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I’m a country girl from way back. Rumor has it my family is related to Daniel Boone, the man who continuously moved west, opening new territory because he needed “elbow room” and because, so the story goes, he felt that if he could see the smoke from his neighbor’s chimney, they were just too close.

Whether we were related or not, I can empathize with “Old Boone”. Driving down the highway, I tense if a car is closer than three car lengths ahead or behind me. I hug the shoulder, especially when being passed- being less than a car width away from another driver is just uncomfortable to me.

Walking or standing, there is an imaginary buffer zone we keep around us, called personal space. Some people don’t need much. Others need a lot. I’m one of the ‘a lot’ people. I can understand if someone reaches out to shake my hand. But I’ll meet them half way. The cashier who hands me cash and casually brushes my hand in the exchange disturbs me, because she unwittingly entered my space. Warn me about those frontal hugs, please. I much prefer shoulder to shoulder hugs. Even then, I need to mentally prepare for a few seconds before contact.

In the malls and on the streets, and especially at church, people constantly invade my space. I’ve watched others pile together like puppies, and I laugh at their antics. But I prefer to stay on the outskirts of such activities. Fun? Oh, yes. But put me in the middle and I’ll act like a cat over a bucket of water.

Friends begin to realize that my personal space zone is pretty broad. They are careful to stay out of this space, or to give fair warning before entering it. I’m grateful and much more comfortable for their understanding.

Spiritually, I need space too. Room to grow and react in. Space to be myself, to live up to my potential and to realize my dreams. Too many rules, and I begin to feel stifled. It isn’t that the rules are bad. I can even enjoy them at times, and I understand why others might need or enjoy them. But I need to be given the opportunity to decide which I will follow, and to grow into them on my own.

Having people to be accountable can also be great, but again, people need to warn me before they step in my spiritual space. I don’t care to be watched and hovered over. I need people to trust me and allow me some independence. Perhaps I’m like the teenager who never questioned parental authority. Still, if the parents don’t give me a chance to grow up, I will find a way to grow around the restrictions and overcome them, even if it means distancing myself from them. Like the tree next to a barbed wire fence, I’ll either move the fence or I’ll make the fence a part of me, but I will grow, whether the fence or the farmer want me to or not.

We need boundaries to grow, but we also need space. The amount of space we need can change through the years. But we all need some amount. The sooner we recognize and respect our space and others’ the sooner we can become what we are meant to be.

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The CREATOR, The Great I AM, The Father, The Intercessor, The Savior, The Son, The Spirit, The Comforter…

In my former religion, it was said we could define God with the following explanation: I am a father, a son, a husband but my name is John Doe. How arrogant!!!! YOU are not God!!! You didn’t create heaven and earth and the sun, the moon and all there is! You are not the great I AM! You cannot die for lost souls or save them from hell!

Can you define love in a neat little package of words that is a final, clear explanation? Can you define eternity so that our human brains can actually conceive it? And yet you provide a neat little packaged definition of the Almighty that equates Him with what you are!?

He that cometh to God must believe that He IS and that He is a rewarder of them who diligently seek Him. There is no demand or need to define Him to fit neatly into a theology so as to exclude others who also believe that
He IS.

His thoughts are far above our thoughts. Yet He provides us with a simplistic way of salvation –Believe. Faith is counted as righteousness. By faith . . . . . .

I don’t pretend to have a better understanding of God or what the UPC terms the ‘Godhead’ but I can read His Word and I can understand what He has made so plain that a wayfaring man though a fool need not err. God is love. He has made His plan for whosoever will believe on Him. He is not willing that any should perish but that all should have eternal life.

There will always be discussion and agreement and disagreement about the many aspects of God, His nature and His plan. The thing that is clear is that God’s love is for whosoever and that surely meaneth me. . . and you!

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 What if they are right?

This is a question that many who leave unhealthy churches face. Because they have not yet worked through the various teachings and/or because they do not understand the manipulative fear tactics, they sometimes later wonder if the group is right. Perhaps they are backslid or lost. Maybe their conscience has been seared. Maybe they did walk away from ‘the truth.’ This fear has caused some to at least temporarily return to an unhealthy church.

One of the signs of an unhealthy group is that they have ‘the truth’ and others, or at least most others, do not and are therefore not saved. They may have some unique revelation. Outside their doors there is no hope for you. Or so they’d like you to believe.

To a spiritually abusive group, leaving them is synonymous to leaving God, walking away from truth, and heading straight toward hell. People caught up in these churches sometimes forget that their relationship with God is one on one and is not dependent upon church attendance. It doesn’t end when you leave a church, switch churches, take a break, or choose to not attend anywhere.

If this thought of them maybe being right is bothering you, take a good, hard look at the teachings and the manner in which they are taught. Learn to recognize the signs of spiritual abuse and how fear is used to manipulate and control. Then you will know whether they are right or wrong and you will overcome that fear of the thought of ‘what if they are right’. 

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 Individuals who suffer abuse sometimes escape, heal, and move on to live productive lives, but there is a part of them that can never forget and sometimes that causes problems. Growing up in a legalistic, spiritually abusive denomination also creates memories hard to forget and makes it difficult to trust ANY church group or leadership. Just as an abused child never really trusts ANY parent again without extensive therapy and perhaps just never, an abused Christian doesn’t trust ANY church and unfortunately therapy for this is not as widely understood, sought, or offered.

Some may not even trust God, believing he is either like the abusive doctrine taught or that He should have saved them from going through that. Many abused children do not trust God for the same reasons.

Good parents who try to help an abused child do the best they can, realizing they may not be successful and have little hope that the relationship will ever be totally without problems but also hope the child will grow to be a happy, productive adult. Many times these good parents pay the price for the bad parents they replace. The child targets the anger toward the parent that is available, proving if possible that they will also reject them or at the least become angry and not understand.

As the ultimate good parent, God must weep over these abused children and spiritually abused Christians, desiring for them to just trust Him to show them a path to peace and hope.

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*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

I want to share another random memory about visions.

My family on my Mom’s side is 90% Pentecostal/Apostolic. They are big believers in visions and prophetic dreams. I shared in an earlier post about my Mom and her best friend informing me of a vision that I was going to be raped as a consequence of my rebellion of wanting to wear pants. Another time when I was 17, my great-grandmother told me she’d had a vision about me.

She almost cried as she told me, she was so disturbed by the content of her vision. She said that she saw me at a river, and I got pushed underwater by a tall man with blond hair. I thought she was about to relate a vision about baptism, but I was wrong.

She said that he never let me back up, he held me under the water for a long time and eventually let go and walked away. She didn’t see me surface. She said that the scene then changed and she saw people that looked like police officers carrying a stretcher out into the water. They reached into the water and put something on the stretcher. When the carried the stretcher out of the water, she saw that it was me, dead, on the stretcher. She described in detail how my clothes and hair were covered with river mud, moss, and “seaweed” type plants. She said my skin looked greenish gray. The vision ended there.

There were several members of my family around and they were immediately distressed after she shared this and started praying for my safety. By this point in my life, I was 17 and had left home in order to leave the Pentecostal religion (my parents told me that as long as I was under their roof I would be Pentecostal) and I knew that the rest of my family was thinking that this was a warning from God that I was going to die if I didn’t come back to the “church”.

My Great-Grandmother was not like my Mom. She didn’t focus on demons and punishment, and she is not normally a ‘sensationalist’ Christian. This caused me to take her ‘vision’ a little more seriously than I now viewed my Mom’s claims of divine revelation. I didn’t agree with my family that it was a message from God that I needed to be Pentecostal again, but I didn’t have an explanation for it of my own either.

17 years later I still don’t really know what to make of this memory. I can’t write it off as easily as other claims of visions because of the deep respect I have for my Great-Grandma. So far though, I’m still alive.

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