#deconstructingpurityculture

[arabonara]

The first third-ish of this is amazing. I will try to listen to the rest of it later.

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[arabonara]

Sexual Immorality

There are no more damning lines in the bible than these- and there's no actual description or deductive meaning of the phrase - it's just sort of a blanket, catch-all. They just assume you will 'catch' the meaning in your spirit.

I'm not sure this fits with modern minds. Blanket words like dissipation (which literally means dilution of a substance) and licentious (having or taking the right to do something) have gained a reputation in scripture as being these undefined lurking evils which are actually quite simple to figure out specifically what they mean when you look at the literal meanings.

But if you ask a pastor what they mean - they will look at you with horror in their eyes and repeat the word in a sinister tone, and then say something like - "everybody knows what it means, everybody knows it's bad."

Meanwhile, I'm not sure they actually realize what Paul was saying there, that having the influence of the spirit in our lives diluted is a problem. That's it. It's not some big, scary bogey man waiting in the closet to overcome us. We can demystify these words by decoding their meanings and using scriptural references to figure out context.

I guess this is part of my problem with the church. It's the same problem that I have with leftists these days. They're both assuming that you will 'catch' the spirit of what they are saying and if you don't, you're an idiot with the moral worth of a scumbag.

On Evangelical Fundamentalists - the pattern set out for us in the Old Testament was not to insist on adherence to huge scaffoldings of rules based on understandings (theologies) set out by one or two key thinkers in the past.

While there was an aspect of trusting the priests to interpret and tell them what they needed to do to be right with God, ancient Jewish understanding of God was individual and scripturally-based. They didn't read books by people who interpreted scripture for them, they read it themselves and committed it to memory, talking and debating about the meanings and practical applications.

Once one of them, I used to believe that a person had to share certain beliefs and 'understandings,' like views on abortion, divorce, masturbation and quiet times, in order to be a real Christian and actually be on their way to heaven.

But now I believe that it's wrong to insist that these beliefs be put upon others. Teaching has a place in the church, but forced assimilation via brainwashing should not. Scripture should speak for itself and be elevated above 'common understandings,' as the only pure truth. Even then, what it means can be a topic of hot debate.

Like I've outlined in previous posts, I don't believe that every situation in which abortion could be considered is equal, therefore the morality isn't equal and the course isn't always clear-cut depending on the fundamental right or wrongness of a thing. I believe that casuistic reasoning belongs in the church. Case-based decisions should be made and morality is based on the situation, not the fundamental right or wrongness of a thing.

Another thing the church gets wrong is thinking if something is right, and they choose that 'right,' thing, God will cause everything to work out perfectly because of it.

Actually, Jesus promised pretty much the opposite.

When it comes to purity culture, the term 'sexual immorality' lead to an opposite extreme of belief - which I've deal with in previous posts (and the nervous system trauma suffered by many because it goes against relationship.) The point is that if you don't define something, it becomes very difficult to define the opposite, righteous response, and leads very easily into error.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there is a healthy breaking away from parental controls at some point to define what is really important to an adolescent individual in terms of values. This is normal and it is a part of growing up. If we don't individuate, we can't ever make our own choices, and will always be relying on others to make them for us: co-dependent and stuck in a child-like state of psychological development.

In Evangelical Fundamentalist circles, it is almost impossible to break away from anything because all beliefs and extrabiblical rules are prescribed beforehand, without acknowledgement of situational difference or nuance.

I know a girl who was a few years into a commonlaw relationship with her boyfriend before they both got saved. They began to be convicted of their relationship, and then planned for a year or two, then got married. Was it wrong of them to stay 'living in sin?' (Was it sin?) until they were able to get married?

I know a woman who married a screen addict when she was young. After 10 years or so, she had an affair with a non-believer who was committed to partnership and present in the relationship. She got a divorce from the husband and had been living with the partner for nearly 20 years when I met her. She was a worship leader at the church I attended. When the leadership team found out she wasn't married but was planning a wedding, they let her stay on.

The same worship/leadership team had a nephew who was engaged to be married and building his own house, with the help of his fiancee. He had been married previously and had a child, to which she was becoming a step-mom. They had been spending a lot of long hours at the house together and were slipping into some 'sexual immorality.' At this point their wedding was only three months away and they decided that it would be too hard to try not to be at the house alone together, since all their friends and family worked different schedules. So they decided to give in to the urges and just be together. The worship team decided their nephew shouldn't be on it anymore. The couple hung out with their non-Christian friends a lot for three months and they ended up with some very drunk sexual 'performances' at the wedding, to the horror of their grandparents.

Todd Bentley had an affair with an intern and then decided to get a divorce. He then repented, decided he wanted a new wife and went out and got one. Then he decided he wanted to be back in ministry. Some Christians thought he should divorce the new wife and go back to his old wife and kids. I don't agree. I think that would have caused more harm than good.

After I left Prince George and moved to Vancouver, I saw that pretty much every girl who wasn't supported by her parents lived with her boyfriend at that age because she couldn't afford the city prices alone.

In the Old Testament, there is such a thing as a slave marriage, where a person would get married to have their debts paid off, and then after seven years, (when all slaves were freed) the union was also required to be dissolved. How is this different from living with a college boyfriend?

How is the modern interpretation of 'sexual immorality' at all supported by things like brother f*cking for fertility in the Old Testament? That would be an awkward Thanksgiving table.

Do people just assume that it was sin and that the sacrifices of the priests would cover the 'mysterious and unknown,' sins? How could it be sin if the "law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul?"

I don't have answers to all of these questions, but until a person does, should they act pridefully in claiming to have an understanding of such matters?

[arabonara]

Princely Behaviour

How do you follow a calling without sinning, without burdening anyone unnecessarily?

When I think back to my time at The River and Point Grey Community Church in Burnaby and Vancouver, people were making all kinds of evil pronouncements against me. These people included my parents, the pastors and even some of my acquaintances with whom I had a friendly rapport. They would say things behind my back, making dire formulaic predictions, like, "if she doesn't do X within Y time period, she's going to end up Z." For example, "if she doesn't get a job at $%^&bucks within the next few weeks, she might end up walking the streets."

Some of their poison did manage to leach into my purview eventually, and with the prophetic seer anointing I could kind of piece together what was being said behind my back from what was being said, and not said, to my face.

For an autistic young adult this was really confusing. It was my first time living in a city and I was shocked at the hardened Christians I found in the church. I thought this wider church community was supposed to be kind, genial, humble, seekers of truth, submitted to the Holy Spirit, discipled, hearing God and following Him, like the Christians that welcomed me to the faith when I first got saved, like my Jesus. This was my baseline, and I was blessed.

(I realize now that looks like a long list, and it would be difficult for many modern Christians in our cities today to meet all of them. Is it because they're too busy? Too obsessed with looking in the world's mirrors to be conformed to the image of Christ? But I digress.)

Instead they were taking their daggers and stabbing in the dark, hoping that they were right, wishing that I would be cursed and the experience harsh consequences for my unconventional choices. Then they would get to sit on the sidelines and shake their heads and cluck their tongues, saying, "I told you so."

Why? Did I remind them of something they'd lost in the effort to become assimilated to Christian culture, something they, like Billy Joel, were longing for but could never attain with all their self-limiting beliefs? Was it jealousy of my looks or calling or anointing? Was it the emotional and creative freedom?

I will never know. All I know is that it's funny now to rehearse the things that were said to me because it was literally impossible for me to do what those people expected. They labelled me as prideful and greedy, as desiring to 'benefit from other peoples' hard work.' They didn't know how badly I wanted to conform, to pull my own weight and to be seen as righteous in the eyes of the community. I was a born people-pleaser. That was my knee-jerk reaction.

This following God into the unknown was a new thing. But after hearing Him clearly, it was an imperative of my personal faith. I had to do it, and I was willing to suffer for it. And the church made sure that I did.

I guess it's one of the things that just tore me apart about the social stratification at The River (formerly allied with the non-Rick Joyner-affiliated Morning Star, which probably should have been a red flag.)

After all, that had been my entire childhood - carrying not just my own weight in straight A's and then at work and housework, giving up my novel writing to my parents' planned interference, but the emotional weight of my family's dysfunction. I had experienced a ton of rejection in social circles because of my autism but also in my family, also due to my autism and vein of gold; giftedness in the arts.

Those girls on the playground broke my nose, my parents broke my heart, and the pastors in Vancouver broke my mind with their gaslighting. It took years to get my brain back to a functional state.

You can't tell someone to do something that is impossible for them and expect to get a good result. You can't threaten to kill a gnat if it doesn't learn to swim and then feel justified in watching it drown. You did that. It never had the capacity to swim or breathe underwater, and telling it that it should have, and if it couldn't or wouldn't, it was the most shameful creature in the entire world, just a moral hairsbreadth above drug dealers and prostitutes...you're the abusive one. The gnat did nothing wrong.

That gnat did what God created it to do and nothing more, nothing less. That is the glory of knowing one's design and living within in.

I do agree with what Paul says, that if people flatly refuse to work, "they should also not eat." That is to say, everyone should contribute as much as they can and in their areas of skill, talent and expertise. It won't look the same for everyone. But do we not have God's love for our brethren? Is His grace not sufficient for us?

I have always been willing to work. I have never tried to exempt myself from it. But if I keep throwing myself up against the wall of an impossible work standard (one that's impossible for me as an autistic person) and keep falling ill, the logical conclusion is that I can't do it, and shouldn't keep trying. Autistic people should have accommodations and still be allowed to make a living, with a little space to ourselves to recharge and regain our optimism. Otherwise life becomes a drudgery, and work becomes a death march.

It's walking the edge of a knife, waiting to see what infection will come next, through the lowered net of cortisol-compromised immunity, and wondering whether or not medical science will have the power to cure it. It's Russian Roulette on an existential level and it's not OK.

The other opposite and potentially more harmful extreme is throwing all the priests and artists into the fields because 'everyone should start from the bottom up, or 'we're all equal in God's eyes.' It doesn't hold water. We may be equal but we are not the same.

Like Julia Cameron says, "you can force an artist to carry trash 18 hours a day, and we will still have to make our art." It's in our spiritual DNA. We are made in the image of the Creator, therefore we must create. It is our moral imperative.

David Damien (Watchmen for the Nations) says that the separation of church and state was the most devastating thing that has happened to the Arts in the last few hundred years. I would have to agree. (Sorry horse camp, can't tick the box that I agree with the full and complete separation of church and state forever.)

So, I guess what I'm saying is that, like Job's comforters, they all spoke from their own well of mostly human wisdom without consulting God ("I hope this is the Holy Spirit,") and told me that it was Him. It was gaslighting on a cosmic scale; it was absolutely spiritual abuse. But there was no one to keep them accountable, so they could say and do whatever they wished to me. And my parents were standing at a safe remove, waiting for me to 'fail.'

One of the reasons that I came against such resistance is that the ground was just so hard. I have come to believe that British Columbia and Canada are places of great unbelief when it comes to the arts. Yet I have helped, with thousands of other, in this past season to pioneer a lot more victory in the arts, but it hasn't been easy.

Exodus 35 and 36 talk about callings in the arts being a real thing, from God. Psalms talks about raising up a child in the 'way of the heart.' There are various layers of meaning to this scripture but the one Arthur Burk cites is that this scripture teaches that parents are to watch for their child's natural callings and inclinations and encourage them along those paths. This Hebrew value is pretty much the opposite of that of the world and western civilization, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, who believed the concept of child as tabla rossa, or 'blank slate.' I don't have time to exegete the entire passage but this 'way of the heart,' was seen as a trust in God and not the philosophies of the mind as in the Greek and Roman cultures around them.

In contrast to the beliefs of the Vancouver church pastors circa early 2000's, Arthur Burk has a favourite saying that goes something like this: What is this railroad track doing in my cornfield?

He views making tracks in areas where a person is not called or gifted (in the name of profit or practicality, like Jim Carey's dad) as a type of disobedience to our Maker. I would agree. But there were times when I wavered.

It's really hard to obey God when everyone around you is telling you to do the opposite of what God and the prophets are telling you to do, and they're beating you with starvation, withdrawing housing, public shaming and slander. But I had to. I had to obey any way, and they broke my mind along the way.

(There are four lights!!! Ok, maybe sometimes when I was really tired I would see five, and start to feel guilty, and anxious, and then I couldn't function at all. It was a double edged sword because then I definitely couldn't work at my job - my mind was a sieve- but if I accepted the peace then I was accepting the opposite of what they wanted - for me to fail. It was a real quagmire. Like Rapunzel in Disney's Tangled. I felt incredible but also very guilty. My moods swung back and forth like an adolescent pendulum. But I digress)

My mother denies that there is a right way to look at this. But there is a scripture that deals with it in Nehemiah 13.

A non-Jew who didn't understand God's heart was given charge of part of the temple. He reasoned with worldly wisdom, seeing with his fleshly eyes, trying to maximize profit at the expense of the running of the temple and worship. He threw the priests into the fields so they would have to work just like everyone else, and took their rooms for himself. God didn't like it. Judgement came to that person when Nehemiah saw what had happened and order was restored in the temple by giving the priests and artists back their place.

And really, does asking the church family for bus change one time really amount to attempting to benefit from the hard work of others (ill-gotten gain)? Are we not commanded to love one another and if anyone asks something of you (physically) to give, and even more than they asked for? (Mat 5:40)

or

"If one of you says to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?" (James 2:16)

Did the pattern set out in the old testament of giving (alms) in addition to tithes (regular percentage of income to the church) really die out in the new covenant?

What about these verses?

Leviticus 19:9-10

Deuteronomy 15:7

Proverbs 19:17

What if this person was a prophet, placed in their midst to test their hearts like the woman Elisha met (2 Kings 4:1-7)?

What do they have to answer to all of these things? What will they say to Jesus when he asks them what they were thinking?

Is it not their faith that has been found lacking, not mine?

After all, it was not caused by laziness or a failure to plan on my part (as they were insinuating.) I do believe though they admitted that I might be neurodivergent, but they didn't' care to explain what that meant or how it might be affecting me. They just told me it was something I needed to deal with with my family - but because talking honestly to my family about anything was out of the question, I never figured out what it meant.

No, my troubles stemmed from a larger pattern of economic and narcissistic abuse by my parents, including medical gaslighting and abuse (gaslighting me about results of medical tests and contradicting my doctors), and isolation from anyone who could help me, creating interference by lying to close family members and family friends. I think they even believed their own lies, making them that much more convincing. This was intended to leave me with nowhere to turn but the dysfunctional family system, so that I could not escape.

*I just had another repressed memory come back of one other time that the Mitchells insinuated that I was trying to engage in ill-gotten gain...*

They had just moved in to their nice new house which they had built themselves and were looking for tenants. One of them was the snobby girl with whom I share a middle name, who had been quite rude to me in the overcrowded vehicle the first time we met (see previous post.)

She needed a roommate and was having anxiety about the fact that she hadn't found someone suitable immediately.

It was such foppish behavior. These privileged people didn't seem to think they had to trust God for anything. They seemed to believe that because they were righteous (in their own eyes) and had done everything better than everyone else around them, everything would just magically work out without them having to go through the normal bumps, slings and arrows of life.

(This is a pride-based fallacy called Performance Orientation. See the books by John and Paula Sandford on more information, definition, and deliverance info.)

Most cult-like churches and movements decide on their own set of extra-biblical rules and spread their P.O. (yes, it stinks) to everyone around them. Some examples include no drinking alcohol, no dancing, no sitting closer than a bible's width to someone of the opposite sex, no dying hair or painting nails, no alone time, no instruments in worship, and no celebrating holidays.

I think now that P.O. might actually be under the sin umbrella of pride of course, but also insecurity, and lack of faith (fear). I think it is the unholy offspring of the marriage of pride and fear. Because if we can earn our sanctification by means of ascending man-made ladders, then we need God less. If we are righteous on our own, there was no reason for Jesus to die. If we can make extra-biblical rules that allow us to attain a higher level of righteousness than those outside our circle, this is pride, but we are also engaging in a form of asceticism, where we must deprive ourselves of something to gain spiritual purification. If pastors believe they are sanctified by this extra-biblical scaffolding according to their own isolated understanding, I believe it is also a type of gnostic heresy.

These false rules not only make people feel superior, they also make people feel safe. The safety gives false assurance on a level of salvation AND sanctification, as if humility is not something that is required for maintaining a connection with God at all (keeping our salvation), as well as engaging further in deep healing and continued sanctification.

But wait, doesn't God exalt the humble and oppose the proud?

Yes, spiritual disciplines are a part of the equation, but they are both lead by the Holy Spirit of God AND biblical. This is why it is so important to have both the word and the spirit in our lives (and are they not symbolized by the lamp and oil in the parable of ten virgins?) So if we don't have the right amount of both to light our way, we may not be ready when our bridegroom comes?

But I digress. This chica asked if I wanted to be her roommate, and I said maybe. I knew that at that point I was in between things, still looking for a job and considering going to makeup school. So I didn't have the money upfront, but I knew enough about neediness and anxiety to realize that while she was still panicking and not trusting God, her answer would not come.

So I said it might work out, if she couldn't find anyone else, to give her a reason to stop worrying. I had no intention of actually moving in unless they had no other option, and those dark-hearted pastors agreed to help give me a leg up for a couple of months while I found my feet.

I didn't intend for them to really even hear about it but in true extrovert fashion, she bubbled over and told them, excited by the answer she had latched onto in her mind (she just skated right on by the words of my actual answer) and they used the opportunity to speak maliciously about me behind my back.

They assumed that I was intending to stay there for free, when actually, I hoped it would give Madame X the opportunity to move past her fear and lack of faith into the right answer (i.e.: as a mental placeholder until the right person came along.)

When they called me and attempted to shame me for it, this was a few months later and I had a place to stay. I let them know this. They told me that getting a leg up was "sometimes okay," but usually only from family or discerned through extreme amounts of devotion and prayer (they had no idea what my experience with my family was like, or what God had told me about the role of the church as spiritual family,) and that they viewed what I was asking for as a handout, and they weren't willing to give me that, despite the fact that they had helped numerous others in their church, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

I now believe that their constant ragging on me was not a reflection of my Christian character or choices at all. It was a release of negative energy generated by the narcissistic, assimilation culture of their church. (See previous post) (A deep anger and rage begins to build when people are mutilated spiritually and emotionally on a regular basis. The people at the top need a place to defer this rage so that they can believe their system is working. So they direct it to the people that are at the bottom of the pyramid of power, people who are not yet in full submission to their rules, people whom they wish to assimilate.)

But by that point I was completely done with them and I let them know that as well. I had started the program at a prestigious local makeup school and despite sullying by people at the River for choosing the Arts, continual attacks by the other girls (social engineering) at the school and gaslighting by the school about how much the loan would cover, I also had moments of breakthrough interning backstage working for Dish Jeans, volunteering doing makeup for fashion shows and hanging out with movie stars accidentally as the glory started to leak out.

So I think that the abuse I experienced does add up to evidence of a huge lack of faith toward Art and The Arts in general I mean mostly Fine Arts when I say this.

I believe this is a spiritual stronghold that exists over places. For example, I could feel that in France, The Arts were celebrated, free and funded. Crossing the border into Germany was something else. Canada and especially BC, being very rough and blue-collar based, have a long way to go in this area still. It's been brutal.

Psalm 55: 1-14, Nehemiah 13: 1-13, Exodus 35:30-36:3.

[arabonara]

Putting God First

Putting God First

This is one of the most confusing topics in Evangelical Fundamentalism, second only to, perhaps, the ‘Fear of the Lord.’ Everyone has their own opinion on what it means, and nobody really agrees on all of it. So it’s impossible for an autistic brain to have a definitive answer, which means that God could be angry with me all the time for not doing it right.

Because of the way my dad was – angry without a cause- I had transferred this fear onto God. If I wasn’t directly communicating with him, I kept a healthy distance because there was this possibility that he was mad at me. For example, ‘practicing the Presence’ while doing the dishes was not an option.

It was an elusive feeling – sometimes there and sometimes not, hard to explain and almost impossible to get rid of. Even though I read books that stated the opposite (After God’s Own Heart by Mike Bickle) and felt a call to believe something better, I couldn’t really get it into my heart. I couldn’t take that big of a risk.

The church I was attending with my husband had taken a turn toward preaching judgment (they liked the story in Acts where a couple of the early church members were killed on the spot.) It wasn’t just a single time, either. They brought it up like 3 times within 6 weeks, each time, egging my fear on to new heights. Yet when the time came to face their own family’s past sins, they hardened their hearts and refused. Alas, I’m getting distracted…

I think that was the heart of a lot of my anxiety in the church in the 10 -15 years after YWAM. The unpredictable nature of Christians paired with the unstable emotional territory of my youth. I wanted to do everything at that heightened level because of the passion and commitment awakened by the YWAM experience.

This was paired with the fact of my reduced functioning due to undiagnosed autism, and mental and physical illnesses. It meant I could pretty much never measure up to all that I was expected to do, including quiet times.

The fear of not ‘putting God first’ lead me to some unhealthy extremes of thought, which triggered anxiety, OCD and avoidance of people who had condemned me in the past. I couldn’t participate in my husband’s family church because they had judged me in the past and my heart was just shut. I would sit there with a lid on my soul and spirit, enduring the service until the end, unable to give, receive or participate. And he wouldn’t go anywhere else. He wouldn’t sit with me either. He always had to stand at the back. Even when we went to a new church, he would barely look at me, seek another seat. Anything to push me away, avoid the emotional intimacy of marriage.

And then there was the debate about when to do a quiet time. Was it morning, afternoon or night? One of the guest speakers in YWAM had said that morning was the best, and if you absolutely couldn’t manage that then they had really godly friends who would do it at night, so they had to grudgingly agree that was an acceptable second, but they didn’t know any godly person who did their quiet time in the afternoon. I can’t make this sh!t up. I was burdened by it for so long.

Then there was the amount of time one was expected to spend in suspended animation, empty and unmoving, unthinking, waiting on God. I guess there were some participatory elements, the overflow of intercession we were supposed to have every day for the entire world and then our family and friends and then our own intimate time with Him. But this crept into the territory of idolatry if we put our time with him second to ministry or only sought him for others’ sake.

I met one person who told me that because God requires a tenth of our income, He also requires a tenth of our time, which equalled 2 hours and 40 minutes (1/10th of 24h in their reckoning). My parents laughed and told me this was just bad math.

At the opposite extreme were my parents. My mom once got mad at me for trying to slide in some quick bible reading before I went horseback riding, while I waited for her to be ready to go. I hadn’t done my quiet time yet that day and something felt off. I was all ready, she had just told me I had 15 minutes to wait, so I sat on the stairs reading my bible, and somehow that was really wrong.

She admonished me “that’s NOT how you do your quiet time –“ “You fit it in between everything else you are doing. It can’t be the priority – it just fits in the cracks...”

But that never worked for me. I had to put him first to set my day aright. It was almost like an offering of cleansing. I love getting things done. We redemptive prophets are so satisfied by getting things done that it almost feels like a high. We run ahead and plan and then start making steps toward that plan. Because of the high potential for idolatry in this area, it helps us to offer the first of our day to God. When I was struggling to rebound from the worst of my Job season, the warfare was so strong that I couldn’t get anything done unless I had put God first. I never figured out the formula – there wasn’t one, really – sometimes God would accept something small as a dove as a sacrifice and other days, when I could afford it, I would sacrifice more of my time, say, the equivalent of an Old Testament calf. Giving myself the grace to experiment with this, forgiving myself when I fail has been the key to learning what God requires, because he certainly doesn’t send down a golden scroll (Matt Tommey, Thriving Christian Artist) with clarifying answers every time I have questions or get fearful and legalistic.

Arthur Burk says he knows a decent amount of prophets who have this same experience. He puts it like this: “if they don’t put God first, the worms eat the rest,” referring to the Exodus story of the manna that was gathered at the wrong time and went wormy overnight. Worms are also indicative of demons, or can be associated with snakes and giving the enemy access via sin. Ironically, people with other gifts, (like my mother, who is a redemptive Servant) don’t share this divine imperative. Maybe it has something to do with having the authority to take new ground in the spirit realm. Before they would go into battle, the Israelites would worship. It was this re-set of perspective that gave them the authority to win the battle. I still don’t have a definitive answer, and I still struggle sometimes. I know that now that I’m working outside the home, God gives me more grace when I fumble things, for which I am thankful.

Deconstruction is so much easier and less painful when people just decide they don’t believe at all anymore, because then they can throw it all out and don’t have to filter through every single gallon of mud to find the nuggets gold that are worth keeping.

But they are worth keeping, because God is real, interactive and good. He’s the kindest person I’ve ever met (Graham Cooke.) He has met me on so many levels and in situations (a lot of them He had a hand in getting me into,) where I was written off and forsaken by all others.

[arabonara]

En Cha Huna (He/She Also Speaks)

When someone breaks up with you, refuses to talk with you, gaslights you about wanting to get back together, loses contact, hears things via the grapevine for a few years and then consciously decides to dismiss your perspective on the level of deciding and discussing with a circle newfound friends that you're a "cautionary tale," it's beyond disrespect.

This type of invalidating is on the level of putting one under erasure altogether, as if you had never existed as a person. It's basically saying that for X reason(s), your perspective doesn't count. It's making you into a non-person, an in-valid. It's very patriarchal, narcissistic, colonial, and extremely damaging.

This is one of the values of our western civilization, one that has built a cold and cruel world. This isn't the type of thing you learn at school or in books though, because nobody would ever actually admit it. It is rather caught than taught, handed down by generations of unfeeling ice-holes who model for their children exactly how to invalidate other human beings when it's convenient. It's a tool of narcissists and colonizers alike (the ultimate narcissists, if you think about it).

It's not the invalidating that raises alarm bells in the average listener - which it should- but we've been lulled to sleep by the overuse of this tactic in society. Every single day you hear someone griping about why another person's point of view is invalid so that they don't have to do the work of accommodating them. If you start to look for it, the payoff is always there, lurking just below the surface of what's being said.

My ex and his friends and I had attended UNBC, a university whose motto is: En Cha Huna. In the local native language, this means, "He or she also speaks," indicating that every single person has a right to have a voice, to be heard, to be understood and valued. Indigenous societies embody this understanding seamlessly as they care for their families, their tribe, and all nations by their earthkeeping practices. It's really just consideration for the lives and voices of the myriad other beings who "also speak."

Yes, he knew. We discussed it with my mom in the living room of my parents house after we had both applied to the university but not yet heard back.

Yet as they cleaned out their apartments and said their goodbyes, even as I had moved on and was living my own life pursuing my calling in the arts, having left university after the first year, they discussed me in my absence, dismissing my life as a "cautionary tale."

It takes a special sort of denial - I guess maybe borne out of a need to invalidate me because if I was right about anything, I might be right about more things, and that meant they would have to question everything they believed, everything they had chosen, and that would lead to a lot of work and probably not more popularity and premarital sex.

I guess it shows me how calloused he had become. And that's not the type of person from whom I would crave approval or to whom I would ever feel the need to prove myself anymore, now that I've had a lot of healing.

But because of what this Jones character represented to me during and even for years after we dated, this treatment was extremely damaging, adding weight to the gaslighting of my parents, religious leaders and even some of my friends. They shamed me for taking the path less travelled, and spoke shamefully of me when things didn't immediately look up.

In short order, this broke me - it broke my mind as well as my heart, and left me unable to function because of trauma. I lost everything, like Job.

I wonder what God thinks of all those judgments that people made, all the conversations he overheard - especially those of Christians in old wineskins judging me for stepping into something new. I hope one day they realize what they've done and learn to do better.

Because they may have the sympathy of the crowd in the here and now, but maybe human admiration is their only reward. I tend to think they may not reap the benefits of the new wine unless they are open to trying some. And in order to do that, they may have to admit they were wrong.

My ex may not have realized or acknowledged that he was engaging in narcissistic abuse tactics, but the unwillingness to admit the truth unfortunately doesn't change the impact of his actions.

Invalidating my perspective by dismissing me as a "cautionary tale" not only reveals the heart of darkness and scales on the eyes, but also the selfishness and immaturity, that he would need to invalidate me continually to suppress the memory or even the inkling of me from coming back to haunt him - like some Freudian return of the repressed or dreams of the macabre.

Did I really hold that much power?

Thanks, J & J, for deciding that I was "awesome," after alienating me from my own inner circle while I was sick and alone, and in the same breath disparaging me, losing both the eye and the "I" in the we so you could continue the illusion that you were living your best lives.

The effects of the gaslighting, denial, blame shifting and public shaming were cumulative and long-lasting, affecting my mental health well into my 30's and 40's so that sometimes I get so triggered when everything's good and it's time to stop working and relax: I feel so guilty and unsafe.

It made familial closeness a personal hell of fear and anxiety, and not one that I could ever explain to anybody. Imagine trying to bond with your new baby and only feeling terror, seeing images of the child bloodied and torn open the ground because of your post-partum depression, anxiety and OCD.

It ruined a lot of intimate moments that were supposed to be sacred, supposed to be family, supposed to be mine. Especially now that I'd wriggled out of the suffocating grasp of my parents and I could breathe again. This was supposed to be life 2.0: my own awesome life, my own independent family, built on the principles of God's expansive love and grace.

I did EVERYTHING RIGHT according to purity culture and I still had a shitty existence.

Imagine every time you get a shot of oxytocin from breastfeeding or a post-partum IV that it only ramps up the panic, because closeness has always meant relational violence and coercion, forced submission to toxic authority and the mutilation and raping of one's inner self.

And when I couldn't make it stop I couldn't connect with God because I believed that fear was a sin.

It's taken 20 years to somewhat re-program my nervous system, but I still get triggered by narcissistic behaviors, which are surprisingly common in the workplace, and in some families.

His opinion was somehow more important than that of my parents, peers and doctors, like a needle in a haystack of abuse that broke my mind. My insides were utterly fractured. How could I ever trust my own judgement again after I'd crashed so spectacularly, breaking everything?

[arabonara]

Moral Failures?

I guess what I’ve ben thinking lately is that cephalopods can pass a marshmallow test – most human children will too, but those who don’t grow up to have crappier lives…

The church tells you it’s almost always better to choose to suffer than to receive good things in this life…even though this poverty-oriented reading (interpretation) of scripture and early church history isn't the only one. It's not even the most accurate.

Even King David said, "I would have lost heart, if I had not believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." We have to have hope. We have to have hope that things will be bearable and even good in this life to motivate us to keep living and trying each day.

(But who comes to the church but the poor, the broken, the maimed...so viewing scripture through this lens, though immature, becomes popular because it's so common. It makes sense of a common experience. As long as someone doesn't grow too much in this area, or change their understanding to fit the new facts and facets of scripture they are learning, they don't threaten the status quo and are therefore applauded for their effective assimilation.)

And neurodivergent lack of executive functioning and brain imbalance (lack of dopamine) requires more regular divergences and treats, which seem, at a normative glance, to be excessive, selfish, petty and gluttonous.

But what about things in our culture like advancing marital age, that are so blatantly inflated (delayed) by our bloated and ineffective education system that make moral imperatives nearly impossible (no sex till you’re married) without destroying a good part of one’s self (who wants a 40 year old virgin? You would have to have spent 1/3 of your life pushing away your deepest needs and desires, putting a ton of energy into avoiding something that God says is good) and throwing away most of (a woman’s) biological potential? What about that? If something doesn’t work practically, it doesn’t work spiritually either. So what’s the solution?

I can think of a thousand and one hybrid solutions that the evangelical church would probably call immoral for violating their fundamentalist views. The logic goes like this: if something is morally right, and you make life choices that line up with believing that (defying all logic, experience and divine intervention, including unprecedented grace and miracles, - which God chooses the timing of, but we don’t get to) everything will work out perfectly because you lined up your life with the ‘perfect’ moral standard.

I used to believe this. Life has taught me that it’s most often not true, and often causes Christians to make choices that cause more suffering for them and their families than necessary. (Read any book by the kids of a pastor in the southern states in the 1930s-60s. They'd plunge their 4-5 + child families into poverty responding to the call of ministry.) Especially women in bad marriages. I don’t know why women choose to suffer longer in neglectful and abusive marriages than men, but they do. Our culture must raise girls with an excessive sensitivity to guilt programming, especially in the church. If a guy lusts after us, they teach, it could be our fault –

Because we wore a shirt that’s a tiny bit too tight in the wrong places- not his hormones or past self-control failures or chosen exposure to porn or masturbation or use of drugs or…no, it’s the wardrobe that’s the issue. The woman’s choices. I’m not saying that everything women wear is modest – it’s not.

But if men who live in a society of nudists can learn to behave, then they can learn to behave in our society where most people are mostly clothed most of the time.

But I digress. The example is meant to illustrate how guilt is used to control women in the church. It doesn’t increase the quality of our lives by giving us more spiritual purity – it distorts our sense of what’s true and false – our spiritual discernment, and brainwashes us to tolerate abuse, moral bullshit from men who are at their core – users, and who use us up.

So due to all this sh*t I used to believe that my constant cravings for snacks, or something (I used to sometimes wished I smoked) that would make me feel better (I now know I have ADD and seasonal affective disorder) every couple of hours, especially in winter was a moral failure, and that muscling through using my superior executive functioning powers (though I was miserable) was the right thing to do.

I know that our society (perhaps unduly) judges overweight women who use junk food to fill these cravings, but what if it’s a normal feature of an abnormal brain that needs different interactions than the typical – to function optimally, and this isn’t a moral failure, but a chemical imbalance?

(There is also the issue of the lack of closeness in my family of origin and growing up to believe that having unmet needs in this area was normal. If I got closer I was bashed so I just stayed away to protect my heart's integrity.)

What does the Bible say about that? (Hint: virtually nothing, because in ancient Israel it was customary and considered wise to trust medical science and experts their own fields and consult those texts instead.) How this flies in the face of the newly-saved, biblical literalist, morally staunch, right-winged conspiracy theorist American Christian of today.

So while I don't think living together is a substitute for marriage, I believe that men especially in our culture need accountability for their actions in marriage, and that includes a way to ensure womens' protection from bad characters before they get into bed with them.

There are people in prominent ministry positions in this town who won't talk to me because their spouse (a man) views the union that I've chosen as "not a real marriage," without talking to me about it.

I actually believe this is abuse, for all the reasons that I have outlined in all of my posts thus far.

If men aren't held accountable for their actions in marriage, according to the Bible, that's what is actually not a "real" marriage, because they are living in violation of the covenant agreement, and the violation of any one of those terms, even once, nullifies the agreement.

This doesn't mean that forgiveness can't heal a breach, even as many as "seventy-times seven." It was meant to protect the parties within the agreement so that neither one is used and abused. And church, shouldn't that be our end goal, isn't that what we want?

Or do we want abuse to be excused in the name of "love covering many sins?" Do we want innocent women trapped in relationships where none or very few of their needs are met, living like slaves in an patriarchal, extractivist relational economy due to our poverty-level beliefs about men, women, relationships and life?

Is that really what we want to allow in the church?

Unfortunately, it is far too common. And those who speak up are often shamed and blamed instead of finding the root of the problem. We can do better. The question is: will we?

[arabonara]

Como Agua Para Chocolaté

That’s what my marriage felt like…I was promised chocolate and given only water…and I suppose choosing my ex and his sexpectations for years and years before marriage would have felt like the opposite – chocolate when I was supposed to only be having water. The guilt would have been unbearable. The judgement from the church and my own view of myself and my integrity – destroyed. I never would have been able to get that back. Ever.

So what do I say in retrospect? What do I do now? What should I have done? Am I free to decide one over the other would have been better when there’s no great option? Do we always have to choose compromise to get our happy ending?

Or do I reject both options, like the main character in the time-bending novel, The Summer House?

How do you even function when it feels like the devil has been playing 3D chess with your life for years – delivering the punch lines of his horrible practical jokes after years of manipulation of people and circumstances that he knew would be primarily destructive to me and to my heart. (Note: your disobedience harms others, not just yourself.) It feels directed, personal, and intelligent. Not some half-witted coincidence of a careless fate.

The enemy hates me with a perfect hatred, and I hate him back for it, and for all that he’s done to me. And where is God in all this?

[arabonara]

"Jos and Jess"

Well, it's Sunday again and I'm sick with a flu and cold, or several, most likely from school. Couldn't get up before 9:40 so that doesn't leave enough time to get ready. (My face is so puffy from dog allergies, and the second air filter I ordered in September still has not arrived. I'm guessing it will be January, after the Christmas rush has gone through.)

Bill put on "The Man from Snowy River," again before work and this time it brought back some persistent memories of a traumatic event from my early 20's.

I think these things are coming up because when they were happening, I didn't have the time to process them deeply enough to avoid trauma and soul fractures...so now that I'm (finally) safe and in a stable home environment, emotionally, my subconscious knows it can bring these things up for healing.

I've been processing the breakup in greater detail, as if I had a magnifying glass, gathering all the facts and taking everything into account, so I can re-evaluate the past and decide what I really think about all these things that happened...as well as what I should have done and what they should have done, in a perfect world with perfect people. Which I know doesn't exist, and I am an idealist, but I have to do this to process it- possibly something about my autistic obsessiveness.

There's something about my prophetic DNA that forces this process and it's a fun thing for my brain, despite being deeply painful.

So the memories of that Christmas visit to Houston came flooding back but more than the memories of actual events, (these came after) it was the context of betrayal.

How could they possibly have thought they were in the right?

Was I hearing God correctly and interpreting it correctly?

Who on my team was pressuring me and distorting my perception of reality and did that ultimately cause me to do the breaking or was it pure conviction?

Is anything really ever pure, this side of heaven?

I watched this last night as a part of my worship time, and besides what it did for me in the spirit, afterward, there was a part of my analysis that clicked in.

It just made sense more than it ever has before ("I lay down my old flames to carry your new fire today,") Maybe because I've accepted it in my heart and not just in my mind? (And 20 years of evidence makes it even more convincing, that the things I let go of back then were intentionally laid on the altar so God could make something - whatever He wanted, in my life.)

So, when I went off to YWAM I said goodbye to a boy I had been dating for almost 9 months. My team didn't think he was good for me and tried to force me to break up with him. One of them fed me a bunch of assumptions which transposed his own drug-addled, lying, cheating college years onto my boyfriend.

When I was already struggling to reconcile both views - on the one hand, his family had more stability than mine and had given me a place to exist outside my own head. His lovingkindness had spoken volumes about God's love and tenderness, and valuation of me. (Where my own family had only scoffed and devalued my creative gifts and emotional needs, forcing me into acting and masking to survive.)

On the other hand, this super-spiritual missionary organization that was all about family (supposedly) and ministering to God and people had a hard line about dating relationships...they were always an unspiritual thing, an idol, and should not be sustained through the length of a DTS, unless, of course, you were already engaged. One girl was and one other girl got engaged while we were in DTS, breaking the rules, but I guess life goes to those who know how to break the rules strategically, which never made sense to me as a younger autistic person. But I digress...

What I mean to say is...when your relational human needs are being met (in family,) and those needs have never been met in your family of origin, how is wanting to hold onto that an expression of idolatry?

I get that one can confer unholy status on a person, thinking they are the greatest and perfect and can never disappoint...and there may have been some shades of that...but lumping all dating into the shady category when clearly it is healing for some people in some situations seems to be a theology (part of asceticism) sourced from a demon of ultra-religion, or a 'religious spirit.' And I know that part of this is the purity culture trend that was peaking in popularity in the late 90's-early 2000's. And part of it was probably my autistic tendency to see things in black and white.

But I've already written about all of that. What hit me watching Jessica flirt with the cowboy dude, on screen, flouting the expectations of their elders, was that they really thought that what they were doing was the right thing - and that I was in the wrong to break up with Jos. That I had been assimilated and brainwashed and they were the balanced, mature and sane ones.

But weren't they the ones who were already starting a relationship months before the actual breakup happened? The depths of betrayal are like the roots of wisdom teeth, going down into the bedrock of my nervous system, the foundation of my ability to relax and sometimes, I can't even when everything is perfect, because my mind flips to survival and safe and comfortable has never in my life been safe - it has put a target for abuse on my back...so I panic, unable to trust that the comfortable feelings in my brain when I lie down in bed to read a good book after a brutal week at school are actually legit...I panic and go down the rabbit hole of trying to convince myself it's safe...until I'm so stressed that it's worse than before I tried to relax and I can't sleep for hours. Then I get sick. That's my current reality, one that was shaped by the gaslighting of my heart for years first by my parents and then by everyone else who mattered.

Well, except in that one relationship that lasted about 9 months. That was my one witness of constancy - until he gaslighted me into thinking that he was single, that he wanted to see me in our home town that Christmas.

So the song. And no, I'm not going to fix the order for you, dear reader, because this is how my crazy, diverse, cPTSD-addled mind works. And it's part of this story because it's partly their fault.

The song about new wine. In YWAM, (because for an autistic, or someone dealing with trauma, past isn't prologue, it's present) I was praying about my relationship with Jos, and my team was praying for me to find clarity, priorities (which I now feel was a wrong theology, see above) and peace about the whole situation and what to do.

I started to see two paths separate out in front of me: the one with him and the one without him. How much could I grow during DTS if I was still clinging to the container of our relationship, and how much could I grow if I wasn't tied down by it? It seemed like unending potential in an infinite God, contrasting with definite boundaries of my growth in a close-knit relationship with him.

Because I was still in the very beginning stages of my DTS and I had deeply bonded with my boyfriend at a level of wounding and personal growth that was fairly low compared to where I saw that I could go with God, I knew that something drastic needed to change to allow me that room for growth. On the other hand, I was so in love and missed him terribly. I did realize that this was distracting for me. (And yes, I saw all the hot meat in front of me, I noticed it...but none of that mattered, because I was deeply in love and bonded with him...and none of their personalities really matched or meshed with mine the way his did...the understandings we shared that no words could describe...)

Jos seemed to not understand that I didn't actually want anyone else. He saw me pulling on the reins, leading in a new direction, and thought that I was about to jump into a new relationship with someone more spiritual than him.

What I wanted to see his both of us going higher with God.

He wrote me an email, and I guess I didn't 'get' it...when he used the word frustrated...what he was really talking about was sex (wasn't it?) and that Jessica was right there, and probably telling him everything he wanted to hear...and thinking that she was a Christian too...and so that she was basically a proxy for me.

Maybe we really were both done and I wasn't the breaker after all?

I have realized that the full surrender to pay the price for the 'new wine' that God would bring out of my life was my desire alone, and not his, and that's where we ended it. I know there was a very limited understanding of these things in his family. He had an anti-religious father cussing in one ear about me being brainwashed and unbalanced and all that.

But Jessica...she was raised in a Christian family! How could she have thought that was the right thing to do? Stealing my boyfriend out from under me and giving him everything I morally couldn't?

And him...when I called to talk to him about things, telling me that he had a girlfriend, and her name was Jessica...so he didn't have to talk to me and work through our stuff? That stuff doesn't just go away because you bury it.

And when we talked years later, she still seemed to think that they were a better, saner 'we,' than he and I had been? That they had talked and decided that their relationship was the legitimate one, and that if they had met right away they would have dated right away and not had to deal with pesky old me?

While they all shamed me a lot back then and I felt like the slimy one, the one in the wrong, the emotional basket case making messes where messes do not belong, I do not believe they had the moral high ground, or that their perspective was more balanced than mine. The sense I get is that they had even decided that they were more Christian than I was, because I had gone too far off the deep end.

How could she think that she wasn't scooping him up that entire time? Did God tell her to do that?

I get that university is a shitty time for most people. It's incredibly stressful, the work is much harder than highschool and you don't have a family to impose structure or budgeting or make meals or do grocery shopping...and being away from one's family (if they're healthy) is emotional deprivation. We need close relationships, especially during stressful times, and if we don't have them, we create them. So there were some unmet needs represented there.

But how on earth did they justify it? I guess by putting me in the place of crazy. That's the only way it all makes sense.

How did all this talking and comforting him and telling him what he wanted to hear and f*cking and telling all our friends about it. How was that you doing the right thing?

He gave to her what should have been mine because he used her as a shield to avoid talking to me...how is that not stealing someone else's man?

They were dating like within a week of our breakup...so how does that leave time for growth, for healing?

To top it all off, my best friend Carla and her dorm mates even had a nickname for them, "Jos and Jess." That was what he started calling her...to me it says t*t.

I don't know...why...wait...in my early childhood there was a couple that were best friends with my parents, Doug and Christine, and she had these huge boobs and would strip off her entire shirt to feed not only her 3 month old but also her 2 year old. That's what the nickname "Jess" conjures up to me. Someone who is breastfeeding you, like a mother who is your whole world.

So the breakup didn't naturally deprive him of something he needed and wanted for a minute so he could find a better source (like Haymitch withholding water from Katniss so she could get to the lake) in God, it lead him into a friggin' ocean of brackish water that didn't satiate his spiritual thirst but only appeared to do so. For when something is truly an idol, it never satisfies, and that is what happened. He used her up and then cheated on her once she gave all she had and it still wasn't enough to satisfy him. Because nothing satisfies the human heart like God does. Nothing.

I guess the next half of our lives will be really telling. I sure hope that all this persecution I've endured will be worth it.

So when I called the Laramie house that Christmas his mom answered the phone and they told me they were watching "The Man from Snowy River," and that it was Jessica's choice...They passed the phone around to all of them, talking to me, placating me, mocking me, laughing in the background.

I really had no idea what they were talking about until I re-watched it for my horse book series, The Hidden Valley. Amazon.com: The Hidden Valley: 9780995298125: Thomsen, Mrs. K. A.: Books

His dad swore and called me a lunatic. This family that had been my safe place had decided all at once to shoot out my heart.

And apparently I'm the reason they finally moved from Houston. I'm the reason it wasn't safe for them there anymore. It was all MY fault. For making THEM uncomfortable.

Because it's always tempting to throw more shit on someone who appears to be struggling...when everything about you looks good externally, when you seem to have it all together. It's definitely their fault, not yours.

I think all this goes to show that it's much easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for one's own actions. Because none of those conclusions are logical. But I've noticed that most of the time, neurotypicals don't care about logic, or actual facts, only about how something makes them feel. They don't even care if it's right or wrong or even if they are, most of the time. They decide what they believe based on their feelings and then push away anything and everything that contradicts their preposterous conclusions.

I guess we will see what happens next. The rhetoric of the church is only just starting to catch up to what God started in me prophetically back then and I've been pioneering since then. I've felt alone for most of it although I haven't really been pushing alone. I know there are others. But most of the time the posturing, shaming, conflict and name-calling in the church has lead me to separate myself and look to God alone. The point is that I hope there comes a day when there is some fruit that I can point to and say, "see, it was all worth it,"

"This new wine that heals people is being poured out of my life..."

I mean, he told me I'd probably be alone for the rest of my life. And I haven't been. I have realized that both guys in my DTS who were actually interested in me -Josh and Nate rejected me because of my neurodivergence, which is shit to realize. That they think you're trash because of something you can't help, that has nothing to do with worth or character really.

And the other guy was Norwegian...(the light haired one, if you are reading this, Josh, not Helge.) which might have been fun TBH...and it would have given me a legitimate reason to move far away from my parents.

Now that I'm 43 and I've seen what I've seen, and I've seen where he went from the breakup and where I went...I can see that the goals we had lead us to make opposite choices that would have lead to conflict and breakup later down the line...

But I don't know. Maybe we would have found a way to grow together. I can never really say what would have happened, because it didn't actually happen. As Aslan says, "There are no what-ifs."