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Walking through treacle


I became a Christian 16 years ago when I was 53.   It was something of a ‘Damascus Road' experience, after my daughter's adult baptism, and I naturally joined the same church she went to.   It was a very big, charismatic Baptist church, with a fundamentalist outlook of creationism, a young earth and ‘If it's in the Bible, that's it!'   Having come from a totally unchurched background I didn't know there was any other way, and soaked up the dogma, and black and white outlook that was fed to me, week after week.

 

However, I had begun to suffer the depression which has dogged me ever since.   An emotionally abusive marriage was the underlying cause, but I was told by the Pastor who counselled me ‘I can find no Scriptural reason for you to leave your husband'.   So I stayed.   And things got worse:  my husband was very hostile to my faith, but I was certain I was doing what God wanted.

 

Six unhappy years on and my husband retired.   We moved to the north of England to be near our daughter, now married, and with 2 boys.   By this time, our 4 elderly relatives, for whom I had been responsible, had died.   My much-loved mother-in-law, my favourite aunt, and my husband's confused aunt had all died within 3 weeks of each other, and my own mother died 6 months later.   We were no longer tied to the south of England, where they had all lived.

 

I had struggled hard to be a good, submissive, Christian wife, but discovered having my husband home 24/7 only made things more difficult. I had eventually settled in a small Pentecostal church, very charismatic, but very dogmatic – no change there, then!   However, people there tended to see my worsening depression as evidence of lack of faith, unconfessed sin, or sheer self-indulgence.   The Pastor prayed for me, many times, but nothing got any better.   I found it harder and harder to worship, and almost impossible to pray.   The only reason I went to church was because I needed to get out of the house to something that was ‘mine'.   My husband's hostility to my faith had muted to indifference, but I desperately needed my own space.

 

Eventually I was admitted to the Psychiatric Ward of our local Hospital as an emergency.   I had got to the end of my tether, and discovered God wasn't there.   His promises weren't true.

 

When I was discharged and became an Out Patient, rather than an In Patient, no one really knew how to treat me.   I don't know whether I was challenging their own faith, but I felt emotionally drained and empty, with nothing to fall back on.   The Bible which I had previously found so comforting, was just words on paper.    My feeling that God had deserted me, I was told, was just that, a feeling, not to be regarded.    Learn encouraging Bible verses off by heart, and keep saying them to myself.   I would then believe.

 

A few weeks after I was discharged, my daughter threw a bombshell.   Her husband of 11 years, who I liked enormously, who had promised to look after her, and who had fathered two wonderful grandsons, had decided he was homosexual.   They were separating and would divorce in two years.   She and her husband were both in an evangelical church, and I was in the Pentecostal church.   Theirs was a bit more understanding, but mine pronounced he was destined for hell.

 

The cracks were beginning to show.   The Pentecostal attitude towards homosexuality was brutal, and unloving.   It had to be ‘dealt with'.   They should stay together, the Pastor said (though I hadn't asked!), with no thought to the dreadful situation that would leave my daughter in for the rest of her life.   The depression got worse.   I asked if those who committed suicide would lose their salvation.   The longest pause I have ever heard told me all I needed to know.   I was consigned to hell if I chose to end it all.

 

By now, the Pastor and his assistant had been to the States and taken on board the theology of Rick Warren (of Saddleback Church, Ca.) and his ‘Purpose-driven Life'.   I hated it.   I saw it as a marketing strategy of bland, bite-sized ‘beliefs' masquerading as Christian faith.   When they moved on to teaching us to become a ‘contagious Christian', making friends in order to convert them, I left.   I was seen as in rebellion.   But I could not swallow the assertion that God has our life planned, and we are, whatever our circumstances, just where he wants us to be.   Really?   And this applies to abused and tortured children as well?     That     didn't sound  like  a   loving   God  who  asks  us  to call him Abba, Father. I began to think the whole Christian thing was a hoax.

 

Still feeling I needed a Christian community, I moved to an Independent Evangelical church I had heard good things about.  But it's not a community, just a collection of individuals and cliques.   Dogma spouts from the pulpit every week.   There is no place for questions.   Everyone outside the evangelical churches will go to hell unless we get them to ‘make a commitment to Jesus'.   But I can't believe salvation is just a question of saying the ‘Sinners' prayer' and that's it.   We are told to ‘work out our salvation with fear and trembling' (Phil 2:12).   Surely salvation and our Christian life should be a journey through mystery and love?

 

I'm told if I can't find God then I am turning my back on him.   We must all fall in love with Jesus, and have a relationship with him.   I can't love – every person I have ever loved either died or went away from me (and that includes my beloved dog!)   I find it hard to ‘have relationships'.   I will have to take anti-depressant medication for the rest of my life, and life feels like walking through treacle.

 

I believe in God.   He came and fetched me 16 years ago.   But I can't find him again; he doesn't speak to me any more.   The remains of the fundamentalist Christian teaching I first received tell me I am guilty of rejecting God.   But I have found a Christian web site where Christians of all shades of doctrine ‘meet', and I am gradually, and very painfully realising there really is a life beyond evangelicalism.   It's a struggle.   I feel alone.    I'm 70 this year, and I keep thinking ‘is this all there is to life – aren't I supposed to be joyful and victorious?'

 

I don't want to be here any longer.                                 

                                                                  

‘Maggie'

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