Category: scripture twisting | Page 4

What happens when your answer to prayer… isn’t?

I hated the huge push for quick marriages, and it is actually one of the reasons I didn’t marry. Then, too… well, “God will give you someone if you’re right with him and you ask hard enough” is all fine and good. And then someone comes and he’s abusive or a stalker or just downright disgusting, and they say that this is the will of God, because God is giving you what you want. Uh, no. THAT is NOT what I want, and abuse is NEVER the will of God.

And then… then you pray and you get a husband or a child or whatever and it isn’t good – the man is abusive, the spouse meets an untimely death, the child is chronically ill, you lose the dream job and go bankrupt, or whatever…. and then the same people say you asked amiss or you did something wrong. Or you think you must have because you heard for so long that you’d have this or that if you did more, prayed perfectly, etc. No. Those things aren’t God’s punishment or our faults, either. It’s easy to cycle into a performance trap with stuff like this, and a downward spiral of self-blame.

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Answers to Prayer?

I was told way too often my prayers weren’t answered because I was somehow wrong. I prayed I’d get married-“you aren’t married, there must be some sin in your life. Work through it, seek God first, and he’ll give you what you want”. Just one example. I heard it until I was so angry. Good ‘wouldn’t let’ me marry because of sin while others fornicate, gossiped, lied, etc and got married?!?! And people in church said I wasn’t because of sin? What a terrible representation of God — giving non-believers what they want and what would be ‘normal’ to want, while withholding them from his children in order to get them to do more.

People say stupid stuff because they don’t know what else to say, or to be dismissive, or whatever, but NOT because it’s fact. Even ‘pray and wait’ upsets me. I did. I prayed and waited way too long, and though I’m glad I didn’t marry in that church because that would have been horrid in a lot of ways, still… no one should have told me that.

Statements like “pray and wait” or “you must have some secret sin” or “just have more faith” are dangerous because… well, so we pray and wait and have faith and it doesn’t happen, or we repent of even breathing and still… nothing. And then what? Those sort of statements bounce around in our heads and can undermine our faith. They leave us with nothing but guilt and shame.

The truth is, what we pray for may happen or may not, even if what we are praying for seem like things that nearly everyone has. And it’s not going to be easy to deal with if those things don’t happen, even without unhelpful comments.

What I finally decided in my own life is that all the asking is fine, but nothing I do ensures God doing what I want, particularly when I want it. And so it’s not my job to pray harder, repent harder, believe more, but just to eventually come to a point of saying, “OK, God. Either way, OK.”

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Thoughts on The Body Keeps the Score

In an online group, someone posted about the book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. They shared how helpful it was for anyone who had been involved in a cult or unhealthy church environment. I am always looking to be able to share information on material that might help our readers, so I asked if anyone would be interested in writing an article about it for this blog. Amy Renee Stangel was one who responded and she submitted the following article in hopes that some might find help for their recovery.

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While I have never read The Body Keeps the Score, I know that the book’s basic premise is that experiences are “stored” within the body’s nervous system. The Christian counseling clinic where I receive treatment uses this book as a staple of its counseling practice.

The body functions in a very intelligent and self-aware way and will “know” things that can prevent brainwashing. As I was growing up and could feel my body being verbally punished through self-abusive religious doctrines, my body knew better and whispered: “You know better than this. You know that God is a good God and that you don’t have to be afraid in your body. You can trust your instincts that something about this is not right.” While I yielded to church and societal conditioning as a child, my memory of my body’s voice stayed buried along with that memory, but the memory came alive upon being unearthed in therapy.

The science behind the idea of “bodily wisdom” seemed at first to be dubious at best and unbibically pagan at worst (after all, I had been told growing up that you cannot trust your body and that it is an instrument of evil, a twisted version of what Paul said in Romans 7); but I could not deny the stream of memories, accompanied by literal releases of pent-up sensations in my body, that came to the surface in reverse chronological order after I began body-based trauma therapy. Many memories I was able to remember at least in the somewhat retrievable past, but many memories I also experienced through the filter of my nine-year-old self and had completely forgotten about for many years. Some have come from even earlier. In my body, I could sense the “knots” of memory that were intertwined with whatever real-time sensations they had been associated with. At times, I would completely re-experience what my personal reactions had been at the time when the memories had been stored. I literally re-experienced those thoughts and feelings.

While traumatic memories can be blocked off by the brain to protect a trauma victim, the body does not forget. Personally, I wonder if God set up this system as a record of truth to subvert systems of injustice and abuse and bring justice to those who need it.

If you are considering trauma therapy (such as EMDR) that may release these stored memories, make sure that you have an adequate support system for your own safety during the process. Although not many people can easily understand our experiences, do what you can to build the best support network you can. My traumatic memories have felt extremely overwhelming at times, and I have needed all of my resources to face them safely. (One time, I had a fully-fledged meltdown and needed to leave work; and the fact that my husband could listen on the phone while I spewed terrified profanity and freaked out…he saved my life because he was available, he listened, he understood, and he was authentically there and didn’t require me to censor myself. I experienced that memory in the context of no longer feeling alone.) My therapist has been on call, and my dad has also been available to listen so that I can feel supported. I have also sought out Facebook groups of those similar to myself for support; not just to process my traumatic experiences, but in order to help me make sense of my life and make sense of my total existence. (We’ll need to reorder the pieces of ourselves left outside of a cult in order to re-knit together the tapestries of our identities. Because of my social anxiety, online groups have been instrumental in allowing me to communicate on my own terms.)

I wish everyone the very best in their journey of healing. This therapy, along with knowledge of comprehensive mental health principles, has completely thrown open the doors of my potential; my life is beginning to make sense for the first time.

Read excerpts from the book here.

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Taking every thought captive

There are also some things I was told I had to do to be saved. I was taught to just stop thinking about some things, “taking every thought captive.” However, refusing to think about certain things, particularly problems in the church, is NOT what the Bible means by 2 Cor 10:5.

Thought stopping, or refusing to think about certain things, is not healthy. Yes, if our thoughts are coming in torrents it is good to slow them down and work through them systematically rather than panic, but to simply refuse to recognize thoughts or questions is very unhealthy and is almost always identified with unhealthy situations that include someone not wanting the one they are teaching to think for themselves. God himself gave us the ability to think for ourselves when he created us. And no, that wasn’t a bad thing. God made everything good.

But even as I write that, I remember a tangle of verses and partial verses that would seem to prove the opposite:

-I’ve been taught not to trust my own thinking. “The heart is deceitful and wicked above all things…” I was told, indicating that my heart was evil and my thoughts therefore, if they didn’t line up with the church’s teaching, must be evil, too.
–Don’t question the ‘man of God,’ I was told. “How can they hear without a preacher?” Well, I heard and responded to God. That doesn’t mean that I have to do anything that anyone who calls himself a preacher says to do for the rest of my life. All that verse says is that someone must tell others before they hear about God, which makes sense.
-But the pastor will ‘give account’ before God. That’s not what Hebrews 13:7 is about. No human being is going to stand before God for us and give an account, either for the good or the bad… I find it odd now that the pastor would have said he would give account of us before God at the judgment, because the way it was always discussed, he would be telling all the bad things about us… which gives him the role of accuser of the brethren. That’s not a role any human should want to choose or tell others he would have.
-But Adam and Eve used their choice to sin. And that’s what it boils down to.

If we are given free choice, we’ll sin. Sin is bad. Therefore… if we don’t think or don’t question, if we don’t make major decisions without checking in with the pastor, if we are accountable to someone else, if we make extra rules to keep ourselves ‘safe’ from sin… we’ll be OK, right? WRONG! For starters, none of that stops people from sinning. God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden every evening. They had the greatest ‘accountability partner’ possible. Eve made the first extra rule — don’t touch the fruit. It didn’t work. And… there are a lot of people who would disagree, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to. God knew when he created us that we would make the wrong choice sooner or later. But he still chose to give us that choice. And when he created us with the will to choose, he still called his creation (us) good.

I’m going to repeat that. God made us with the ability to choose. He knew we would sin. AND HE STILL CALLED US GOOD. Not because we were only going to be good for a little bit of time. Not because he didn’t know what would happen. He called us good because he loves us… and maybe, just maybe because sin is not the horrible problem to the almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal God that we humans have been led to believe it is.

It’s about relationship

I’ve struggled for years with Bible reading. After I was thrown out of a church in 2000, I started having more and more difficulty, but particularly after I moved to a new city and a new church. So for 16-17 years, I’ve struggled. I knew the push for reading the Bible in a year was part of the problem, but recently I’ve realized there is a whole lot more to it.

So much of what I was taught in the church I was thrown out of was oriented to a judgmental, punishing god. This was a god who wouldn’t answer prayers (at least not mine), who would stand by and watch as someone tried everything and was still thrown out, a god who would give up on people or turn his back on people. This was a god who would send people to hell for wearing pjs or brightly colored tights or a wedding band. Sermons that were respected were about god cutting people off, about people never being able to get back to god if they ‘fell away’, of warnings about people going to hell… I was told that they didn’t even know if I could be saved, and then was warned at the interim church I ended up in that I should never talk about what had happened or that I’d been kicked out, which added more fear to what I was already dealing with, and with no outlet but only shame and secrecy.

When I moved to a new state and a new church, there were many more ‘good’ sermons about how people were going to hell in addition to what I’d already heard. People quoted scripture at me to justify themselves and excuse their behavior as well as to blame me for whatever was happening. It became harder and harder under all the condemnation to see God in any other way.

I could see that the god my former churches taught about wasn’t a realistic picture of God, but I couldn’t reconcile what I read in the scriptures (as much as they’d been twisted) with what I thought should be a loving, faithful, forgiving, merciful God. So I avoided the Bible. I didn’t need another daily reminder of a malicious god.

In all this time, all these years, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’d heard that God valued us or that he loved me personally. Not as a platitude, but as a real, heartfelt statement. I didn’t realize how much I’d been taught and how much I believed that Jesus died the death he did because he had to die the most gruesome death possible to take the punishment that I deserved. I didn’t realize the guilt or even the illogic of that — there are plenty of types of death that are gruesome and involve torture. Crucifixion was terrible, but men have thought of other gruesome modes of death, too. It’s not about my sin. It’s not about how awful I am, but about how much God wants a relationship with all of us — not so much that he would die, but so much that he came as a human, grew as a human, lived as a human, and died as a human, experiencing everything that we do in order to relate to us, even including death… to restore relationship. The one who relates best, after all, is the one who’s walked in our shoes. And so Jesus did.

Sin doesn’t separate us from God because he can’t be around sin… it separates us from God because we are too ashamed, too guilty, too whatever to be with HIM. God knew Adam and Eve sinned, but he still came for his walk with them in the garden. It was they who hid, not God. God never stopped trying to connect to us. Everything I was taught even as a child was so backward.

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