21. What am I doing? (Stand Alone)

I have so many emotions going through me. It’s exhausting.

When I decided to write this blog, I wanted to do it to work toward healing. I wanted to get it out of me and release it. I still do, and it has been good, but the emotions around it have been complex.

I ask myself multiple questions every day. Should I keep writing? Should I stop? Am I ruining people’s lives by doing this? Should some things be left unsaid? Is my being silent the better option?

If I have forgiven, why can’t I move on? If I have forgiven, why share it? Why drag it all back up? Isn’t the Christian way of doing things just letting it go and staying quiet?

I would argue that although that is the most common “Christian” answer, we leave room for the pattern to repeat itself by not “dragging things back up” or staying silent. Isn’t it more merciful to share in hopes of saving someone else from being hurt?

The last two and a half years have been hard. It has seemed at times like I have been stuck. I will admit that letting things go is not my strong suit. But what is the timeline for healing from something like this?

Is there a prescribed amount of time? Is it possible that maybe everyone’s healing time is different?

I heard someone on a podcast describe our lives like a story or a novel. They asked the question, what happens when we are intimately involved in a story and are suddenly pulled out of it? What does it feel like to sit back and watch that story go on without you? When that sense of belonging and community is gone, they said, it’s more painful than you can describe.

It’s like peering into a window of a home you once lived in; You don’t live there anymore, but every room holds a memory.

The house is still there, it looks the same, but you no longer belong. It’s a strange feeling.

That’s what things have looked like to me over the past two years. I “sold” my old house, I built a new one, but I drive by the old one every day. The memories are still there… I own the memories but not the house…

Let me say that again… I own the memories but not the house. The two aren’t the same. I can love my new home more and be thrilled to be here, but when I drive by that old house, I remember where the nursery was, where I rocked my babies, where our Christmas tree was in the front window every year, the backyard my kids played in, the birthday parties, the meals we cooked in the kitchen… all of those memories and stories still belong in my heart and my mind. I can revisit them when I want to, and I can share them.

What does forgiveness look like? I used to think that forgiveness meant you just completely forgot all the things that happened and moved on. It turns out the human mind doesn’t work that way. We can’t actually forget things so easily.

A good friend once told me that forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, and the inability to forget isn’t a sign of weakness. You can forgive someone and not trust them, you can forgive someone and not like them, and you can forgive someone and still share the things they did wrong. So our inability to forget can be a built-in safety mechanism. We learn from things. What’s the point of learning a lesson if we forget about it?

I’m fighting this hard. I’m feeling it. My brain hurts. I randomly find myself asking what in the world am I doing? Do people really need to know this stuff? Do people even care? Am I hurting people?

I ask my husband all the time if telling my story is wrong if, in doing so, I anger people? He continually tells me that as long as I’m telling the truth about things that happened to me and around me, it’s my story to tell. He reminds me that I’m bringing things to light and good can come from it.

And here’s the truth… I have felt very much convicted that I should keep writing… Just when I start to beat myself up and think I should quit, I get a message or a phone call from someone encouraging me. Or even my daughter who told me that she finally feels like she has a voice when she’s felt silenced and forgotten for so long.

Here’s what I know… God is definitely telling me to keep writing. He hasn’t released me from that yet. I know He wanted me to be quiet for the time I was, and now He wants me to speak up. It would be easier to be quiet, but I can’t.

One of the questions I’ve asked many times in my previous posts is where is Jesus in this? So, I’m going to ask it again, this time of myself. Where is Jesus in this? Why is He asking me to write all these hard and sometimes ugly memories? It’s so easy to think that Jesus is only in the good, happy and pretty parts of our lives. We like sunshine and rainbows, pots of gold and cloudless days… but Jesus walked through the ugly stuff too and He exposed it.

How many people have been hurt by the church? How much carnage is there? When we continue to protect the organization and not the people, we have sorely missed the mark. Instead of the church being a hospital for the hurting, we’ve made it the place from which the ambulance takes them away. We have become so intent on protecting the organization that we have forgotten that the organization was only put in place to reach people for Jesus.

We have made pastors into celebrities who need constant pats on the backs and accolades. We’ve given them the central place in the church, the place where Jesus belongs.

I’m a truth-teller, always have been. I’ve always said, just tell me the truth and let me deal with how it makes me feel, but tell me the truth, and I, in turn, tell people the truth as well. My husband once told me that I want the truth revealed more than almost anything else. I feel it deeply.

My family functions as a child were always interesting. We would meet together for holidays and smile, hug, exchange gifts and laugh as if we were all merry and best of friends. The next day we had all gone our separate ways and went back to disliking one another again. There were so many underlying issues between us, but for the sake of appearance, we never dealt with any of them. We just faked it for the pictures and for our grandmother. And now we have all moved on; many of us don’t speak to one another at all. I always wondered what would happen if we were all to sit around in a room and just tell each other the truth. What if we just told each other our true feelings and worked them out? What if we were honest with one another? I always imagined that if we could do that, we could have true happiness as a family instead of the fake smiles we put on for the holidays, and we may have remained a close family even after my grandmother’s passing.

What if the church did that? What if we brought to light the things that had been done? Couldn’t the church be a beautiful thing if the truth were to abide instead of lies and covering things up?

I’ve followed all the latest issues going on with the SBC. Their immediate response to the victims of abuse was to just cover it up and move on. Now it has exploded and it’s something from which they may never recover. But the saddest part of that whole thing was how little the victims meant to them. They wanted to protect the SBC as an organization at all costs, even at the cost of innocent, hurting, people; the people that Jesus loves and died for.

That’s a long explanation for my initial question which was Where is Jesus in this whole blog… where does He belong… My answer… at the very center of it… He’s the air I breathe, He’s more to me than any other, I want Him to be uplifted, honored, and glorified… things that I write that may seem hurtful, things that are hard for me to relive, and things that are honestly hard for me to say about other people… It’s me calling into the light the things that have been in the darkness. It’s me crying out that these people are more important than the organization. It’s me giving a voice to people who haven’t had one, like my daughter who has been hurt so badly. I do it in hopes that one day we can call the evil, evil, we can call out the wrong and in doing so maybe the church can someday, once again be what Jesus intended it to be.

Until Next Time,

Whitney