Quote:
Originally Posted by Trapped
Igzy, I understand when you say you are a person who needs to know what happened. I am too, but I also need to know why. I can't stand up after decades on the ground, shake it off, say "huh, that was weird" and walk off in another direction. I don't want to lose more decades lost in another wormhole group, missing the mark. Was there no point to those decades? Why did they happen if not for something? Otherwise what we go through in life is meaningless.
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I totally get your whole post. I've been there. Let me just say the following:
1) Realize your value to the Lord has NOTHING to do with your status with the LC. He values you and loves you as his precious child and that has nothing to do with being affiliated with a church movement. You must get to a place where your self-esteem before the Lord is not fundamentally based on anything to do with the LC or any other group.
2) No group or person owns the Church. The church belongs to Christ. He "loans" aspects of the church to practical groups, but he can just as easily take back those things. The Lord never lets fallen people hold the church or its members hostage. Anyone who thinks he does is sadly deceived.
3) All church groups are imperfect. This is something we need to get. There have been many, many godly people in the Catholic church, but there have been some other things that are not good. It's a mixture. The LC is no different. When you ask what was that all about, what did it mean, it meant that the Lord works wherever he can as much as he can. But just because he is working in a place does not mean that is the only place he is working or can work. Because we were so committed to the Lord in the LC he was able to do many amazing things. But because it was eventually overwhelmed by a warped vision, it became toxic in some ways.
Lee clearly saw that the church has its good and bad sides. Where he went off the reservation was to look at the good in the LC and disregard the bad, and at the same time look at the bad in "Christianity" and disregard the good. In other words, he looked at the LC in an idealized way, at what he hoped it would become, while doing the exact opposite with any other groups. This bait-and-switch, equivocating mentality is rampant in LC thinking. But it's so subtle to them that they don't see it, because they believe they are special and chosen and so operating under a set of rules which favors them, which is the calling card of every errant group that ever existed.
4) The fact is there are contradictions in the LC. Some can take them, some can't. If you can't the Lord is not, in principle anyway, telling you to stay. That is, it is not fundamentally by his law and nature necessary for you to stay. He may be leading you practically to stay, he may be leading you to leave, he may even be leaving it up to you. But there is no bedrock principle that says you must stay.
5) So what did it mean? It meant God was working. It meant he was there with people that were meeting in his name, just as he said he would be. What was really good about the LC? The Lord, the Spirit, the brotherly love. Other stuff like being "the Recovery" or "bringing the Lord back" were exciting, but that probably isn't what kept you there.
The Lord puts up with a lot of our silliness to be with us, but that doesn't validate the silliness. It was those basics that mattered: love, fellowship, relationship, purpose. All and only the things that are available anywhere.
So, again, my advice is get yourself to a place where you feel good about where you are. Don't feel like you have to figure everything out before you get there. The same approach must be taken with other things in life which don't make sense: the death of a loved one, a divorce, unfairly losing a job, any major challenge which doesn't make sense. You have to decide to be happy without having figured out why it happened. As I said, at some level madness is unexplainable, and you have to trust that the Lord sees and knows everything and will make known what we need to know when we need to know it. It always comes down to faith in him.