Good evening! My story - and thank you for yours

[eDh22]

Hello! Wishing everyone a good evening! I've been reading through the board for hours and hours now and thought it would be rude not to leave a message. It has been time well spent to hear so many people put into "ink" experiences that are so similar to those of much of my life but which I had long compartmentalized.

It was only very recently that I heard about the most recent "blow up" in the LCs and found out my family was no longer meeting with them. I feel awful for what they went through but it's a relief that they are now out too and it's no longer standing between us. I feel a little bit that I "missed the party" as I read all the back posts from that time as I had already snuck out the backdoor a couple years before but I have enough to process of the weirdness of my childhood and early adulthood within the LCs.

Why did I stay for so long into adulthood, despite increasing cognitive dissonance? If I chose, I could point to my parents for the first 18 years in the LCs, but for the years after that, I'm just embarrassed. I remember being in agony on my way to the meetings, wishing for any excuse not to go, but holding on to the tradition of my childhood, the "highs" of my youth, and too proud to "quit".

It was my pride, ironically, that finally tripped me up. A woman, a wise and kind Christian who was not with the LCs, found out that I had only really read the works of Lee and Nee (and ok, I never read much Nee, I pretty much just read the Morning Revival year in and year out) and gave me such a look of pity. Ouch! The final blow came when a friend attended an LC meeting with me and a mutual friend of ours stood up and just lambasted (other) Christians and Christianity and I got such a look and was asked if I really believed it. How to explain that, no of course not and I was pretty sure neither did the person who just gave that proto-hate speech but it was what was expected of us. Tradition. Price of entry.

I started attending all sorts of different Christian meetings on Sunday mornings. It was a lot of fun meeting everyone and seeing all the different ways they spoke and prayed and sang, but I was pretty burnt out and ended up taking a hiatus for some years, until I attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation and took a course on Religious Recovery along with a bunch of recovering Catholics (never thought I'd have anything in common with Catholics). We were pressed to review our religious pasts, grieve for what was lost, and reclaim what had been real and precious. You may be among those who are aghast, sputtering, fuming over the UU "churches" but they are such a safe place to recover from religious trauma and figure things out.

I'm still trying to move onward and upward and discover my soul (mind, emotion, and will) that appears to have been successfully denied over the years. I went into my teenage diaries recently and they all read like life studies, largely because I had nothing else to say, or at least nothing I wasn't too scared to think, feel, or do. The postings on this forum have been very helpful for next steps (e.g. be humble, have a sense of humor, learn to be human, practice thinking critically, meet with other Christians). Thank you.

And thank you for providing a space where I can post this in "ink". Even publicly (gasp). I want to own it, laugh about it, grieve over it, and grow into the person I truly have the potential to be.