The Long Goodbye
Anyone who spent time on a playground with monkey bars as a child knows that to move forward you have to let go of something. But, sometimes when you're just learning to traverse the monkey bars you don't want to let go for fear of falling so you just hang there until you finally either fall or work up the nerve to move on.
The reality is that a massive, massive part of why I couldn't accept that I was attracted to females...accept that I was gay...was that to embrace what I am, I would also have to let go of parts of my faith as I knew it. You can be openly gay and be Christian, but you can't be openly gay and be a conservative fundamentalist Christian and the latter had been a core part of my identity for the first 30 years of my life. It took roughly 20 years to pry that identity from my fingers.
When I graduated high school, I loved the church of my later childhood and teen years. I had loved my youth group. I loved the church members, young and old. They were like family to me. I loved my pastor and thought he was the wisest man alive. I thought I was in the "correct" Christian denomination that had all of the mysteries and complexities of faith and the Bible figured out. Every word I had been taught by my church leaders had been perfect, unquestionable, and true. And I had a plan. I was going to go to college. I was going to join a church that was a carbon copy of the one I had left back in my hometown with a pastor just like my old pastor. I was going to join the Baptist Student Union (the BSU). There I was going to make many friends and meet my future husband. I was going to graduate, then get married in my mid 20's, have kids in my late 20's and early 30's, and assume my role in a Baptist church forever. It was the sequence of events a good portion of the women at my church I admired the most had followed. I had a plan. But, as my sister-in-law often likes to say "I made plans and God laughed at me".
Step 1 was to join a church. Two things happened early in my freshman year that stalled out this effort initially. I was in the marching band at an NCAA division 1 school with a fairly major sports program. So, because of that, game days took a lot of energy. We didn't march on the field with sheet music (so it had to be memorized) and never did the same halftime show in the same venue twice so I always just barely felt like I knew the show. So, there was always a low grade amount of worry about doing something embarrassing in front of 50-70,000 people or worse on a nationally televised game. We were also expected to function as a spirit organization, so we were expected to try and help work the crowd and lead cheers and give an appearance of being energetic and happy to be there, whether we felt it or not (which was fun and I loved it...it was my sanctuary, but it was exhausting). My particular school had two locations we had "home" games. Rehearsals on game days started 6 hours before kickoff and we stayed after the game to play as everyone exited the stadium. So, from the first downbeat of the warmup to the final note of the post-game show, game days were 10 hour days when games were on campus and from stepping onto a bus and exiting the bus in our second "home" location, those were 18 hour days. So, after a fairly exhausting Saturday in the fall, I was less than enthusiastic to get up and go to church on the next day. Yes, that was probably a little lazy.
The second thing that happened is that when I did try to visit churches, it just never clicked. One church wasn't bad, but wasn't great either. One church was too conservative. One seemed to have a little too much emphasis on the offering plate. At one particular church, I made the mistake of attending a business meeting where they essentially expressed open hostility towards the university (and "university" was in the name of the church!) describing it as this corrupting place essentially. For one thing, I had professors who went to that church. For another thing, at least for me, I was an engineering student. I learned calculus and differential equations and wrote long slightly absurd mock-technical papers describing the inner workings of a toilet (I still feel sorry for the dude that had to grade those), and for 30 glorious seconds, I knew how internal combustion engines worked. There was absolutely nothing in my education there that had anything to do with religion. At all. It was the first time in my life I had ever walked out on a church service because I'd felt like I had better things to do with my time. (I almost felt guilty until I found out my sister-in-law's college roommate had also walked out on the same pastor two years earlier). And by this point, frustration, exhaustion, laziness, and momentum had kicked in and I just gave up on the enterprise for college, much to the dismay of my parents. It was also starting to occur to me that the pastor I grew up with and the church I grew up in may not have been the norm. It's also possible I was changing.
Step 2 was to join the Baptist Student Union. The first several weeks of my freshman year, our football schedule worked out such that we had a home game nearly every week. Any time there was a home game, there was a pep rally several days before that the band was to perform at. The night the pep rallies were on were the same nights the BSU met (which I always thought was a little odd, but whatever). So, that (in conjunction with my church failure) kind of killed any drive or momentum I had towards doing that. I didn't find that husband and I kind of left college disenchanted with the denomination I had grown up in. The script I had in my head as a high school senior for how college was going to go wasn't remotely what actually happened. And while I hadn't let go of that monkey bar that was my Baptist upbringing, my palms were starting to sweat a little.
In a slight twist of irony, while band had been the thing that initially caused me to not go to church in college, my instrument is what drew me back to church after I graduated, moved, and started my first job. Shortly before I graduated, I spoke with a guy I had played trumpet with my first couple of years of undergrad. He was moving from the town I was about to move to back to the location of the university. We were essentially trading locations. So, he knew the worship team at the church he was leaving (which was the largest church in the state at the time. it was huge) needed a trumpet player. Also, my senior year I'd had a few small solos in some of the marching band shows. (it's not that impressive...they lasted about 15 seconds and about 50 people in the actual audience can hear them because trumpets are directional instruments and it's a big damn stadium). Plus, it's a marching band. I digress. It turned out that one of the worship team leaders at this church had a daughter who was a freshman in band my senior year and he'd heard the rehearsals (which are in high school stadium so he could hear every note). So, unbeknownst to me, I had effectively auditioned for this worship team a year prior. I went through an audition process, but I really was kind of already in. It was a really good band. Essentially all of the musicians had, at the very least, played through college. Most of them had music degrees. Several of them had played professionally at some point. So, I was actually by far one of the weaker musicians in the group, but I was able to sort of get through it. And then the style of worship music that was popular at the time was fun to play. At any rate, before I had set foot in the doors of this church, there was already a good bit of momentum towards me going there.
I timidly (almost skeptically) visited the church for the first time the first weekend I was in town. The sermon was out of Proverbs on the ways of wisdom. It was essentially a lot of good, basic life advice (which is what Proverbs is). It was as if he were talking directly to me at that moment in my life, new in adulthood. The pastor that week talked about his time as a tour guide at Graceland and told a story about putting dishwashing liquid in the dishwasher and then trying to hide the resulting bubble mess from his wife early in his marriage. It felt like home. Then September 11th happened, and I desperately felt like I needed some faith to grasp onto. And that was it. That was my church. As it turned out, while it wasn't a Baptist church, it might as well have been. All of their beliefs and practices were virtually identical. As it turned out, this was good and bad.
Just like in a Baptist church, this church had a singles group one night a week for people in their 20's. It was heavily geared towards creating heterosexual couples. Sometimes it was jokingly referred to as a "meat market". For reasons I couldn't explain at the time, I never was incredibly comfortable in that group. The worship team would have seemed like a logical place to make friends. The people on that team were sort of the one group of people I interacted with the entire time I lived in that town. However, most of the horn section were men. Men at this church were advised to follow the now infamous Mike Pence "Billy Graham rule" which is essentially for married men to keep a degree of distance from single women lest the single woman try to seduce them. (which, if you've read the title of this blog, you can see there wasn't exactly a high risk of that happening, but it didn't matter. I could never be genuinely close friends with those people. It was a warm relationship, but I could never really be friends with them). This was also actually an issue at work while I lived in this town as well. I work in a heavily male dominated field, so it makes it isolating to live and work in a town where the Billy Graham rule mentality (where single women are to be feared) is the norm.
Then, there were small groups that met in peoples' homes weekly. This was the place, in a congregation of several thousand, you could actually get to know people and make friends. Just like the Baptist churches, the groups were paired off by marital status and age. So, while in my 20's there were plenty of groups to be a part of, the groups broke up nearly every year as people either got married or moved away for job changes or as they graduated college.
I started to experience other issues. I attended a class about "Godly Womanhood." For one thing, this class on womanhood was taught by a 50 year old man. For another thing, the tldr version of the class is that all girls and women should be either preparing for marriage and motherhood or investing in their current marriage and children. Everything else was inconsequential. He seemed to blow off the need for women to have a substantial career. Ignoring the fact that I was keenly aware not all women get married, I had spent my life watching multiple women who had lived what he was suggesting become widowed with teenage children or young children and were unprepared to have to manage finances or support themselves and thus struggled in ways they shouldn't have had to. A lot. So, I had a huge issue with this.
Then, a second issue I had was this church seemed to be essentially using their pulpit to influence how people voted. There were two different things they did. A "marriage protection" constitutional amendment had been put on the ballot in our state election the same year George Bush was up for re-election. The church did several sermons on the importance of protecting marriage from homosexuals. They never did quite explain why gay marriages were going to be damaging to the straight ones there. It was unclear if they were afraid lesbians were going to move in next door and start inviting their wives to play softball (thusly upsetting the laundry schedule) or if gay men were going to start bringing them baked goods, upsetting the balance of the Force or what. But we were told it was very important that we participate in our community and do our civic duty. I didn't see why it was the church's business or concern if people who didn't share their beliefs had a marriage they didn't approve of for religious reasons. I've always been a "keep your hands to yourself" kinda girl. The other thing the church did was invite a gentleman who was running for US Senate as a Democrat and pro-choice and who was also a member of the church to stand before the congregation and give his position on abortion. They then proceeded to give a sermon on the evils of abortion. So, in essence, they stood there in front of the largest congregation in the state and instructed their members to vote and vote Republican in a Presidential election year. That hand holding onto that monkey bar was starting to sweat a little bit more. Maybe even cramp a little.
Once I hit 30, it turned out there were no small groups at this church left with openings. There was literally no longer an easily findable place for me at this church. They eventually found one, but I had already accepted a job in another state and was moving.
Once I moved to my new town, a few things happened. I started making friends with my new co-workers who didn't care that I was a single woman. They were also either agnostic or atheist. They were some of the kindest, wisest, most accepting people I had ever met. I fairly quickly joined a church in my new town that looked and felt like the last one. But, it felt overcrowded and like there wasn't really a place for me so I kind of gave up on that enterprise and learned to just enjoy sleeping in on Sundays. My grip on that monkey bar was loosening.
Then I met a lesbian at work. She was the first lesbian I knowingly knew and it turns out she's just a normal, hard working person who worries about providing for her wife and kid and doing a good job at work. No motorcycles or leather involved like all the movies and sitcoms of my childhood told me there should be. As it turns out, I knew and was friends with loads of lesbians in college, but I didn't realize it until after marriage equality passed and I started seeing wedding pictures. Turns out there are a lot of gay people in music. Who knew? (I had never understood why I felt so comfortable around them and found them so relatable. They weren't boy crazy like the others. I know. Stop judging me).
Then I met and got to spend a little time with a female married couple through a mutual friend at work. They're both these kind, sweet, funny people. Their gay agenda seems to center around car payments, their mortgage, the despair of carpool, and raising their kids to be intelligent, decent humans. So, essentially, they sounded exactly like every other middle aged married couple I know. And if my old church had its way, they (and all of my queer married college friends) would have this litany of additional roadblocks to being able to take care of each other and their children (essentially) because my old pastor wanted George W. Bush to be president for 4 more years and found that to be an easy way to scare homophobic church members into voting in that particular election, if we're being honest. And I gave that church money for years. I was on their worship team. For years. I effectively helped him do it because I believed in that church.
The other part of meeting this couple is that I saw what a female queer couple could look like and it was sweet and it was oddly comforting for reasons I couldn't explain. My hand on that fundamentalist Christian monkey bar was cramping. But, I still held on. Partly because I had always held on and didn't see any particular reason to move. I felt like most things I had been taught were still good, even if some were starting to appear questionable. Really questionable.
The thing that finally made me let go was the 2016 election. Facebook is a heck of a thing. You watch and interact with people from every era of your life in one convenient place. The same people (from my churches over the years) who taught me that being gay was without a doubt and unquestionably an abomination are the same people who taught me the importance or protecting children, the weak, the elderly, and generally anyone who can't defend themselves. They're also the same people who talked about the importance of having leaders with integrity, having been just besides themselves when the Clinton scandals of the 90's were happening. They're the same people who heavily emphasized the importance of sexual ethics within marriages.
They abandoned all of that (every bit of it) to support Donald Trump. Taking healthcare away from children and the elderly? Not a problem. Repeated, brazen, sometimes cruel marital affairs? Not a problem. Repeated, borderline illegal cheating of people who had worked with and for him? Not a problem. Religious registries for people because it's a religion they didn't like? Heck yeah! Pre-schoolers being ripped from their mothers at our border with no measures taken to be able to return them and inadequate measures to take care of them? All because their mothers came here seeking asylum? The same people who taught me to defend the defenseless took no issue with this.
The monkey bar grew unbearably hot in the summer heat and I let go. I finally couldn't take it anymore. I didn't reach forward yet. That was later to come. But my faith in the church of my youth had been broken. If their beliefs in things as basic and caring for children were that lightly held, why on Earth should I be so afraid to question or re-examine the other things they had taught me? My faith in God is still there. But God and the church are two different things and, for now, all bets are off on my faith in the American evangelical church I spent 30 years immersed in.
It likely sounds crazy or absurd, but I feel like it took having that faith broken for me to be mentally prepared to able able to question things. To accept what I'm going through now. I had to let go to be prepared to grab on to what's next.
The reality is that a massive, massive part of why I couldn't accept that I was attracted to females...accept that I was gay...was that to embrace what I am, I would also have to let go of parts of my faith as I knew it. You can be openly gay and be Christian, but you can't be openly gay and be a conservative fundamentalist Christian and the latter had been a core part of my identity for the first 30 years of my life. It took roughly 20 years to pry that identity from my fingers.
When I graduated high school, I loved the church of my later childhood and teen years. I had loved my youth group. I loved the church members, young and old. They were like family to me. I loved my pastor and thought he was the wisest man alive. I thought I was in the "correct" Christian denomination that had all of the mysteries and complexities of faith and the Bible figured out. Every word I had been taught by my church leaders had been perfect, unquestionable, and true. And I had a plan. I was going to go to college. I was going to join a church that was a carbon copy of the one I had left back in my hometown with a pastor just like my old pastor. I was going to join the Baptist Student Union (the BSU). There I was going to make many friends and meet my future husband. I was going to graduate, then get married in my mid 20's, have kids in my late 20's and early 30's, and assume my role in a Baptist church forever. It was the sequence of events a good portion of the women at my church I admired the most had followed. I had a plan. But, as my sister-in-law often likes to say "I made plans and God laughed at me".
Step 1 was to join a church. Two things happened early in my freshman year that stalled out this effort initially. I was in the marching band at an NCAA division 1 school with a fairly major sports program. So, because of that, game days took a lot of energy. We didn't march on the field with sheet music (so it had to be memorized) and never did the same halftime show in the same venue twice so I always just barely felt like I knew the show. So, there was always a low grade amount of worry about doing something embarrassing in front of 50-70,000 people or worse on a nationally televised game. We were also expected to function as a spirit organization, so we were expected to try and help work the crowd and lead cheers and give an appearance of being energetic and happy to be there, whether we felt it or not (which was fun and I loved it...it was my sanctuary, but it was exhausting). My particular school had two locations we had "home" games. Rehearsals on game days started 6 hours before kickoff and we stayed after the game to play as everyone exited the stadium. So, from the first downbeat of the warmup to the final note of the post-game show, game days were 10 hour days when games were on campus and from stepping onto a bus and exiting the bus in our second "home" location, those were 18 hour days. So, after a fairly exhausting Saturday in the fall, I was less than enthusiastic to get up and go to church on the next day. Yes, that was probably a little lazy.
The second thing that happened is that when I did try to visit churches, it just never clicked. One church wasn't bad, but wasn't great either. One church was too conservative. One seemed to have a little too much emphasis on the offering plate. At one particular church, I made the mistake of attending a business meeting where they essentially expressed open hostility towards the university (and "university" was in the name of the church!) describing it as this corrupting place essentially. For one thing, I had professors who went to that church. For another thing, at least for me, I was an engineering student. I learned calculus and differential equations and wrote long slightly absurd mock-technical papers describing the inner workings of a toilet (I still feel sorry for the dude that had to grade those), and for 30 glorious seconds, I knew how internal combustion engines worked. There was absolutely nothing in my education there that had anything to do with religion. At all. It was the first time in my life I had ever walked out on a church service because I'd felt like I had better things to do with my time. (I almost felt guilty until I found out my sister-in-law's college roommate had also walked out on the same pastor two years earlier). And by this point, frustration, exhaustion, laziness, and momentum had kicked in and I just gave up on the enterprise for college, much to the dismay of my parents. It was also starting to occur to me that the pastor I grew up with and the church I grew up in may not have been the norm. It's also possible I was changing.
Step 2 was to join the Baptist Student Union. The first several weeks of my freshman year, our football schedule worked out such that we had a home game nearly every week. Any time there was a home game, there was a pep rally several days before that the band was to perform at. The night the pep rallies were on were the same nights the BSU met (which I always thought was a little odd, but whatever). So, that (in conjunction with my church failure) kind of killed any drive or momentum I had towards doing that. I didn't find that husband and I kind of left college disenchanted with the denomination I had grown up in. The script I had in my head as a high school senior for how college was going to go wasn't remotely what actually happened. And while I hadn't let go of that monkey bar that was my Baptist upbringing, my palms were starting to sweat a little.
In a slight twist of irony, while band had been the thing that initially caused me to not go to church in college, my instrument is what drew me back to church after I graduated, moved, and started my first job. Shortly before I graduated, I spoke with a guy I had played trumpet with my first couple of years of undergrad. He was moving from the town I was about to move to back to the location of the university. We were essentially trading locations. So, he knew the worship team at the church he was leaving (which was the largest church in the state at the time. it was huge) needed a trumpet player. Also, my senior year I'd had a few small solos in some of the marching band shows. (it's not that impressive...they lasted about 15 seconds and about 50 people in the actual audience can hear them because trumpets are directional instruments and it's a big damn stadium). Plus, it's a marching band. I digress. It turned out that one of the worship team leaders at this church had a daughter who was a freshman in band my senior year and he'd heard the rehearsals (which are in high school stadium so he could hear every note). So, unbeknownst to me, I had effectively auditioned for this worship team a year prior. I went through an audition process, but I really was kind of already in. It was a really good band. Essentially all of the musicians had, at the very least, played through college. Most of them had music degrees. Several of them had played professionally at some point. So, I was actually by far one of the weaker musicians in the group, but I was able to sort of get through it. And then the style of worship music that was popular at the time was fun to play. At any rate, before I had set foot in the doors of this church, there was already a good bit of momentum towards me going there.
I timidly (almost skeptically) visited the church for the first time the first weekend I was in town. The sermon was out of Proverbs on the ways of wisdom. It was essentially a lot of good, basic life advice (which is what Proverbs is). It was as if he were talking directly to me at that moment in my life, new in adulthood. The pastor that week talked about his time as a tour guide at Graceland and told a story about putting dishwashing liquid in the dishwasher and then trying to hide the resulting bubble mess from his wife early in his marriage. It felt like home. Then September 11th happened, and I desperately felt like I needed some faith to grasp onto. And that was it. That was my church. As it turned out, while it wasn't a Baptist church, it might as well have been. All of their beliefs and practices were virtually identical. As it turned out, this was good and bad.
Just like in a Baptist church, this church had a singles group one night a week for people in their 20's. It was heavily geared towards creating heterosexual couples. Sometimes it was jokingly referred to as a "meat market". For reasons I couldn't explain at the time, I never was incredibly comfortable in that group. The worship team would have seemed like a logical place to make friends. The people on that team were sort of the one group of people I interacted with the entire time I lived in that town. However, most of the horn section were men. Men at this church were advised to follow the now infamous Mike Pence "Billy Graham rule" which is essentially for married men to keep a degree of distance from single women lest the single woman try to seduce them. (which, if you've read the title of this blog, you can see there wasn't exactly a high risk of that happening, but it didn't matter. I could never be genuinely close friends with those people. It was a warm relationship, but I could never really be friends with them). This was also actually an issue at work while I lived in this town as well. I work in a heavily male dominated field, so it makes it isolating to live and work in a town where the Billy Graham rule mentality (where single women are to be feared) is the norm.
Then, there were small groups that met in peoples' homes weekly. This was the place, in a congregation of several thousand, you could actually get to know people and make friends. Just like the Baptist churches, the groups were paired off by marital status and age. So, while in my 20's there were plenty of groups to be a part of, the groups broke up nearly every year as people either got married or moved away for job changes or as they graduated college.
I started to experience other issues. I attended a class about "Godly Womanhood." For one thing, this class on womanhood was taught by a 50 year old man. For another thing, the tldr version of the class is that all girls and women should be either preparing for marriage and motherhood or investing in their current marriage and children. Everything else was inconsequential. He seemed to blow off the need for women to have a substantial career. Ignoring the fact that I was keenly aware not all women get married, I had spent my life watching multiple women who had lived what he was suggesting become widowed with teenage children or young children and were unprepared to have to manage finances or support themselves and thus struggled in ways they shouldn't have had to. A lot. So, I had a huge issue with this.
Then, a second issue I had was this church seemed to be essentially using their pulpit to influence how people voted. There were two different things they did. A "marriage protection" constitutional amendment had been put on the ballot in our state election the same year George Bush was up for re-election. The church did several sermons on the importance of protecting marriage from homosexuals. They never did quite explain why gay marriages were going to be damaging to the straight ones there. It was unclear if they were afraid lesbians were going to move in next door and start inviting their wives to play softball (thusly upsetting the laundry schedule) or if gay men were going to start bringing them baked goods, upsetting the balance of the Force or what. But we were told it was very important that we participate in our community and do our civic duty. I didn't see why it was the church's business or concern if people who didn't share their beliefs had a marriage they didn't approve of for religious reasons. I've always been a "keep your hands to yourself" kinda girl. The other thing the church did was invite a gentleman who was running for US Senate as a Democrat and pro-choice and who was also a member of the church to stand before the congregation and give his position on abortion. They then proceeded to give a sermon on the evils of abortion. So, in essence, they stood there in front of the largest congregation in the state and instructed their members to vote and vote Republican in a Presidential election year. That hand holding onto that monkey bar was starting to sweat a little bit more. Maybe even cramp a little.
Once I hit 30, it turned out there were no small groups at this church left with openings. There was literally no longer an easily findable place for me at this church. They eventually found one, but I had already accepted a job in another state and was moving.
Once I moved to my new town, a few things happened. I started making friends with my new co-workers who didn't care that I was a single woman. They were also either agnostic or atheist. They were some of the kindest, wisest, most accepting people I had ever met. I fairly quickly joined a church in my new town that looked and felt like the last one. But, it felt overcrowded and like there wasn't really a place for me so I kind of gave up on that enterprise and learned to just enjoy sleeping in on Sundays. My grip on that monkey bar was loosening.
Then I met a lesbian at work. She was the first lesbian I knowingly knew and it turns out she's just a normal, hard working person who worries about providing for her wife and kid and doing a good job at work. No motorcycles or leather involved like all the movies and sitcoms of my childhood told me there should be. As it turns out, I knew and was friends with loads of lesbians in college, but I didn't realize it until after marriage equality passed and I started seeing wedding pictures. Turns out there are a lot of gay people in music. Who knew? (I had never understood why I felt so comfortable around them and found them so relatable. They weren't boy crazy like the others. I know. Stop judging me).
Then I met and got to spend a little time with a female married couple through a mutual friend at work. They're both these kind, sweet, funny people. Their gay agenda seems to center around car payments, their mortgage, the despair of carpool, and raising their kids to be intelligent, decent humans. So, essentially, they sounded exactly like every other middle aged married couple I know. And if my old church had its way, they (and all of my queer married college friends) would have this litany of additional roadblocks to being able to take care of each other and their children (essentially) because my old pastor wanted George W. Bush to be president for 4 more years and found that to be an easy way to scare homophobic church members into voting in that particular election, if we're being honest. And I gave that church money for years. I was on their worship team. For years. I effectively helped him do it because I believed in that church.
The other part of meeting this couple is that I saw what a female queer couple could look like and it was sweet and it was oddly comforting for reasons I couldn't explain. My hand on that fundamentalist Christian monkey bar was cramping. But, I still held on. Partly because I had always held on and didn't see any particular reason to move. I felt like most things I had been taught were still good, even if some were starting to appear questionable. Really questionable.
The thing that finally made me let go was the 2016 election. Facebook is a heck of a thing. You watch and interact with people from every era of your life in one convenient place. The same people (from my churches over the years) who taught me that being gay was without a doubt and unquestionably an abomination are the same people who taught me the importance or protecting children, the weak, the elderly, and generally anyone who can't defend themselves. They're also the same people who talked about the importance of having leaders with integrity, having been just besides themselves when the Clinton scandals of the 90's were happening. They're the same people who heavily emphasized the importance of sexual ethics within marriages.
They abandoned all of that (every bit of it) to support Donald Trump. Taking healthcare away from children and the elderly? Not a problem. Repeated, brazen, sometimes cruel marital affairs? Not a problem. Repeated, borderline illegal cheating of people who had worked with and for him? Not a problem. Religious registries for people because it's a religion they didn't like? Heck yeah! Pre-schoolers being ripped from their mothers at our border with no measures taken to be able to return them and inadequate measures to take care of them? All because their mothers came here seeking asylum? The same people who taught me to defend the defenseless took no issue with this.
The monkey bar grew unbearably hot in the summer heat and I let go. I finally couldn't take it anymore. I didn't reach forward yet. That was later to come. But my faith in the church of my youth had been broken. If their beliefs in things as basic and caring for children were that lightly held, why on Earth should I be so afraid to question or re-examine the other things they had taught me? My faith in God is still there. But God and the church are two different things and, for now, all bets are off on my faith in the American evangelical church I spent 30 years immersed in.
It likely sounds crazy or absurd, but I feel like it took having that faith broken for me to be mentally prepared to able able to question things. To accept what I'm going through now. I had to let go to be prepared to grab on to what's next.
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