Traumatized by God and His People

The small group re-traumatized me. As I drove home, my heart was heavy as I realized what had happened and wondered if it was possible to stay in a relationship with people who had no idea what our relationship was doing to me.

Traumatized

Trauma is “an emotional response to a terrible event.” I can’t count the number of times my relationship with God’s people has made my head spin. I apologize in advance if my words are traumatic to you.

• I long considered my first church after college an “ideal” church. Shortly before I entered the professional ministry and left for less-than-ideal congregations, I fought for my high school students’ voices to be heard in selecting their youth pastor. I heard later that my pastor described me as a source of contention and a leader in the fight against racial equity. My heart broke.
• I worked for a summer in a church where the congregation did not love the pastor. They didn’t mind him as a person; they didn’t appreciate him as a pastor. I wondered if the same would be true of me someday.
• I worked for a year with a pastor who, along with his family, had poured heart and soul into a new church development. I sat next to him when the church leaders executed a coup and took “his baby” from him. I watched him shaking in his chair, yet they kept coming at him. My experience taught me that church leaders can be cruel and positions within the church are temporary.
• I served in a church for 12 years. Then I didn’t. The leadership doubted my character and ability to change, so they stripped me of my ordination and later refused to reinstate me. Not knowing how widely the lies had spread, I wondered what people in my church or community believed about me. I was a pariah in a town that used to respect me.
• I worked as a chaplain in an ICU and watched people die of COVID, completely separated from those they loved. On Sunday, I would go to church and hear that masks and vaccines didn’t work, the government was lying to us, and the wise move on our part was to resist science and our government. I didn’t understand how a simple thing like wearing a mask could be so burdensome that God’s people wouldn’t willingly take up that cross to save others’ lives.

As I drove home from the small group, my fear of God’s people and questions about God’s decisions were in the background while I tried to process the COVID conversation I had just listened to. I felt alone, depressed, and confused. Was it possible to maintain a relationship with my newfound friends?

Separation

It is difficult to know where God ends and His people begin. He is a God of love and compassion; He also has high standards and demands justice. When His people spoke, were they mimicking the complexities of God Himself? And if so, was I safer in His hands than theirs? The terrible events of my life inevitably caused my emotions to swirl inside me and confuse me. For example, when pastors were removed from their positions, was that the hand of God or the hand of men? I have a hard time separating the two. The result is I feel unsafe with both.

Adding to the difficulty, my wounds never completely heal before the next assault on my heart begins. Without a clear separation between God and His people, I don’t know where to place the blame. Is God the perpetrator, more confident in my ability to handle suffering than I am, so He keeps piling it on? Are His people at fault, oblivious to my pain and the suffering they cause? How am I to know when God’s chosen ones are working at His behest or when they are working at cross purposes with Him? Unclear where responsibility lies, my confidence in God and His people is shaken.

Where does this leave me? Is my only option to separate from the Church because I can’t separate the Church from God? Some opt to separate from both; that doesn’t work for me.

Brave space

At the end of the day, my connection to the Church will have to be what Micky Scottbey Jones described as “brave space.”

Together we will create brave space
Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world.
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But it will be our brave space together,
And we will work on it side by side.

I choose to be brave in these spaces.

• I’ll go back to church because I have received a great deal of love along with the hurt.
• I’ll return to the small group and engage because we’re all there looking for connection.
• I’ll stay in a relationship with God’s people because they draw me closer to God more often than they drive me away.
• I’ll continue to experience trauma; in the midst of my pain, I will help others heal from theirs.
• I’ll continue to seek God with His people because, at the end of the day, we are all just broken people.
  • We will hurt each other while we seek healing in our world.
  • We will fight for the rights of others while we occasionally deny rights to each other.
  • We will search for truth while we disagree on where to find it.
  • We will call each other to truth and love by staying united.