Broken and put back together

The year I graduated from high school, the year I turned 18, I was finally on my way to being emancipated from my mother.  I found a midnight shift job (which curtailed our interactions significantly) and saved my money for a year and went off to a small bible college.  I had become a Christian a couple of years earlier and wanted to find out more about the Christian faith.

I found far more than I bargained for.

First off, not everyone who claimed to follow Christ was all that enthusiastic about it.  They seemed to think they had “grandfathered in” and felt that everyone else was having a good time while they were missing out in their dutiful and dull lives following a bunch of rules.  What they were missing was a God encounter.

But I eventually found my tribe in the older students and the former drug addicts and street people.  These people had experienced God the way I had and they were hungry for more.  We all wanted to go deeper in our faith.  I decided the best way to do that was to work in a Christian ministry, so a couple of years later found me on staff of said college.  Because the faculty and staff would be solid Christians who would help me grow…right?

Peeking behind the curtain of any kind of ministry is sure to disappoint.  What you’ll find there is people.  Wounded, struggling, and imperfect people.  There may even be evil people lying in wait for innocent victims.  I found all of that and experienced sexual assault from two different men that I had deeply trusted.  Years later, talking with other women, I learned there were other predators there as well.  This is no longer surprising to me since we now have the #Me too movement and the recent news about hiding sexual misconduct within the Catholic church.  But at the time it was shocking and devastating.

I left that job and for a time left the church as well.  I never gave up on God - He never failed me through all of that.  But His people were another story.  For years I  was part of a micro-church before that was even a thing, and worked on starting my art career.

The Lord gave me time to heal and slowly called me back into larger community.  Was it perfect?   No, indeed.  People in the church are in various stages of transformation - myself included.  It is quite messy, as a matter-of-fact.
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But the community of broken people from different fellowships came around Mike and me when I stepped back into my mother’s life.  They helped us make the act of forgiveness a tangible thing.  They became part of a bigger story, and because of them I could write a book about how forgiveness is walked out…even when you’ve been forgotten.

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Forgive and Forgotten - available on Amazon. Click on image to go to website.