Allow Others Their Journey

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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An old friend once told me, and I paraphrase here, ‘Church people just don’t get me.’ Anxiety was a constant in this friend’s life, so when people at church would ask, “How are you?”, the friend would give them the truth. None of these “Fine” answers for the friend. According to my friend, that ended conversations pretty quickly.

When COVID quarantines went into effect, it became the perfect excuse for the friend to leave the church. My friend, to my knowledge, has never gone back. Like many others I know, they have had enough of a church that doesn’t meet their expectations of what church should be.

Or what Christians should be.

Church people weren’t ready for my friend’s truth; my friend’s reality of anxiety. I understood that. I’ve dealt with anxiety for most of my adult life. But unlike my friend, I always walked the Fine path of safety and security.

I knew folks didn’t want to hear about how stressed I felt at my job. They didn’t want to hear about the challenges in my marriage or with my kids either. Or should I say, I assumed they didn’t want to hear it.

Truth can be a bit much, especially when it is someone’s confession of reality.

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I wish I could say that I have always been like this, but I can’t. I wish I could say that I had this revelation 5, 10, 20+ years ago or more. But I can’t. It would have changed so many things in my relationships.

But the enemy of our souls would love nothing more than to keep us bound up in the past. Lot’s wife had her identity in Sodom and Gomorrah. She looked back. I don’t want to look back. I will learn from it, but I do not want to dwell there.

I’ve been hurt so many times by Christians. As I’ve written before, I’ve been nearly destroyed by the choices and actions of Christian leaders. I loved God so much. I wanted to do what He wanted me to do. However, Christian leaders flipped the switch on the Spirit. I didn’t fit in with their plans.

In another instance, the pride and arrogance from the pulpit were heartbreaking for me. It was so severe that I left church altogether.

But then I came back.

I allowed God to heal me in a time-frame that I could handle. He didn’t rush me. He didn’t chastise me for not wanting to go to church. He gently and lovingly guided me back to Him.

He allowed me my journey.

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Keeping it real. I like to keep it real here on the blog. I can be blunt, brutally honest, at times. The Lord is teaching me about being more restrained, so more often than not I won’t post all what I am thinking or processing at any given moment.

Yet, I am taking a risk here by saying I despise the terms “church hurt” and “deconstructing” one’s faith.

The term “church hurt” is very broad. It lacks specific context, which is something that irks me about the whole idea. People say they have church hurt. Okay, what happened? A church leader hurt me. Okay, how did they hurt you? They abused their power. Okay. How did they do that?

Some people might call those questions victim-shaming, but that would be incorrect. What I am trying to do is get to the root of the issue. And I speak this from experience (see previous section in this post). Before “church hurt” became vogue, I lived through it… multiple times.

Having even walked away from the church; some would probably call that deconstructing my faith. Nope. I call that a wilderness season.

Why? Let me explain.

I believe to deconstruct one’s faith means that their faith was built upon someone else’s faith. This would be true for so many who grew up in the Church. Their parents were Christians, so they were Christians. They were taught the Christian faith by their parents or the church they went to. Their foundation is not their own.

Or it was built upon belief in a man and not the Son of Man. More stock was put in church leaders than one’s own relationship with God. More time and more energy were put into a person. More conversations, more hope, and more faith were dedicated to them instead of God.

Again, this is not victim-shaming. This is based on multiple factors. These include my personal experience, my observations through social media posts and reading blogs, and watching others up close deal with “church hurt”. From my experience, there are deeper issues happening than what is seen or talked about.

From my perspective, I had a skewed idea of what Christians were supposed to be like. They were supposed to be perfect, or better yet, without any flaws. Even after the first church hurt experience, I went to the second church still thinking that Christian leaders were supposed to be this pillar of Christ’s example.

By the time the third church came into our lives, I no longer held them up on a pedestal. I did expect common decency and some semblance of the golden rule. I did not expect arrogance at an unhealthy level, from the pulpit, but I certainly got that.

I never understood why God would let that type of leadership to continue operating as they did. I never understood why God would (supposedly) answer televangelists prayers and not mine. I never understood why God would allow people who wanted nothing to do with Him, to prosper.

Until I walked away from God.

What I experienced would certainly be labeled “church hurt” today. I have mentioned this here in this post. I also talked about it in earlier posts. My expectations of others had something to do with it too. Most certainly, it doesn’t justify what was done. Absolutely not. Yet, I think of Colossians 3:2 here:

Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. (KJV)

I love how the King James Version calls it “affection”. The ESV says it like this, which is probably a common variation that people know:

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

The Greek for that word/phrase, “set your minds”, there is the Greek word, φρονεῖτε (phroneite). It is Strong’s 5426. This says, “To think, to set one’s mind on, to have a mindset — I think, I think/judge, I direct the mind to; seek for, I observe, I care for.”

Then I also think about Proverbs 3:5 (ESV),

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.”

Not trusting people. Trust in the Lord, which is why I recently wrote, “Church. It’s not what you think.” In that post I said, “Why do we think church (aka church people) should be perfect? Why do we think church (aka church people) should always have the right answer? Why do we think church (aka church people) won’t ever do anything wrong?“

My unmet expectations of other people contributed to why I left church, but it wasn’t the sole reason. I was the reason. Me. My eyes weren’t on God. They were on people. My trust wasn’t in God. It was in people.

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The beauty of a relationship with God is that it IS a relationship with GOD. He’s more than “the big man upstairs”. He’s beyond just being “the big guy “. He is Alpha and Omega (Aleph and the Tov). He is the King of kings, Lord of lords, my Redeemer, my Savior. He is Jehovah (YHWH, Yahweh). He is El Shaddai (Almighty God). He is El Elyon (God most high). He is El-Olam (Everlasting God). He is Jehovah (YHWH, Yahweh), and all the names that go along with that.

HE. IS. GOD.

AWESOME!

And we get the privilege of having an actual relationship with Him through Jesus. I have not always understood the how of a God-relationship, but I have one. Every Christian has one. God loves us with His “hesed”. As Dr. Billye Brim puts it, hesed is God’s covenantal, loyal, obligatory love. It is unchanging. It is never decreasing or increasing.

It just is.

Hesed.

Despite all that Jesus faced – abuse, betrayal, torture, rejection, abandonment, doubt from those closest to Him – He loved. We so often don’t think about that in the context of our own relationships. I mean, even on the cross, to His last dying breath, He loved Judas (December 2024).

He loved those who abused, betrayed, tortured, rejected, abandoned, doubted Him. He loved them. I can’t stress that enough. He LOVED them. With His hesed, He loved!

Are you grasping that with me?

He could have stopped Judas. He could have stopped the beating, the torture. He could have stopped the hammering, the piercing. He could have stopped it all.

But He didn’t.

Why? Because there was a greater purpose. And that greater purpose is love.

This is the new commandment that Jesus gave before He went to the cross. In John 13:31-35 (ESV) it says,

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

How was Jesus capable of doing that? How did He love, despite everything? How

He focused on Father not people.

Whether good choices or not, God allows each one of us our journey. I understand the reasons why people leave the church. I understand why they never come back. I understand why they think they are just fine on their own.

I don’t agree with it. It is not Scriptural for me to agree with it. But, like Jesus allowed those in Scripture, and me, our journey, so too I allow others their journey.

That…is true hesed.

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Knees Down, Prayers Up

Sunny