those was an option. And there was the sermon about how if we leave our local church we have cut ourselves off from God, from life, from forgiveness, as though we have amputated ourselves from the body of Christ.

I remembered last night how, on December 31, 1999, I was terrified that God was going to come back and thought I’d surely be lost. I spent that night on the living room floor, sobbing and begging God to forgive me for who knows what, and never feeling any peace or forgiveness. I realize in my mind now that what I was dealing with was not conviction but condemnation, and fear, not godly sorrow or repentance. There was no peace or forgiveness because I wasn’t repenting of anything. I’d done nothing wrong except attend where I did and believe what I did, and those weren’t things I would recognize should be repented of for many years.

God didn’t come back on December 31, 1999. The pastor told me about a month later that he discerned I had bad thoughts and if I didn’t change, he would throw me out. He then left town for several weeks. How does a person change thoughts someone thinks they have, but they don’t? I ‘repented.’ I spent hours more on the floor, sobbing and asking God to change me. I stopped eating, thinking I would fast until they returned. But I thought they would be gone for a week at most, not several. I finally had to eat, and felt I was condemning myself by doing so. I tried to reach them by phone so that I could talk to them before breaking my fast, but they wouldn’t answer at first and then answered only to tell me to stop calling them. I called everyone at the church asking them to forgive any offense real or imagined, and was later accused of calling them threatening to kill myself instead.

These things had a psychological impact, but the spiritual impact was greater. I’d started attending there with a fairly healthy view of God and faith. By the time I left, my self confidence had been torn out from under me (I felt guilty just for being invited out to eat, because ‘saints’ shouldn’t eat with the ungodly-1 Cor 5:11), but more than that, my faith in God had been shredded as well. I repented, but I hadn’t felt forgiveness, and certainly hadn’t seen any forgiveness from others at the church, not even the ‘man of God,’ the pastor. I begged God for the special revelation we supposedly must have, but never really understood or experienced anything about this ‘revelation’ as the pastor described it. I fasted for days but was still thrown out. My pastor had discerned something evil in me, some thought I didn’t know I had, and though I’d prayed and fasted and repented, things only got worse.

Above all of this, these things had happened during a time when I’d thought I was closest to God. I was praying in tongues often, studying the bible, feeling the emotionalism in church, living by the high standards set, close to the pastor and his family (at least in my mind), repeatedly playing the sermons and music I was told to, and was very involved in bus ministry, Sunday School, and music at church.

All of these ended the night the pastor called me and told me never to come back. No one but me ever realized they ended, because that night I lost every person who might have known. I went to another similar church, but was told there to pretend nothing had happened and just ‘move on’. I couldn’t move on, though, and I couldn’t talk about the reasons I couldn’t, since I was to pretend nothing was wrong… and since admitting these things would have been good reason for the new pastor to label me ‘backslid.’ The only thing to do at that point would be to ‘pray through’. More fear, more nights on the floor sobbing, begging God for something that at that point I knew wouldn’t happen. To make matters worse, just as I would start to heal somewhat and begin to feel that there might be hope, something else would happen and the doubts would come back, as well as all of the memories.

Of everything that happened in my 19 years in Pentecost, that’s what had the most lasting damage. That combination–the fear, the condemnation, the false teachings that backed them, but most of all the doubt that they instilled. Not just self doubt, but faith shattering doubt of the Bible and of God.

Things are better now. I am healing, slowly. There have been times I wanted to just walk away from all of it. It would be easier not to believe than to fight through the mess that was left after everything happened. But there have also been times of learning and growth, and for me, these have been the most healing, times when I saw the scriptures that were used against me in a different light and I realized how wrongly they’d be used, times when I recognized some of what caused the damage and was able to rebuild, to heal, and to finally move forward, not as though nothing had happened, but in spite of what has.

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Dear pastor: Mothers’ Day

I cringe every year in May. Mother’s Day is coming.

After years of hearing sermons about motherhood being the highest purpose or calling of a woman, of guilt trips because I’d never had a child, of thinking I was weird for not wanting children, for being humiliated by the “inclusion” of “the rest of us” by saying “Ok, all the mothers stand… now, all of you ladies stand, we want to honor all of you. If you’re an aunt, a daughter, a sister… you’ve probably helped raise a child in some way. Stand up!!” Ugh. If I could have just remained seated, but I couldn’t. And so the guilt tripping sermon about the highest calling of a woman being something I had not the least real interest in and a month or more of wondering if I should adopt or try artificial insemination just so I could be “normal” culminated in the embarrassment of standing in front of a group of my acquaintances to acknowledge I was, indeed, female, someone’s daughter, and an aunt. But not a mother.

Thank you for that day. You talked about Mothers Day from a historical perspective. I tuned you out. But you fairly quickly moved away from the mom stuff and on to a very good sermon about loving one another. You didn’t give all the mothers corsages or some gift in front of the congregation. You never pointed out which of us were and weren’t mothers. You didn’t ask the ladies to stand if they had this or that many kids or if they had this or that many grandkids. You didn’t even preach on motherhood.

For the first time in many years I didn’t regret going to church on Mothers’ Day, and I breathed a tentative sigh of relief. There was one more trial in sight, because there were candy bars given to each mother at the door on the way out. I hesitated to leave for the same reason I hesitated to come-surely this would be the moment when I would have to admit I wasn’t a mom or take the candy bar and act normal while cringing inside. I walked by the table and the person giving them out smiled, but not with any expectation or gesture to indicate I should take one. And nothing was shoved at me. No questions were asked. No one poked me and told me “Someday you will… just have faith!” Not once.

It was the best Mothers Day service I’ve probably ever been to. One where I didn’t feel embarrassed to be me.

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Dear Pastor: What a cat taught me about love (that no church did)

He was a stray alley cat, not more than two. I caught him making friends with my house cat… sort of. My cat wasn’t nearly as interested in friendship as the stray, and the stray was probably more interested in food than companionship. I decided to befriend the cat.

Making friends with a stray cat isn’t easy, even with tuna or liver to tempt him. It takes patience to befriend a stray.

The stray wasn’t approachable, but he would sit and watch as I interacted with my cat, and slowly, seeing that I didn’t hurt my own cat, he began to come closer. If I’d tried to catch him or pushed for contact too quickly, he’d never have trusted me. He was where he needed to be at that time, 5-10′ away, distant but interested. We have to accept strays as they are, not as we want them to be.

He came in. I left the door open for him. He had to know I wasn’t there to diminish his freedom, but that he was welcome.

His decision to let me touch him came as a happy surprise. Within months he’d become a normal house cat, with some outdoor tendencies. I always let him come and go. He was still cared for, even if he went out sometimes. He was loved.

One day, he jumped on the counter. I picked him up gently, and he began twisting in panic. He thought he was going to be thrown. Then I understood his deep distrust, and it broke my heart. His fear didn’t make me love him less, but more. He’d overcome so much. I respected his fear and never picked him up off the counter again. We communicated “no” in other ways that worked just as well.

Tommy died about a year later. We had moved, and he never got completely used to his new surroundings. He was terrified of the changes, and I didn’t listen to his fears, thinking he would adjust. The night before he died, he sat on the front step with me, leaping and catching bugs between raised paws in a beautiful, joyful dance. The next morning he was gone. But even in death he taught me… it doesn’t matter how long or short a time someone is in our lives, they are there for a purpose. It’s not our place to require them to stay with us. It’s our job to love them, not keep them or hold them too tightly. A life well loved is a life well lived, no matter how long or short. It’s my purpose to love others well.

I’m not a stray, but I have the same tendencies as Tommy did:
It takes time for me to trust you.
Unconditional love and acceptance will create trust.
I’ll actually stay longer if you leave the door open for me. Don’t pressure me to conform or to stay. Don’t make me feel obligated.
I have fears that should be recognized and respected. Don’t love me less for them, love me more.
If I need to leave, let me go. This is part of loving well.

Tommy is gone. I’ve been the care taker for probably 30 cats since. Some have gone, four have stayed. One of those four is missing part of his tail, has scars down his back from a reckless interaction with probably a raccoon, and has a permanent limp. And he’s one of the most loving, trusting cats I’ve known. So one more:

Don’t judge me by my scars. I’m beautiful in spite of them.

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