Archive for January 2019

That time a light shined into the dark

By on January 27, 2019

I have a little story to tell.

My therapist asked me a question a couple of weeks ago, and I gave her a partial story which answered her question but did not get to the rest of the story which would have resulted in an ugly cry. Last week I read a blog post that included a story which reminded me of this one I had just told my therapist. And so I decided I’m ready to share it.

It was 6th grade. A lot of awful crap happened that year. Like the cut finger incident I wrote about before and significantly toned down Daddy’s response. But anyway, one morning I was waiting for the bus, and Mom had to make a long distance phone call for something. This was back in the dark ages when we were on a party line and you had to call the operator to call the operator to call long distance. At least you couldn’t direct dial. Daddy had told her exactly what to do because of course he did. She did not follow his instructions exactly as she began to talk to the operator and he began screaming at her and saying awful, hateful things.

And I fell apart.

When Mom finished with the call, she turned on him and asked him if he was happy for how that affected me. And that’s the extent I remember of their interaction as the bus came and I could leave.

That’s all I told my therapist. Which that was all that was relevant to her question.

What I remember of the bus ride to school that morning was trying to will myself away. Just away. Away from everybody. I didn’t want to deal with anybody and I sure didn’t want to melt down in front of anybody and have to explain. I just wanted to be completely invisible. And it pretty much worked on the bus. But then we got to school.

When I walked in the door to the building, 2 girls from my class were in the hallway outside the door to our classroom. Now these girls picked on me a lot, but I normally didn’t mind because they did it in a way that didn’t feel malicious, and was almost always funny. That morning, however, was not the time, not that they knew. I could see it on their faces and knew it was coming, and they started in. On a normal day, it would not have bothered me in the least. But that morning, I lashed out at them, ran into the classroom, and put my head down on my desk and started crying. Which again, I didn’t want to cry and have to explain.

Those 2 girls immediately came over asking me what was wrong with genuine concern. I gave them the oversimplified short version and they proceeded to try to convince me it was going to be okay. They were the light that I needed in that moment of darkness.

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:14-16 NIV

via GIPHY

This entry is filed under 500 Words, Abuse, Dysfunctional, Family, Life, Thankful.

Growth that matters

By on January 20, 2019

Among Christian Church Culture “church shopping” is not well looked upon. It’s filed under fickleness for consumerist Christians – people who want their “ears tickled.” Sometimes it’s viewed as what “troublemakers” do who just cause some kind of issue and move on when they get run off or after having a public tantrum on their way out. To be fair, these are broad-brushed generalizations I’ve gleaned over the years of reading blogs and books and tweets by predominately evangelical Christian leaders. There may or may be that much truth to it, but it’s the understanding I picked up whether or not that was the intended message. So it is with this in mind that I struggled with the question: Is 4-5 years the most I can stay in a particular church?

I think so far, I have stayed about a year after I start feeling it’s time to move on. It seems as though I reach a point where I realize something is missing. And I wasn’t sitting there just absorbing and consuming. I was giving. I was serving. And I grew, but only to a point. I am so done with Baptist churches, and having gone through some of the literature and minutes from meetings my parents kept, I’m even more averse. (That’s a story for another day.) I don’t want any more modern “seeker-driven” church built on megachurch patterns of motivational speeches (“relevant” sermons) bookended by a rock concert creating an atmosphere of emotional experience but never getting beyond a series of how-to’s for living the American Dream to its fullest.

I was talking to a friend one evening a few months ago about that “something missing” feeling. He felt it, too, though we’ve never gone to the same church. I’ve had similar conversations with other friends. It isn’t just me. I’m reading it in books and blogs also. This disillusionment with a lot of the modern church here in the United States. I think we’ve been focusing on cultural Christianity without Jesus.

I can find just as much right as wrong in every church I’ve been in. I’m not out to find the “perfect church” because I know that doesn’t exist. I know that having so many choices of churches is, of course, going to feed Christian consumerism. But just maybe it can provide something else.

I spent about 2 years with my first therapist and went as far as I could with that therapist. She helped me see a big issue I’d acted on for many, many years and cut me no slack for my excuses. I learned and I grew. But there was something deeper I needed to work on and it’s not an area she specializes in. So I found another therapist who does, 2 years later. And there will come a time when I will have gone as far as I can with her, though I feel nowhere near that point yet.

By using this analogy of going to a different therapist, it comes across on the surface as consumeristic shopping to meet my needs. But, the 2 years I spent with my first therapist enabled me to heal enough to break some destructive behaviors. My current therapist is helping me identify and correct other thoughts and behaviors that are destructive. Each of them helped and are helping me to grow with my current one building on top of what the first built.

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. 1 Corinthians 3:5-9a

Maybe this whole church search will continue to leave me still wanting more than there is. It all boils down to this: I want the focus to be on Jesus. Who Jesus was. What Jesus did. What Jesus taught. And considering that, how to love my neighbor. How to hear and surrender to the Holy Spirit and lay aside my self-focused desires and fears to do good to others especially the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, and the despised.

I want teaching and fellowship that transforms me more into Christlikeness than whatever the current popular cultural church growth movement is. I don’t want to be entertained, I want to worship. I want to worship Jesus, not a system.

This entry is filed under 500 Words, Faith.

You have a voice

By on January 19, 2019

You’re got to feel to heal. That’s not what my therapist said, but that’s how I paraphrased it, and it’s now my go-to “trite” saying. I don’t remember what she actually said nor do I even remember the context. But that sums it up quite nicely nonetheless.

It turns out that I am very empathetic. I had no idea because I’ve spend my whole life shutting down at the first sign of a negative emotion. Of course I would somewhat do that for positive emotions also because that’s how stuffing, suppressing, and numbing work. It’s an all-or-nothing effect. It is impossible to selectively numb.

I emotionally triggered several times over the last semester. It started with my therapist. She asked me something, and I can’t really explain what all happened. It seemed to get horrendously hot, and I couldn’t answer her. I could not get any words to form in my head let alone to come out of my mouth, but I had a vision of sorts. Anyway, this was followed by a series of triggering assignments and activities across multiple classes at school. Not to mention more than a few of the talks at The Courage Conference. (The Conference triggering was anticipated.)

A few months ago, I had a Twitter conversation with Doug Bursch, and he said something to me that no one else ever has. He gave me permission to have a voice. “You have a right to your voice.”

Those words of validation breath life into someone whose voice has been silenced their whole life through abuse. And it took me a few days for it to fully settle in. I still struggle a whole lot with my voice because decades of being silenced through force or just being dismissed has left a lot of stuffed anger. I want to lash out with all the same venom that was injected into me. I was telling my therapist one night about how uptight I get when I engage in discussing/arguing on social media with this rush of adrenaline. She asked me why I thought I would have that reaction. Well, it’s because I wasn’t allowed to have a voice or an opinion and had to stuff for fear of a beating, or worse, berating.

Kings Speech Voice GIF from Kingsspeech GIFs

I started this post 2.5 months ago. There was a point I was working up to but I haven’t written any on it in over a month, and so who knows what it was. But I recall having some sort of epiphany and deciding that I was done being silenced. And I am done with staying quiet so as not to upset people. We don’t grow without discomfort, and our lives aren’t meant to be lived for our personal comfort.

This entry is filed under Uncategorized. | 2 Comments

Cynical and disillusioned

By on January 18, 2019

Sheila Gregoire of to Love, Honor, & Vacuum did a series on her blog this week about problems she saw with the popular Christian marriage book “Love & Respect” by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs. I commented on the 3rd post because she said I’ve been thinking for a while – that Jesus often isn’t the center of our teaching. I started a comment and then realized I was about to typed out a big rant, and decided that the potential length called for my own blog post.

There are a couple of posts I should probably finish first, but I’ll start with this and let the other 2 be explanations after the fact instead of a build up to.

So here’s Sheila’s posts:
A Review of Love and Respect: How the Book Gets Sex Horribly Wrong
Love and Respect: Why Unconditional Respect Can’t Work
The Ultimate Flaw in the Book Love and Respect: Jesus Isn’t at the Center
Our Podcast: The Love and Respect Earthquake, Tidying Up, and More!
Your Stories of Women and Marriages Damaged from Love and Respect

Here’s my comment on the 3rd:

The church I quit last year did a sermon series on this book back around January 2015 (my guess based on when I added and updated Love & Respect in my Goodreads). I didn’t see a problem at the time. But this time last year I started to see what was consistently missing from most (if not all) of the formulaic sermon series (plural) that I was started to really listen to. The Holy Spirit.

I was about to type out a whole rant, but I’m going to save that for my own blog when I have more time.

The “Love & Respect” series was from November-December, 2014. That was during my first year of sobriety, and while I was “coming to,” I was still entrenched in patriarchal indoctrination. And I was still kind of desperate to save my failing marriage. So I didn’t see anything off at the time. That came later most glaringly with the InCite Conference of 2017 with fired pastor Perry Noble who was billed as a headliner of the conference shortly after his stint in rehab for alcohol abuse.

An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. 1 Timothy 3:2-3

Noble had no business being on that stage. Around that same time I noticed several megachurch pastors around the country using the phrase, “The Best is Yet to Come” just as ours had done in connection with a fundraising campaign.

By this time, I had a little bit of sobriety, I was working through some issues, and I was questioning everything. One of my twitter friends was talking about Robert Morris’ book “The Blessed Life” and Morris saying Jesus was “God’s tithe.” That reminded me that he said that garbage when he spoke at our church in 2014 for a sermon series based on that book. I found it odd when I heard him say it, but I was in early sobriety, and barely able to discern yet. Now? God didn’t “tithe” himself. Jesus is God. And even if we divide out the Trinity, Jesus is 1/3 not 1/10. But still, how can God tithe himself and who is he tithing to? HE IS GOD! I haven’t yet been able to get through that book. I have it, and started it because the pastor sent a signed copy when I started giving money only he addressed it to my daughter not catching that it was MY name on the check and apparently assuming that “Jamie” = “James” and as husband he was the spiritual leader. He was not. But I digress.

I had to step down from serving once I went back to school because I couldn’t put in sufficient practice time. If I was just singing, I could, but not playing guitar, and there were loads of vocalists by that time. Also, at this point, I was only attending when I was scheduled on the worship team. I was still listening to all the sermons via podcast, but then a sermon series happened that got all over me. The pastor made the statement, “Jesus was a carpenter. He was a man’s man!” This wasn’t the only hypermasculine statement, but it was the one that pissed me off. I am a carpenter. I don’t do it for a living, and rarely have time to do it as a hobby (for now), but I’ve been building and fixing things that fall under the carpentry umbrella since my very early 20s. You don’t need a penis to be a carpenter! Does this also mean that men who aren’t carpenters are less manly? That’s just ludicrous. He even made a statement about men who’ve been “wussified” and I was like, “That’s the ‘clean’ version of Mark Driscoll a few years ago talking about how men have been ‘pussified’!” That whole series could have been a Driscoll series, and may have been one of his recycled. And Driscoll is another disgraced pastor who has no business on a stage or behind a pulpit.

It was a couple of months after this that there was a guest preacher who gave a standalone sermon to tell parents what they need to do to guarantee their children will follow God. That’s the sermon when it hit me that there was no mention of the Holy Spirit at all, and only a passing mention of Jesus. It was all about doing a set of things “right” so that your kids will turn out all right. But you can do everything “right” and kids will still have a mind and will of their own. Without the Holy Spirit to guide your relationship with them, and without the Holy Spirit guiding them, there is just behavior modification to be accepted by your tribe. The odds are certainly better if you raise them up, but motives matter, and if it’s to make y’all look good and not for them to actually love Jesus and obey Jesus in order to love others, it’s just empty works. There are no absolute guarantees because “Christian formulas” are NOT Jesus.

I stopped listening to the sermon podcasts during that summer’s “Hot & Heavy” series. A story was told, that I have heard told before that I don’t believe actually happened. It’s the reason for following the “Billy Graham rule” because a female congregant tried to seduce him to go to a hotel room she had reserved right across the street from where they were eating as they had met for counseling. I am just as skeptical of that story as I am of Billy Graham’s claim of finding a naked woman in his hotel room. Maybe one of those stories is true. Maybe they both are. But even if so, isolated incidents do not indicate a pattern of women to fall on their backs with their legs up in the air for pastors. It goes right along with patriarchal and complementarian men blaming women for men’s lusts and fantasies while portraying themselves as hapless victims. It makes women enemies just by their very existence. And this is not of Christ no matter how big of a platform they get.

This turned into the long rant that I figured it would. I wrote about magic formulas 3 years ago. I guess once your eyes get opened, you just can’t unsee it. Sheila is right. If obedience to Jesus is not our primary desire in every aspect of our lives, all else will become idolatry and we will chase after and follow anyone who makes us feel better or promises us a comfortable life rather than following Jesus.

This entry is filed under 500 Words, LinkWhoring, Rant, Totally Judging, Where is Jesus in that. | 2 Comments

No resolutions

By on January 1, 2019

Happy New Year!

Happynewyear Kiss GIF from Happynewyear GIFs

I am certainly glad to be done with 2018. I had some firsts last year. I went on a cruise, I sang karaoke. I always said I’d never gotten drunk enough for karaoke, and I’ve been blackout drunk a few times. But apparently I just needed to get sober enough.

I had goals last year. I wanted to lose a bunch of weight before my 30 year reunion. I lost 5 pounds – while on the cruise. Stairs, man. We walked a lot of stairs. Also, Petra made me eat healthy. Anyway, I intended to do yoga every day, and tried to get back into meditating every morning. I wanted to eat healthier. For the most part I failed at them all.

This year I have goals again. But I started working on them before Christmas because I have to combat the stress. I’ve been doing yoga, and signed up for a 30 day challenge again. I’ve been making little dietary changes starting with cutting out the syrupy Starbucks. I’m walking the stairs at work several times a day already with a goal of going from basement (where I work) to the top every hour. I didn’t get that done last week because I was very busy and trying to get a bunch of stuff done and wasn’t finding good stopping points.

And I’m going to get rid of my house. I sold my mom’s house, which was my security net. But this house I’ve been in just got way too far out of hand. It was not a good investment for a couple of drunks. I’ve been working on decluttering. It’s going very slow because there is just so much shit scattered everywhere. But I made a LOT of progress in the kitchen over this long weekend, and I’ll just do what I was told – one room at a time.

I intend to blog on the regular again. I want to start back working on my fiction. It may or may not happen as spring semester starts Monday. The fiction, that is. Speaking of school, I have 3 classes this semester, and all that’s left will be the internship. Oh, maybe what I’ve been trying to prove with school is that I can knock this out without dropping out at least once. Because I dropped out of undergrad once and graduate school twice. Then again, I’m not losing interest partway into each semester like I always did before. Because I am following my calling. And I’m sober now. That makes a huge difference. Go figure.

And this time next year, hopefully, I will be changing careers. Because I am not too old to do that.

This entry is filed under 500 Words, Life, Ramble.