Why? Why does it still hurt so much? Why do I go back so many times and reread the text messages to see where it all went wrong? A year and a half has passed. I should be over it by now.
Friendship. Something that never came easy for me. My personality has always been pretty intense. I love big; I get mad big, I cry big… it’s a lot for someone who isn’t even 5 foot tall, and it’s a lot for other people to handle, especially other women. But, of course, age has helped me curb some of those emotions. But hurt, pain and rejection have taught me that it’s better to make myself smaller in most situations.
I didn’t have many friends in elementary school. Part of that was because of medical issues that kept me from being the “normal” kid.
High School was an awful experience for me as far as school went. However, it was my church at the time and my relationship with my now husband that kept me from going crazy during those years.
All of this to say, I never had a group of girlfriends. I never even knew that I wanted that.
There was a group of women at our last church, and it seemed like something just happened organically. We didn’t look the same, nor did we have all the same interests… I could go on and on about how we were different. But what we did have in common was our church, and two of the ladies had girls the same age as my daughter.
It started with a text message. A friend, who we will call Friend #1 because I knew her the longest, put me and her neighbor, who we will call Friend #2, in a group message with a lady who had recently joined the church, which we will call Friend #3. From that day on, the text message thread between us was constant. It was funny, it was sad, it was serious, it was encouraging…. It was part of my life. Any time something happened in one of our lives, no matter what it was, we sent a text message. It wasn’t unusual for us to text each other 50 times daily.
We ended up chaperoning camps together quite often. They were not only great friends but also the first to help volunteer for the events for the children’s ministry.
We went to dinner together, plays together, went shopping… you get the picture.
I felt like this group of 3 ladies would be my friends forever. I thought our bond was strong enough never to be broken. I imagined planning our kid’s weddings together, retiring together, etc. We joked about being the Golden Girls and the group of women on Steel Magnolias. We would go out to eat, and we would come back home. We would sit in the car for another 2 hours just talking.
They were the first people to know when I started questioning my job. They were the first ones there when I broke down emotionally. They heard all the ugly, all the pain and unfiltered anger. They were there for me when I needed them.
June 2019: time for summer camp. This particular week in June, I would be chaperoning a youth camp for Senior High. It was the first time in several years that I would only be there for one portion of the camp instead of the entire week. My own kids had finally reached an age where they would be attending at the same time.
There was no need this year for me to attend the Junior and Senior high portion. So I left for camp on a Tuesday. My fateful evaluation landed the Monday before I left. When we left Tuesday morning, I was far from ok, and Friend #1 and Friend #2 were there with me at camp. They knew me well and could tell I was in a bad place. That first night they started asking me questions. Still, we had been told that, as staff members, we weren’t supposed to discuss our evaluations with anyone. What happened behind closed doors at church was supposed to stay there. Staff had certain privileges and also certain restrictions. They assured me that they were a safe place and when the damn broke open, the tears, the words, the pain, and the hurt poured out. I told them about every portion of the evaluation and how hurt I was.
They both assured me this was no way for a pastor or a boss to treat their employee. They were dumbfounded that anyone would or could expect any more from me. I will never forget how freeing it was to share my burdens with friends. It would, however, become a night I regretted. I keep my guard up for a reason. The more guarded I am, the less I can be hurt by others. This time I let my guard down. I trusted. I shouldn’t have.
These friends always teased me about my family’s relationship with the pastor and his family. They “jokingly” accused me of sucking up. Looking back, I can see that they probably weren’t joking. Instead, they wished for the same kind of relationship.
It turns out that we wouldn’t be like the Golden Girls at all because the bond was indeed breakable and when it broke, it broke into a million pieces.
I wrote the previous section of this blog post a very long time ago. It has just been sitting in my documents. I haven’t even looked at it until now.
I would say that I’ve healed tremendously this year. So many things have become more manageable, and even this part of the story has become easier for me to talk about.
But I still tread into this section with great trepidation. There’s still a lot to unpack.
I will try my best to tell it succinctly, but there’s just a lot… a lot of hurts, a lot of anger, a lot of disappointment, a lot of confusion…
If I’m being completely transparent, a big part of me wants to slap the shit out of these ladies. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life that 3 people have hurt me this way.
In all fairness, these ladies would probably also like to slap the shit out of me.
I want to be careful. I want to own my part in what happened. I’m not innocent.
Let’s back up to the summer of 2020.
Covid was in full swing. As a result, things in the world were stressful.
My family and I decided that we were all out of Tree Town Baptist. We hadn’t returned. The last service I attended was on December 29, 2019. The last service my family attended was on March 1, 2020.
The back porch meeting with the pastor was on April 21, 2020. We met our friends at the restaurant on May 16, 2020. We received the voicemail from that friend on June 22, 2020.
This group of friends knew it all. They knew the hurt. They got the fresh, raw emotion as it came out of me. They heard the venting because I was open and honest through it all.
Too open and honest.
I felt like I could say anything to these ladies… they were my people.
When I met them for dinner on the night of August 19, 2020, I had so much anger within me about Tree Town Baptist. As I mentioned in the last post, I didn’t hide it well that night. I think a large part of me hoped they would see the toxicity of the church and the pastor and run for the hills. You never want your friends to be stuck in a bad situation, and when you’ve seen the truth, you want to share it.
We sat there that night at the Mexican restaurant and visited for a very long time. It felt good for things to be “normal” again. We didn’t just talk about church stuff, we visited about what was going on in each other’s lives.
My daughter rode back with her friend from the snow cone social, and we met at this friend’s house before we headed home. We stood outside their home, right across the street from the church, and visited for a long time. It was good.
I do remember one of their husbands saying I should come to help him lead worship that Sunday and my response was that the pastor would shit his pants if I walked in. We hadn’t heard a single word from him since I sent the apology text. It was more than clear that he wasn’t interested in us returning to Tree Town Baptist, and frankly, we weren’t interested in returning either.
During those summer months, we struggled to maintain the level of friendship that we had before. I wasn’t sure if it was Covid, that I left the church, or both.
I wanted to make it work so badly. I desperately wanted this portion of my life to stay the same.
I came up with the “brilliant idea” that we should study the book of Psalms together. Since we couldn’t see each other and didn’t go to church together anymore, I thought a Bible study would be a good thing to do together. We would read one chapter of Psalms each day and then text our thoughts, just something about what stood out to us in the passage. It didn’t have to be deeply theological, just simple.
I was grasping for a way to bring us back together. What better way to do that than with a Bible study?
I’ve gone back and looked over text messages over and over again to see where the breakdown began.
The first red flag for me was when one of these ladies was adamant that I not tell the Personnel Committee what was going on with the prospective children’s minister. She didn’t want me to say anything about the things I knew. Her words were something like; they never asked for your opinion, so you need to mind your business.
That hurt and immediately made me question things.
The next red flag was when that friend made a Facebook post about the wrong reasons to leave a church. That occurred in June 2020. Her post came very soon after our conversation about leaving the church. It was hurtful.
I guess she could deny that it was about me. But, if a friend were sensitive to what was going on in one of her “best friends” lives, she wouldn’t post anything like that. How could she not think it would be taken that way?
The next red flag was when I noticed that I got messages from the group every day of the week, and then on Sunday, there was silence. There had never been a silent day between us, yet strangely enough, Sundays became silent. I could only think that Sundays were no longer a time and place where I was welcome in the group.
The next red flag was when one of the friends named our text message group.
Let me explain something to you… the only reason you name a group is so it is immediately apparent who you are texting.
Say there are 4 people in a group… the text message will list their names, and it’s easy just to glance and not realize that it had one more person in it than you wanted to text. By naming the group, you can be sure that the people you intend to text are in that group.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
I deduced that they were probably texting in a different space when it had to do with church, if it was Sunday, or if they wanted to say something without me knowing.
This suspicion was further confirmed when in our group message something would be mentioned as if we all knew about it. Someone would say that they sent it in a text… but I didn’t have that text.
Adults can text who they want, when they want, and as many times as they want… there are no rules and regulations for group or private text messages… but this was different, it was new, and it was suspicious.
This had never been an issue before.
Another thing I noticed was that they wouldn’t answer any question I asked about church. When the church hired a new music minister, I wondered how they liked him. So I just sent a message saying, how did you like the new music guy? It wasn’t a loaded question. I genuinely hoped they would like him. I knew there was excitement around his hiring, I knew they waited a long time to hire anyone. I just simply wanted to know if they liked him…
Again, I was greeted with total and complete silence.
I got the message.
After going back over the timeline, I realized that I was already seeing many red flags by the time we had dinner that night in August.
I think I knew that it was probably over by then.
I began noticing that each day we studied Psalms, the passages somehow began to pertain to the church. There was the likening of David to a church pastor. (I guess they didn’t know that Tree Town’s pastor preferred to be likened to Paul)
The evil in the passages began to pertain to angry people in the church or people who left the church…
Here’s just a portion of a few for example…
Psalms 52…When we are mad at someone, we leave out bits and pieces of the story because we really want to paint a bad picture of this person. We love to hear bad stories of this person or we love to hear when someone else isn’t happy with that person…
Psalms 55… if you are close friends with someone, at some point you have felt betrayed… Running away isn’t the answer. What would that fix?…
Psalms 56… I see pastors a lot of times in this role as David. Unhappy church members do lots to cause and strive and pain for these men of God. God called David to be King much like he calls pastors to churches- we think this is mainly our doing… I would probably be shocked to know exactly what a day, week or month looks like for a pastor. How many tears are shed for doing what God has called them to do… I’ve caught myself putting down my pastors before. This is someone we should be praying for. Their line of work isn’t easy.
Psalms to 59… These evil people were probably following David and searching to find anything to blame him for. Sound familiar? Looks a bit like a church…
This next one just makes me chuckle. This woman lived by a do as I say, not as I do model…
Psalms 64… When we are in difficult circumstances or being personally attacked, know this is a chance for God to work on those doing the wrong. It is so hard to extend grace to those mean evil people. But you better believe I want it extended to me when I do wrong.
These are just small excerpts. There are many more.
She would say that if I thought those things were about me, then I must have had a guilty conscious. I know her well enough to know that she will take no ownership in any of it. She considers herself a very holy person who lives just a notch above the rest of those around her. She’s a rule follower, almost like a nun, is what she always said.
I would shake my head every day when these text messages about our Psalms Bible study would come through wondering how these passages could even remotely be likened to a pastor or a church. I began dreading the sermon I would receive from this lady each day.
I gave her the benefit of the doubt for a very long time, and one day my husband finally said, Whitney, she’s preaching to you. She’s weaponizing the passages every day to tell you what she is afraid to say in any other way. I knew in my heart that what he said was true. I couldn’t play dumb anymore. I finally began to see it, and I got angry.
Finally, on October 7, 2020, I had enough. One of the friends said she wasn’t feeling well that day. I asked if she had been near the pastor’s wife the day before because I had read that the pastor’s wife had Covid.
The responses were quick and definitive… the pastor’s wife wasn’t at church, two of them quickly told me. It was an odd exchange.
I responded that I wasn’t accusing, just asking.
Things were unraveling. There were too many unsaid things, and too many emotions were left unexplained in text messages… we hadn’t been able to see each other… we weren’t attending church together… my mind was going crazy. I didn’t feel safe with these people anymore. I needed to know the truth.
So, before thinking it through or sending it to my husband to look over, I sent a text message to the group to find out where I stood.
It wasn’t my finest moment.
I could’ve done a better job explaining my emotions, and I could’ve done a better job with my wording.
I had just found out that I had some new medical issues. I was having hormonal problems. I was feeling ostracized by everyone in Tree Town. I wanted a friendship with these women, but I wanted everything out in the open. I wanted the truth, be it good or bad.
None of these are excuses… I could’ve handled things differently. But I didn’t think I had to.
These were friends. Some of my closest ones. I thought I could be completely honest and that we could hash it out…
I was wrong.
I’ll share the unraveling in my next post…
As I go back through all of this, I see a lot of things. Sure, these friends weren’t sensitive to my emotions or to the needs I had. Maybe they weren’t capable. Maybe they didn’t realize they weren’t being supportive. Maybe they didn’t care… I don’t know what it was.
I can’t change it. I can’t go back and fix it. I have to move forward.
But what I can do is learn from it.
I can learn that when other people are hurting, my words carry weight. I can destroy someone with my words, or I can build them up.
I will go into this more later, but these friends thought it was time for me to move on, get over it, and stop living in the past. They thought I should find a new church, jump in somewhere, and get busy serving.
Their advice was bad. Really bad.
I needed time to heal, I needed to feel heard, and I needed to be loved and maybe even coddled a little. I had never needed that before, I was feeling vulnerable. I had been through something that had traumatized me, and I needed my friends to surround me. For how long? I don’t know… this is something that will affect me the rest of my life… grief doesn’t have a timeline… the effects of trauma creep up at the most inopportune times…
My takeaway is this…
If someone trusts you enough to share their pain, handle it with great care. If someone continues to talk about the same things over and over, realize that they are still hurting, they are still processing, and they just need a friend to listen. If you don’t agree with how someone is handling their grief, don’t correct them; it’s their grief, it’s their trauma… sit in it with them… just be present… love them… support them… be sensitive to their needs, their emotions, their pain… think about what you say, what you post… and don’t put a timeline on things. That person may never completely get over what happened to them, and that’s okay.
On the flip side of things…
If you are hurting and you reach out to someone who you think is your friend, and they preach to you, belittle you, push you to feel a way that you aren’t ready to feel… If you see red flags in the relationship, if you feel unsafe… walk away… your instincts are probably correct… you deserve better… these people are probably not your real friends.
Until Next Time,
Whitney