This One Time I Got Shunned

photo found here: http://tyt2000.deviantart.com/art/Freedom-19490162

This evening, I browsed Facebook photos and came across an album called “Pastor T’s Ordination.” I clicked and suddenly saw the eyes of my abusive father (Can I get a different term for that? He is no father of mine.) looking at me through the screen. My youth pastor, who spiritually abused me, was being ordained and my abuser spoke at this event. I clicked through the pictures, identifying each person that came out to support my abusers by name. These were my once my friends, my mentors, the kids I babysat…

Pastor T apparently still endorses my abuser. Everyone at my old church does, as far as I know. And I can’t figure out why the pain flows tonight, because this is not new knowledge, but it does. It flows and flows.

These people raised me. Did they always think I was crazy? Or just when I stopped believing what they believe? I haven’t done anything wrong by stating facts. They would even say that God wants truth to be known, but they want me to say nothing about the truth of my childhood.

And why do I care? I look through the photos, and it’s not like I want to move back to New Hampshire and be in their lives again. I don’t ever want to go back to that church basement for potlucks or even stand in the parking lot.  So what’s bothering me?

I think it’s the fact that they took away my basic human rights, and they continue to act as if I am evil because I took those rights back. They degraded my gender. They sacrificed me to do their mission work. They tried to control my thoughts. They taught me that I wasn’t valuable to anyone, not even God. They made me feel that setting relationship boundaries wasn’t spiritual. They said I made God sad if I didn’t do exactly what they wanted me to do. Then, when my world went beyond them, they shunned me. Some did it through ignoring me and some did it through picking countless fights on my Facebook wall (and never engaging in conversations on a personal level, even when I pointed out that our friendships couldn’t survive constant debating with no personal encounters). Every lost friendship wounded me, but they said they did it because they couldn’t, in good conscience, support me as a person. They implied that I was backslidden and compromising, doing whatever I felt like doing. What really happened? I examined the world and my beliefs with fear and trembling, afraid of what would happen with each change. I think I found beliefs that correspond better to reality. I can’t change reality. And truth I've found has been too good to me to reject. So who is the real friend, the one who shuns me for having different viewpoints, or the one who tries for years to fit the mold so that she can stay included in the community?

What do I want from them now? I want them to believe that God hates abuse. I don’t need to defend myself, but I still wish I could be believed. When they are entirely unwilling to consider that my father is an abuser, when they set him up as their leader, when they feel sorry for my mother as she plays the victim (and then focus their negative attention towards me, just as she wants), when they bend any evidence they can find in directions it doesn’t naturally go so that they can stay in their secure lives, when they support the phony “investigations,” that the unqualified leadership at Christ Community Church used to harass me, and when they call me a liar, they revictimize me. I’m not too far away to feel this pain, since they will always be my past.

And tonight, it makes me feel hated.