The Journey

Between the ages of 9 and 18, I saw so many unusual things, interacted with people from almost every walk of life and coped with innumerable harrowing situations. Like the time my family was doing a Sunday morning outreach at the homeless shelter in downtown Savannah, right after we moved there…

I was 13 years old at this point and I’d been sent out to the large, enclosed trailer we towed behind the truck which housed all of the sound equipment, religious literature, food, blankets and other goods that we hauled along on our outreach ventures. I don’t remember what I was sent out there to retrieve, but a man with bloodshot, glassy eyes followed me into the trailer and stood between me and the back door. He began to speak to me, and approach me, in a full-on pedophile proposition and my blood turned cold. This situation didn’t require my protective intuition since the danger was so blatant, but every fiber of my being was in a heightened state of fight-or-flight (the state in which I mostly lived already). I attribute angels, and the man’s likely intoxication, with my good fortune of getting past him and out of the situation.

I was hesitant to tell my parents about the incident for fear that I might somehow get in trouble for it in the end, but I also felt responsible for saying something, so I eventually managed to get my mother’s attention and bashfully explained what had occurred. She in turn told my father, and I believe some half-hearted attempt may have been made to find the guy, but since he didn’t seem to be around anymore, the whole thing was basically shrugged off. My father was more interested in the conversion of the men in the homeless shelter. Maybe he was right to be. It was in this same shelter that I saw a shriveled white man on a cot wasting away from AIDS and learned he would soon die as I stood by helpless to do anything at all about his suffering.

Again, the desperate desire for safety and protection was thwarted.

But worse than all of this, worse than the drunken grabs on the street, the lack of concern from caregivers, the terror of knocking on strangers’ doors as a pre-adolescent child, the constant on-guard for self-protection, the total lack of control over my environment and my way of life, the threat of punishment for any action perceived as defiance, autonomy or rebellion…worse than all of that by a LONG shot was the lack of safety from God.

It is confusing enough, when growing up in a traditional, religious environment that teaches us that there are RULES that we must follow, distinct do’s and don’ts, that must be adhered to in order to win God’s approval, and thereby, his Love. Protest this idea as much as you wish, but the reality is that the human mind does not separate the ideas of approval and Love, and therefore, one is equated with the other especially when it comes to that entity known as “God.” The more fundamental the religion is, the more intense the teachings and indoctrination of the mindset that there are specific ways in which we do (or don’t) get to God/heaven/enlightenment, etc.

Growing up in such a belief system, as so many of us do, can lead to a great deal of pain, confusion and misunderstanding about the nature of God. And there is no doubt that I have lived most of my life reeling from exactly that. But for explaining this, we must go back a little and work our way back up to my teenage self.

Growing up in primarily Baptist churches, I learned very, very early about Jesus and how horribly he suffered and died for my sins. I learned about the crucifixion in excruciating detail, and as a sensitive child, I was horrified by what I had done. As my father found a new sense of faith and religious fervor when I was 9, these teachings quickly overwhelmed my young life and I can remember crying myself to sleep over my guilt and shame for what I had put Jesus through. It all seemed so horribly wrong and unfair and I didn’t understand God’s reasoning for any of it, but who was I to question it, this sinful little girl who had to be “saved” through the torture and death of an innocent man? It never made a whole lot of sense to me, how one thing had anything to do with the other, or exactly what I had done so wrong to require that, but I could find no satisfactory answers for this quandary and I soon learned not to question it out loud.

By the time I was 11, we were living on a boat in the Florida Keys, along the outskirts of mainstream society, and we found our church home at a squat little concrete building on Tavernier Key that housed a congregation called “Spirit and Truth.” Here at Spirit and Truth, I discovered that the state of my soul as a Christian was so much more precarious than I’d originally thought. Not just that, but the condition of my future as a Christian was also far worse off than I had ever imagined. You see, Spirit and Truth was home to some hardcore End Times zealots. Through their End Times Bible Study, at which my sister and I were weekly in attendance and were the only children present, I learned that thanks to humanity’s collective sinfulness, there were some truly horrible times in store for me. And the only way for me to secure the future of my soul so that I may ascend to heaven in the afterlife was for me to essentially grin and bear it.

For those of you who are not #exvangelicals or otherwise recovering from the effects of a doomsday or End Times enthusiastic group, let me explain. Some evangelical Christians (and other sects) believe that the End of Days is approaching as detailed in the book of Revelations, the last book of the Bible. There are many schools of thought within these groups, but essentially, the apocalypse is coming and we’re all gonna die. But before we do, ohhh before we do, the “trials and tribulations” we will endure. I’ll do my best to summarize it — not in any kind of absolute theological doctrine, but just according to the particular doctrine that was taught to me and as my child’s mind understood it at the time:

Depending on the group (and how optimistic or pessimistic they are), there are three ways this apocalyptic era can go and which way is not explicitly clear in Revelations, so there was a lot of debate, but there are 1) Pre-Tribbers, 2) Mid-Tribbers and 3) Post-Tribbers. According to the book of Revelations, when the End of Days has arrived, there will be seven years of Great Tribulation during which all manner of horrors will be rained down upon the earth. Somewhere in the midst (or at the end) of this raucous, Jesus will return, the rapture will occur, and an army of Christian soldiers will battle evil and ultimately win. I am over-simplifying things greatly, but you get the general idea. (Truth be told, it’s been a long time since I had to study this junk and I’ve buried a lot of it.)

Pre-Tribbers are the glass-half-full of the Christian theology world. These optimists believed that Jesus will return and take his faithful back up to heaven with him (i.e. the “rapture” will occur) at the very start of these horrible seven years. The Mid-Tribbers are the ones who believe that the Christians will have to endure 3-4 years of the persecution that will occur during The Tribulation. This first period will be a testing of their faith. Then, Jesus comes back, the faithful ascend to heaven with him, and those who remain on earth undergo another 3 years of even worse tribulation during which time they either come to believe in Jesus or go to hell (literally). Then we have the ever-pessimists: The Post-Tribbers. These dark minds are convinced that there will be no rapture until the 7 years of Great Tribulation is over and that all true Christians will have to endure every heinous form of torture and persecution before Jesus returns and takes his faithful Home with him.

These folks were the most disturbing to me due to their absolute revelry in the idea of pain and suffering. They practically foamed at the mouth as they discussed with zealotry how horrible it would be and how only the True Christians would persevere in the face of such suffering to win the reward of an afterlife in heaven. They looked at me and my sister with a sort of reverence because, they assured us, this would all be happening within our lifetime. In fact, we were expecting the end times to start any day now. The signs were supposedly all lining up. We were so lucky, they said, that we would bear witness to these great events.

I can remember nautical charts spread out all over the booth table on our boat while my father discussed escape routes with other men from the church. They were scouting places to go and hide when the tribulation started and the best way to get there undetected. We were lucky, it seemed, that we lived off the grid and had the means to take to the seas for awhile if necessary. I’m not sure what locations or routes they were deciding on, but I gleaned enough to get the impression we would likely end up somewhere in the Caribbean initially. We would have to stay on the move, they said, throughout the seven years of the Tribulation to do our best to avoid detection and being caught. We would ultimately have to travel and hide out by land because access to fuel and supplies for the boat would become scarce.

The specific trials and persecutions that we would have to endure during the Tribulation was a topic discussed with great excitement. Christians would be hunted down, they said. All manner of medieval torture would be resurrected for our persecution. We might be tarred and feathered, an ancient form of inflicting a torturous death. Drawn and quartered was another one. Burned at the stake was another. We would be imprisoned, starved, beat, raped, stoned and even crucified like Jesus, all in attempts to get us to renounce the name of Jesus and our faith in him. The government was going to try to tattoo us with barcodes – this was the “Mark of the Beast” – and we would have to escape this mark by all means necessary in order to secure our soul. We could be hanged, shot in firing squads or beheaded.

Back in my bunk on the boat at night, I didn’t feel lucky at all that I would get to see all these “great events.” I prayed fervently that the Pre-Tribbers were right, but my heavy little heart didn’t believe it possible. The folks at the church seemed to think that Pre-Trib believers were cookie cutter Christians who wouldn’t actually hack it through the Tribulation. The best I could truly hope for was a Mid-Trib rapture and to make it through to that point. I listened to the doomsday predictions in all their gory detail as the adults gleefully discussed the possibilities and I thought it all over very carefully. I did my best not to resort to despair. I hung my hat on one possibility, a possibility for which I fervently and earnestly prayed to God night after night: When my time came, I prayed desperately that God might grant me the mercy to be beheaded. It seemed the kindest and most painless of possible ends. It wasn’t death that I feared anymore, by the age of 12, it was just pain. I just wanted to die without too much pain. Oh dear God, please please let me go by beheading, I beseeched.

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WHAT. inthehell. kind of “God.” would require, ordain or in any way participate in such a brutal Hunger Games of a world??? If this is the God we served, then there is no safety in all of heaven and earth. To whom should I turn? The God who required his “one-and-only-son” to be brutally crucified as a scapegoat for my misdeeds? The God who created a world with temptation and demanded that I not fall prey to it, or else….? The God who, after setting me up for that failure, then demands that I endure all manner of brutality for “His Name’s Sake” that I might end up in heaven with him once it’s all over? Excuse me, but…WTF????

Okay, so, now we come to the crux of it. If this is God, then why would I want anything to do with Him? This whole life is about suffering in an endless chase of the carrot of heaven, that place where I get to hang out with the dude who saw fit to put me through all of that shit because if I didn’t faithfully endure all of that temptation and tribulation, I wouldn’t be worthy to be in His presence. Because, of course, I am inherently bad due to Original Sin which my little 20th century self really had no say in, in the first place. What a guy! Am I right?

Oh, but at the same time, this God loves me sooo much. Somehow his having his son murdered on my behalf is proof of that. And his willingness to forgive my utter sinfulness, my disgrace of a being, is further proof of that. No matter that He created me and is 100% infallible and yet somehow His creations are capable of being 100% fallible, broken and bad. How is this even possible? No, you don’t question it. You also don’t question the constant contradictions in this definition of “Love.” Instead, you let them eat away at your subconscious and your soul for years and years as you do your best to ignore the wrestling of your soul with the insanity of these concepts. At least, I did. And it drove me to deep depression, anger and confusion throughout my teenage years and into my adulthood.

So perhaps, with a bit of imagination, you might see how my whole little world felt fraught with constant danger and predicament, from both physical as well as spiritual threats. My whole life revolved around managing, and evading, dangers of all kinds. And so it was that, when I met a man in my early adulthood who introduced me to a source for Truth which explained all these terrifying paradoxes and contradictions and made them all make perfect sense, which transformed the entity of God into a sane and Loving and safe Being, a man who introduced me to these immortal words which still bring tears to my eyes:

Nothing Real can be threatened;
nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.

…so it was that I cast great love and adoration upon this man in the wake of such an enormous sense of relief that I had never before experienced in all my days; and over time, with his help and guidance in doing so, made him into the source of all my safety, hope and security.