[aron]

Had a thought to share and decided to post it here. I was raised in the "hippy" era of the U.S., my parents did a lot of booze & drugs (Their parents drank heavily - my parents added drugs to that). It was a mess. Violence & sexual predation, etc.

Then, during the "Jesus movement", our family was invited to a Baptist church & got the Baptist hellfire sermon, and everyone went up front & received the Lord. Now, I distinctly remember that a choice was in front of me: I could either sit there in the pew & let everyone else go up front, and be damned to torment for eternity, or I could be welcomed and forgiven by a loving God. But also, this abstract concept of 'salvation' was presented within a social setting. My whole family went forward! What was I going to do? Get separated from them?! I mean, I was like 7 or 8 years old.

My point in recounting all this is that I probably would have gone forward, whether Muslim or Mormon or Zoroastrian setting. I did what I was told, which is how one got fed, clothed, and avoided (most) beatings. And, I wasn't equipped to intellectually parse the argument from the podium - I wasn't aware that down the road, Muslims and Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses were using similar recruiting tactics with other families.

What I'm saying is that I became a Baptist just like kids all over the world become whatever they become - because it seems like the best option out of the ones in front of them. Usually they're part of a socializing system that tries to remove choices and options. "It is this, or else". Everything is designed to take away your ability to think, to criticize, to choose one from among a variety.

My family eventually dissolved, as booze and drugs and violence won out, at least temporarily. So I left that shattered wreckage, and was ott & about, fueled by booze and drugs and anger. I was gonna punch you, before you punched me. Again, I was making the best choice that I could, given that my world-view pretty much consisted of drunken people punching each other. I was gonna get the biggest stick.

Then, I got sober, and soon after was in the Local Church... in an AA meeting, they'd said, "Turn your life over to God", and so living in a brother's house, going to 7 meetings a week, sitting in the front row and bawling like a hungry calf made a kind of logical sense. Instead of shots of Jack Daniels it was "OHHHHHH LOOOOORRRRRDDDD JEEEEEEEZZZZUUUUSSSSS!!!" over and over again. Again, looking back, I can see why this seemed like a good choice in the context of that moment.* I got clean, and was living as a Christian. At the time, it seemed like I'd made a good call on that one.

But the demons didn't go away. Year after year I lived in that brothers house, arranged the chairs for Lord's Day meetings, swept the sidewalk in front of the Meeting Hall. But the shame, the nightmares, the anxiety, the helpless rage, the obsession-compulsion behaviors, didn't disappear like I'd hoped and expected. And the local elders weren't interested in my case. One by one, they met with me, frowned as I shared my frustrations, as I told a non-LC story of not being healed, or 'metabolically-transformed' as they put it. And in so doing, they denied the reality of my existence.

My story is that I made what seemed like the best choices at the time, given the limited amount of information at my disposal. And that goes for Watchman Nee, Witness Lee, and the Local Church elders who denied my pain. They all have done what seemed best at the moment, within the constraints of their world-view which was derived from and permeated every aspect of their immediate socio-cultural setting. In other words, everyone's doing the best they can with what little they have.

This has helped me to forgive and not try to place burdens on others which burdens they simply aren't equipped to bear. Everyone's doing the best they can, and some didn't get much to start with. Should I blame God for that? No. Rather, I can in each present moment choose peace, and find forgiveness therein. "If you forgive others, then God will forgive you. If you don't forgive others their trespasses, then God won't forgive yours." Pretty simple set of choices: forgiveness is offered as a reciprocal event, as a two-way street.

*and the Local Church acculturation process is very good at removing choice. Everything you allow, everything you agree to, is carefully designed to remove options, and manipulate your mind further and further into a corner, until it finds no available options but to succumb. Only by seeing this, can one effectively begin to resist.