Tag: Spiritual Abuse

Pain

Pain is realizing this is true, not just for society, or the world, but for our personal lives as well: family, friends, church, hobbies… everything. Sure, growing up and growing older should involve maturation and changes in direction and perspective, but no one told me I would be betrayed by my own body and my closest friends and mentors.

I’ve had two personal, related “911’s” — events that shook me to my core and changed everything — that struck at the same time 4 years ago — and I’m still trying to figure out how to get through it all and get better. The medicines I take for my health problems keep me continually off-balance, and make it nearly impossible for me to marshal my inner fortitude to make the changes and do the work to address the long term issues.

It’s just… hard, man. Really hard. No one really understands, nor do I really want them to. I don’t want to put that on them. There’s nothing they can do about it. I’ve never been stoic. I’ve moaned and bellyached to everyone who would listen my whole life. This time, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything ANYONE can do about it, because there’s no one thing that’s wrong. If there’s a way out, it’s through a dozen small things done with a measure of discipline that I have never been able to muster, even at my best.

The outlook is bleak, and we’re on the precipice of a second civil war, and at the verge of the End Times.

Spiritual Takeaways

Many, many years ago, a preacher I respected mispronounced “concupiscence” — or maybe it was “incontience” — some “bible” word — and I made the mistake of pointing it out. It was even privately, one-on-one, well after the fact. He proceeded to tell me a long story about how he heard his pastor mispronounce a word once, and as he struggled to get a note to him to point it out, he heard him explain the word correctly anyway. The lesson was obvious. You shouldn’t try to correct your spiritual superiors. It’s not your place.

Several years later, he told a story about a woman in Las Vegas getting into an elevator with 2 black men, and thinking they wanted to rob her, and she got all scared and dropped her bucket of slot machine coins. As the story goes, it turns out it was Eddie Murphy and Michael Jordan, who thought it was funny, and sent her a bunch of money wrapped around roses or something. It was one of those stupid email chain letter things in the 90’s, the kind that Snopes was invented to debunk. It never happened.

Having seen this long before, and not being about anything spiritual, and ignorantly thinking he wouldn’t want to relay “fake news,” I sent the Snopes article to him. Just him. I didn’t CC anyone else. I wasn’t trying to embarrass him. A few months later, he told the whole story again, with nary a hint of it being fake. I took that as a direct shot at me, to show that he was going to say whatever he wanted in the pulpit, no matter what. I understood the point to be that I should never question him. About anything. Ever. After that day, I didn’t. In fact, I can’t recall ever saying anything to him about what he preached again, good or bad.

Because I never brought it up, and never talked about his preaching again, I’m sure he felt the “teaching moment” had achieved its intended effect. However, the lesson I actually learned from it was that he played fast and loose with the truth, even if he was in the pulpit, and I never looked at him the same way again.

Little did I know that this was the first few snowflakes that would eventually start an avalanche.