Curse Replaced with Blessing

Yes, yes it has been.

Curse broken. Perhaps for good.

The ball got rolling on a Wednesday night in a coffee meetup. Had you been there and heard the deep sharing and easy laughter between me and the couple I was with, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d known each other longer than we had. The man had been in significant pain since I’d met him. A family picture later that summer had shocked me into wondering what a stroke for me would do to our family. But no one could explain to my friend exactly what had happened to him to produce that half slack, half frozen face. And the pain continued unabated for months, specialists all across North America mystified. Until one doctor put down her instruments and said, “Tell me the whole story.”

At the end of it, her conclusion had not been remotely suspected. “I think you’ve been cursed.” She followed by asking if they wanted to join her at her church’s prayer meeting that night. Sure, why not? Who would have guessed––that night the shroud lifted. Pain-free for the first time in six and half months.

Say, WHAT?

“Wow, I really don’t have any kind of neat box to put that in,” I admitted out loud.

“Yeah, neither do we! Someone cursed me. That curse has now been broken.” 

They even figured, looking back with 20/20, where, when, and via what object the curse had come. Still, our Western, excluded-middle minds struggled to accept what it meant. But who can argue with suddenly re-straightened face muscles? 

The six months of debilitating pain had never been illness. The summer’s stroke-like event…wasn’t. All along it was a real, honest-to-God––well, some very different Being, to be sure––curse. Too weird. My friends laughed in assuring me that this was the most natural and self-evident explanation for every last member of the First Nations community in which they lived, eh? Way up there where only the Ice Road takes you.

“Of course!” Of course someone cursed you. 

Really?

The next day I found it hard to stop thinking about. 

Come Saturday, I was still thinking about it, and while listening to a podcast, my ears perked up as curse was brought up there. The host meant it more like I understood it. Curse, the opposite of blessing. Curse, the negative, untrue thing I say about myself, even if only in my head. Curse, the result of experiencing harm. 

Then this landed like a ton of bricks:

“Curse will never be fully gone until it is replaced with blessing.”

In that moment, I knew what I needed. 

In that moment, I saw myself in some sort of ritual done in community. I’d ask Tammy to lead it. For I, like my friend, hungered for release. I wanted curse replaced with blessing. I’d been entirely sick of my trauma still affecting me for awhile now. Really, really fed up. 

I’d processed. I’d dealt. I’d healed. But not enough, cause here it was, hanging around. Waking me up. Dragging me down. Filling up brain space. Unshakeable. 

I wanted to be done with it.

I didn’t want to dwell, anymore. 

I didn’t want those men any longer encroaching on my mental space. 

I was more than satisfied with the number of times I’d chosen and re-chosen forgiveness.

I no longer cared what actual lies had been told about me, or why so many people believed them or did nothing about them.

I. Just. Wanted. To Move On.

Really and truly. New life, new job, new community, and fine enough with forgetting the old. I’d embraced the new start but was failing, still. 

And sick of it, did I mention? 

I have no interest in wondering ‘Why…’ or ‘What if…’. So why can’t I stop? 

Cause curse. 

Curse in my life had become a curse on my life.

I preferred sleep. I wanted rest. I love peace.

Stop the Regret-A-Whirl, I wanna get off. Bring the floor back up to my feet, please, so I can get off this wall.

Sleep, rest, and peace eluded me more than I liked, which only piled on an anxiety about being some kind of failure, so I cursed myself for not being able to stop. Which made me believe more lies. Which confirmed that feeling of failure.  

One particular lie had always topped my list, especially in those months after the groundless firing. My battle with it had been more difficult and more damaging than all battle with all the rest, together:

I must be some sort of high-functioning, half-______.” 

I dare not even put the actual accusation in writing. 

But from the inside––and some of you will know this––“believing a lie”is a poor description of what is actually going on in our heads. 

Sure, with some things, we’re aware it’s a lie. We can face the mirror and prepare ourselves to face the day. You might need to be a certain age to say this exact phrase, but we self-coach with some version of a daily, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.” It does the trick. 

But other things are way more insidious. In fact, we’ve been convinced: It’s not a lie, something’s wrong with me. It doesn’t feel anything like believing a lie. Not on the inside, for we think what we’ve actually done is accept an unfortunate, but unshakeable, truth. We are self-aware! And making the best of things. We swallow the shame and move forward.

Or so we believe. 

More than once through tears I’d asked my wife, “Why has no one in my entire life loved me enough to shoot straight with me on this [and tell me I’m defective]?”

Yup, trauma.

I couldn’t see that at the time, though; instead I was battling to integrate and make sense of the messages of my trauma. 

Because IF this is a lie, wouldn’t more evidence to the contrary be forthcoming? 

When it isn’t, we believe it’s the truth. And if we ever want to get over whatever hump we’re stuck on, the sooner we admit that the better. 

Except I’d been trying that for a long, long time. 

Why wasn’t it working? 

Simple. It wasn’t the truth. 

It was curse. 

And one does not rid oneself of curse by integrating it.

One rids oneself of curse by replacing it with blessing. 

On that Saturday––with the perfect storm of my friends’ story and a podcast––I knew: Time to take the bull by the horns, Dann, and get help. Replace curse with blessing. 

Via texts and calls, I gathered a trusted community. A group of seven to bear witness with me.

Tammy led our ritual. (My simple definition of ritual is just some kind of solemn ceremony which includes bodily, sensory actions.) Together, sitting in a circle, we would take on these curses that I had been unable to shake alone. 

I named that first and biggest lie. The first person wrote it on a slip of paper.

I imagined I’d probably make it all the way ‘round the circle and give everyone something to write. 

It wasn’t long and a number of them were crying.

They knew me, but they hadn’t known this about me.

Even I hadn’t consciously known all of these lies. They began to tumble from me.

Dann deserved this treatment.

So-and-so truly knows and understands Dann. They were wise to do this.

Dann is not wise, he’s blind. Dann does not understand. 

Dann’s kids deserve the trauma they have undergone (and still are)––that’s how bad Dann was.

When I was done, there’d been enough lies for every person to have filled out three slips.

Then Tammy had me start over at the very beginning.

First person, first lie. I read it aloud, then listened to the group in unison:

“This is a lie; this is not the truth.” 

Burn the paper. Hear the noise. Watch the smoke. Smell it. Hug the person who’d written it.

Next I was instructed to declare the opposite of the words I’d written and just watched burn. Tell the truth.

Some were easy:

Hell no, Dann’s kids did not deserve this. Doesn’t matter what he did. (Indeed, “Heaven, yes” could have been chosen by any number of people during our family’s hellish journey.)

Others required a deep breath. And trust in my present community that they could see clearer than I could:

Dann is beloved and wanted.

One at a time. Round and round the circle.  

On my second go-round, after burning a slip Tammy had written, I got My Bonus Gift. 

Since before Thanksgiving, I’d oft repeated out loud a conclusion I’d reached in counseling: “I think my body is telling me I need A Really Big Cry. Something purging, cathartic, body-wracking… And move on from there.” 

I wasn’t going to force it, but I was constantly on the lookout for it, because tears get triggered by the funniest things, sometimes, don’t they? Yet along with anticipation came fear that it would come at the wrong time. I wasn’t afraid of crying in front of anyone, for who cares? It’s human. But I was, I decided, totally not up for uncontrollable sobbing in front of a big room full of people, for instance. That kind of situation where everyone can hear the blubbering? But has to crane their neck to figure out where it’s coming from…?

I wasn’t cool with that. 

But weeks and months went by, and though my tear ducts made a number of modest efforts, nothing ultimately satisfying ever really materialized.

Now, standing in front of Tammy, it was here, unlooked for.

The group just waited. Tammy just held me.

When it had passed, I completed my third and final round. 

“This is a lie; this is not the truth.” Burn. Hear. Watch. Smell. Hug. Tell the truth. Repeat.

I finally sat down.

Slow breaths. 

“I think I feel good,” I cautiously reported. I knew I wouldn’t really know until I got some distance.

But sure enough, the next day, driving around, I had two distinct realizations:

Oh! Today is the third anniversary of Day 0. The Day That Started Everything. That’s crazy.

And:

I feel something… What is that feeling? Lemme think for a sec, this is familiar… Oh, my word!! 

I feel like… MYSELF.

It had actually taken time and effort to identify it. How faint the familiarity had been.

I have not fully felt like my own self in three years?! What the…

Tell your stories, people. Your stories of pain, trauma, church hurt, all of it.

My replacing curse with blessing was a great, great day for me, and I feel grateful and relieved over how it all went. It has lasted. Your story has been different, and your healing may come different. I tell my story simply so that it may stand on its own for what it is. Yours is yours. You don’t need my ritual, you need…well, decide in your community what you need. Because at the bottom of it all, we’re the same. Image bearers seeking to live more fully into our own agency, voice, and value. Silence… advantages the status quo and usually the wrong people. Speak. Pull back the curtain on your trauma, and do not do it alone. 

Displace curse. 

Replace it with blessing. 

God be with you. 

The Longer Story of the Whistleblow that Ended My Denominational Employment

INTRO

If you were to tally 2022’s posts to this blog, you’d find…none. The main post of 2021, too, even though that was an extremely eventful year for us, was missing nearly all detail. Such time gaps don’t concern me; I’m not really that kind of blogger. But there was a reason beyond just “not getting around to it” that I didn’t post in 2022. We were regrouping. It was a take-time-to-be- grateful year. A new job year. 

2021 was the Year of Trauma.

And before now, it was not the right time to talk about it.

My reasons for speaking now, in order of importance, are: 

1. My own healing. 

I’ve learned more about trauma in the last few years than I imagine I thought I ever would have. Which of course means I now understand much more about (and have so much, much more compassion for) those who’ve known worse, and far worse, trauma than me. But it also means that I’ve learned not to dismiss my own. Big T or little t, trauma doesn’t simply just go away. We do the work of moving through it. Understanding it. Rebuilding. Replacing. 

We all move on, and my whole family is in the process of moving on. But we don’t move on from trauma; we move on with trauma. We take it out and work on it when we can. Or, it comes out whenever it freaking feels like it. We deal with it either way. We tell our stories. 

The timeline I am going to link to in this post forms the scaffolding of my story. It’s missing upwards of 99% of my inner story, but there is rarely a forum in which we can (or want to) tell our whole stories. I suppose in a “tell-all” book. But normally, bits and pieces get brought into the light as the time is right and the audiences are right. Before now, I kept this timeline largely to myself.

But I have come to recognize that my own healing journey requires sharing more. Because of good counsel, I value sensitivity against over-sharing, but because of good therapy, I know the value of speaking. It’s a rhythm and a path that I am choosing to engage, and I am merely a learner on that path. I’ve miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep. (Great one, Mr. Frost.) 

2. Family and friends.

While therapy is for the minutiae, many people we are in relationship with can love us well enough for what we need with far less complete versions of our stories.

Though I’ve hit a majority of the major ones, I’ve still cut the episodes/events in this story by at least three-fourths. But even then, you may prefer not to read my timeline of this account. I invite you: go with your gut. It is absolutely your freedom and your choice, and I have done the favor of making it easy by putting the timeline on a separate page. You will not get there unless you click the link. If you are one of the two handfuls of people who subscribe to this blog, I believe you will not even get a notification of its posting, nor will it later show up in the list of past entries. Everyone remains free at all times to “take a pass.” If you’re uncomfortable with accounts like these, honor yourself and don’t read. There’s enough detail in the Outro for you to catch on. If you dislike the thought of a negative report about your own denomination (should you happen to know me; you won’t find named names), or are simply from a generation, in a family, part of a tradition, or at a time of life where the supposed need for the public airing of dirty laundry mystifies you to begin with… please, be my guest and don’t read. Proceed directly to the Outro without clicking the link.

For the record, please allow me to confirm how many, many members of my former denomination still get counted in this friends and family category. There may be strain or silence characterizing some current or future relations, but there is not bitterness and ill-will. For all of them, maybe especially those who might recognize their juxtaposition to parts of the story because they were there, there’s no better way to begin to appreciate some of the impact of the full story than to hear it told from the vantage point of the one who lived every chapter.

3. Encouragement to others with a yet-untold story of their own.

Be assured, our stories have value even before we have the courage to tell them. And yours has value even while others may drown out your hope by shaming you that you can’t make a trauma case out of every boo-hoo experience. Telling our stories has always been part of the human experience, and it always will be. 

As I am always blessed by the honest telling of stories––stories that help me know I’m not crazy… or defective… or alone… but beloved––so may you be. 

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

–Flannery O’Conner

4. Righteousness. Justice.

Yes, I care about righteousness and justice. But I also don’t forget that I have contributed towards unrighteousness and injustice, sometimes consciously, more often unintentionally. Hardly anyone, and I would include many a Christian man who abuses his power, is purposefully working on behalf of the antitheses of the things he says values. But good intentions and good motives are nothing in the face of the power of wickedness and injustice working their will upon humanity. And, throughout history, in the name of God as often as opposed to it.

My question for you, reader, is: How will you pursue justice and righteousness in those places where you can determine that others are failing to flourish? What shall you do when the missing piece is your voice? Don’t think that the day will come when institutions simply “do the right thing” somehow disconnected from self-preservation. For our institutions do not bear the imago Dei, we do. Only you, image bearer––whether you decide to simply lay down your self-protection or whether you gather allies and speak together––can choose to speak. Everyone has a voice. It’s a priesthood of all believers. 

THE POST-WHISTLEBLOW TIMELINE

I whistleblew.

The Timeline linked below is not an attempt to prove I was correct; indeed it does not even lay out my case. It assumes the accusations were credible and routinely verifiable by qualified persons. Only one of the original accusations is referenced, and that is not in the Timeline but in the Outro below. The Timeline is a sketch only of the process that, together to date, forms the full organizational response to a request for help in a case of perceived abuse. The net result of that process was my family having been removed from our life-long organization.

Click here to read the Timeline.

Alternately, proceed directly below to the Outro, instead.

OUTRO

Welcome back, if you chose to read the Timeline. 

Should anyone be feeling some inward insistence that, had you been around, you would have stepped in and done something!… God bless you. Thank you for the sentiment, truly. But not likely. It’s not like there was a shortage of very good people all around and all throughout all of this. No one intervened. I think it is simply our congregational and community default, for whatever reasons, to believe the narratives our leaders are speaking. So I would say, “Please, turn your eye to your present. Is there someone(s) in need of you now? Someone who could use your defense on their behalf against those wielding power, even in church, not in service of them, but over them to their harm?” We need more people with these kinds of eyes.

More is broken in our beloved institutions than just a few scattered leaders. In the story I have just told, almost everybody involved were fine, good folks committed to good leading. To a (wo)man, they probably followed policy right down the middle. At every turn. In spite of that, and in the midst of that, somehow an image bearer’s human needs were invisible. There is no way on God’s green earth that any image bearer’s human (including spiritual, emotional, social, financial, or other) needs should be that invisible to us, ever. How many are in this world, I personally find myself deeply convicted about, and never more so since undergoing this experience. It should not be possible in the Body for anyone (whether you’re speaking about me, or my boss, or an outsider) to be that mischaracterized and misjudged. And don’t get me wrong: I am as capable of blindness as any. I am as capable of power abuse (had I any to abuse) as anyone. 

In other words, whatever problems we have won’t be solved by simply plugging new people into unchanged paradigms. 

…the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end, and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them.

N.T. Wright

What if there had been someone who had decided they wanted to seriously advocate for me in my situation? What options did they have? Another letter? To be ignored? (Happened.) To be publicly denigrated? (Also happened.) What else? Was there anything for such a person short of risking their career and reputation as we were? Is “I’m going to put career and reputation on the line” truly the only downstream option to “I guess I’d better just trust the leadership and stay out of this”? Where is care? Justice? Protection? The place for appeal? The non-in-house input? Without safeguards, who would choose a dangerous road just to help another? There are far too many dominos with extremely long-term ramifications directly in the shadow of career and reputation for anyone to risk toppling them all. 

No, I do not blame anyone for not joining us in the furnace. 

We did have Someone walking around in there with us, don’t forget. Yes, we were alone, but we are none of us ever completely alone.

On the other hand, if in a case like this you wanted to fire and hold everyone accountable for every error, who should be included? Everyone who did not fully join the proven-correct-in-the-end side? We’d all have been fired years ago. What about the dozens or scores of people up and down the organizational ladder with some measure of direct or indirect power to do something to defend me but who didn’t? Do a clean wipe once the truth comes out? Fire everyone? No lunatic would suggest it. These are good, ministering people. (We, too, I guess, once enjoyed that reputation.) 

No. Not for one minute would I support this kind of thinking. The firing of hardly anyone.

Even if one did it gently. Like, in person instead of via FedEx. Or letting them know what the reasons were. Preferably ahead of time. And informing them on which day their network access would end, and did they need any of their files? And, if they were offered a severance package fairer than one month, if one were even to take––heaven forbid––their age? number of children at home? length of service? other human factors? into account. Still no. For most, not deserved.

Yet firing any one of these people sharing any of the guilt for what was done––the age-old story: buying the fabricated narrative of the powerful, closeting the truth, then punishing the one who’d dared to speak it (in short, all those who called good evil and evil good)… firing any of them would be more justifiable than firing me was. 

For at least they did something, right? Maybe no legally fireable offenses, but neither did I. And they did something.

I did nothing. I reported abuse; I asked for help. Help for myself, help for the lambs beneath (to borrow a term used by my successor who immediately came to see the same problems I’d reported), and help, especially, for the accused. 

That is all.  

I was charged with the raison d’être for whistleblowing laws: “disruptive.”

Secondly, “harmful to team cohesion and ministry effectiveness.” Of course, whistleblowing does those things. So yes, guilty on both counts. But these are knee-jerk, stereotyped responses to whistleblowing, not actual charges. Now, to be clear, the simple fact that these charges, specifically, were levied does not automatically somehow exonerate me. But they don’t incriminate me.

However.

Let’s not move past “disruption” and “harm” just yet. I submit that there is harm and disruption that deserve to be called out. If the board and the denomination would open themselves to an impartial look, I submit that their actions would be shown to have been more disruptive (to people’s lives) and more harmful (to people) than the disruption and harm I caused to the organizational status quo. And I would make that statement without the need to add in our family’s trauma to the equation. (Including that would break the scales, I’m afraid.)

Is anyone even surprised that abuse was protected with more abuse?

In hindsight, sure. But this pattern across the Christian world landscape is too commonplace, too predictable, and too rampant for real surprise to be justified.

When I told the RO (on his phone call 4 days after the FedEx that terminated my employment) that I was surprised by being fired, my notes record that he replied,

“I don’t see how, as this has been going on for over a year, and you’ve been going around to all your colleagues telling them you’re going to be fired.”

…I shut up. 

It was time to get off the call. The full weight of my fate crystalized in that moment. 

When I’d filed accusations six months earlier, the first was about my boss’s repeated threat to me that “The board and the RO want to fire you.” Used on me as a means of attempted control for almost a year, I’d finally grown tired of that dark cloud and gone to the RO (also the Chairman of the Site board) directly to point-blank ask him to clarify. To which he replied that he had no idea what I was talking about. (Later, neither did the one board member I knew.) That’s when lights––very bright lights, for I had always assumed the statements to be true––first came on for me. 

Now a grueling, traumatizing six months later, the victim discrediting process had run its full course, and that fantasy had become reality. I was having difficulty wrapping my head around how.

My sinking heart saw that I had appealed for safety to the one entity in which my lack of safety would become ultimate. Pick your podcast, documentary, or article, and we’ve all learned by now that this is all I should have expected from the outset. But somehow I had sincerely––and, I feel embarrassment and shame to admit––naively expected the people that I knew to do better. But no. Everyone went along with the final solution that one man with awesome power dictated to our entire ministry site. 

More than one person has told me of being informed of the existence of “real reasons” for my dismissal that go beyond “disruption” and status quo “harm.” And rumor has it they are alarmingly dire. But they remain, as they have from the beginning, in the dark. Purportedly, it is claimed, to protect my future! No. They were kept in the dark because they are fabrication and spin. Sure, charitably, maybe they were birthed in exaggeration of actual faults and weaknesses I do have. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing.

Shrouded in mystery, at least from me, they yet managed to leverage an offer for salvation: a clean personnel file. Here was my opportunity to present myself acceptable to a subsequent ministry. Perhaps my reputation was not yet a total loss. I was welcome to move on and minister somewhere else within the organization or denomination; not only would no one be forcing me out, they would keep my record scrubbed of any overly damning verbiage.

In 2021, I had not the wherewithal to respond to this false grace from the left hand whilst the right yet rested on the knife within me.

I shall respond now.

Any such offer––intimating that I might desire preserving career and reputation above Gospel duty and love––irrevocably demonstrates an utter failure to understand, not only me, but the entire situation. It is, in fact, evidence of the absence of even a good-faith attempt to understand the situation. Regardless of what some so-called clean personnel file might purport to offer me, I reject it, for it stands on lies. It cannot and does not offer any vestige or iota of kindness to me.

Some months ago, I heard through the grapevine that the boss I reported on was dismissed for the same basic issues I reported on.

I was possibly never going to write publicly about this story before that day, as 1) I watched many of the lambs who most needed to leave do so, and 2) I wasn’t that interested in playing an interfering role after I was gone. From what I understand, his firing came about because, unlike how my position was structured, the person who succeeded me had direct access to the site board. Eventually, those men’s eyes were forced open, I guess, and they made decisions based on actual knowledge. If the denomination had simply engaged a more correct response when I first came forward (and it’s not some buried mystery what correct responses look like in these situations), it would not have even mattered that the board never met me. The truth would have come to light, and the bleeding would have been stopped. Instead, it got protected, then blessed. Everyone bears some measure of responsibility for those additional years of bleeding. 

When I heard the news of my former boss’s dismissal, part of me grieved. I hadn’t stuck it out for 287 days in order to get proven right. And no, I don’t “feel vindicated.” (Everyone asks.) I engaged an “If not me, who?” situation fully aware of its seriousness, and the result I’d hoped for never materialized. And it has not materialized with this development. I only ever hoped for redeeming correction and real help leading to healing. “Vindication” wasn’t even a line-item that made any sense before the denomination mishandled everything. Besides, just because I could see more, and much sooner, than many other site people, that doesn’t mean I was the one experiencing the most mistreatment back in pre-Day-0 days. Not at all––others were. My mistreatment was probably, in therapeutic hindsight, worse than I realized at the time, but trauma for me did not begin in earnest until after I came forward. 

“Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation.”

-Herman Melville

Do I wish today that I’d taken an easier way out (there were a number of routes we might have chosen)?

I do not. I have even gotten to, a few fleeting times and for the very first times, personally experience actual, real, paradoxical joy in suffering. Who would have thought? May I prove worthy of more, if need be.

Thank you for listening. By letting me speak, even to you few, you contribute to my healing. I will keep at this process––we must all keep at our processes––for as long as I need. 

How I came to farewell my denomination of 40 years. Or, How do we know that’s God’s voice?

Does God speak things to you? Even without having touched on this topic with each of them, I’d wager I have friends at every point along that spectrum. 

Some who might say, “Dude (people my age are, after all, GenXers), if you think God is specifically speaking to you outside of the Bible, welcome to heresy.”

Others who talk about hearing God about as clearly and specifically as one could possibly imagine and certainly beyond what most experience.

You might reside at one of those ends or somewhere in between. I’m not today writing to convince you of anything. 

As a college student thirty years ago, I discovered that spectrum along with the fact that some people seemed to have “more” of God than I did. So I wanted it––Him––too. [It’d be immaterial for my purposes here to get into what I think was good or bad about all that was going on there; for now the point is just the story.]

One night, in a long session of earnest seeking and prayer, God spoke. He told me something about my future. Something good that was going to happen to me. And the reason I was being told ahead of time was so that I wouldn’t struggle with pride when it happened. 

Sure enough, the next day, it happened. 

Just not to me. It happened for somebody else.

Not purposely and certainly not knowingly, I’d stepped out in true faith and sincerely believed something my God had told me all while imagining the entire thing. 

At least I’d been smart enough (“you mean faithless enough” the Enemy would long taunt) to keep one foot in reality and make a pre-arrangement with God:

“IF…if for some reason this doesn’t come true? And it turns out this wasn’t You? I’ll meet you THERE where I sit on THAT marble ledge to wait for the cafeteria to open. And we are going to deal.” 

I was sitting. And we dealt. 

As best I can remember, it took rather some time for shock to wear off and devastation to sink in. Hours, perhaps days, but the real effects were long-term. My newfound conviction that God’s voice must be out of my reach devastated my ability to engage the topic for the following five years. For fully ten years, it handicapped me significantly. Not until fifteen years after the fact––the difference between age 20 and age 35––could I honestly say that I no longer experienced its effects when talking or praying about hearing His voice. Fifteen more years are now passed, and well, it’s finally an old, almost humorous story overwritten by many others and hardly thought of. 

_____________

Earlier this year I watched a video put out by the president of the denomination I’ve worked in for two decades and otherwise been a part of for four. He announced a celebratory demolition event at the denomination’s new national office property. 

And the Lord said to my spirit: “You’re going to be at that.” 

That’s odd. Really? I wonder why? That’s like… (checking map) 9 hours away.

But I pretty quickly jumped to Ohhh… hey! I’ll bet I could do that on the motorcycle! Might set a new record for myself…yes! I am going to run this by Tammy. 

And I began to plan my trip, operating out of a sort of a learned default that obeying even when not sure of the reasons is almost always preferable to skipping out because of doubts. I’d come a long way in 30 years. That old college-days wound was such a non-factor by now that it failed to cross my mind even in instances like this.

I did think a lot about the possible whys for such a trip, however, and while I really couldn’t say much for sure, what I began to say out loud to my wife and a few friends was, 

“I think… I’m going to say good-bye to my denomination.” 

Now while that wasn’t exactly a super logical statement, it was also not completely disconnected from a few certain things on the horizon that could have been construed as clouds. Six months earlier, I had filed an official complaint/report about a leader. There was a mediation process of sorts under way. There’d been an inquiry. But in no way did any of those present like some demise of the relationship was imminent. Perhaps some end lay beyond a bend in the road I could not see? I had no real ideas, but even if such an end was months off, I could easily appreciate how a loss like that would be best grieved properly.

Three days after the president’s video released, my denominational employment was terminated. Do we actually need reminders that His sovereignty is not limited by bends in the road? As if. 

But I wouldn’t experience the shock of the news for seven further days until the notice arrived via FedEx. No warning, hint, or discussion had preceded it. It contained one sentence of rationale. Nothing further has ever been added to that.

Clearly there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than I’d been privy to.

Suddenly, my good-bye trip had become über-pertinent.

A few asked why on earth I would consider even bothering with the situation any more––surely I was not still driving up there? But I figured that if the best I’d come up with was that this was good-bye, how could getting that irrevocably confirmed do anything but confirm my trip as well? 

I had to go. Fortunately, I did not take my motorcycle. (If you liked that sentence, take a moment to savor it, maybe print it out and stash it away, because you will never see it again.) I wasn’t in a good place, and driving a car was all I was going to be able to handle. The growing realizations about what people up the ladder must be believing about me… things that had never been explained to me… had left me the night before begging God for sleep for the fourth night in a row. 

Thankfully enough sleep came that by morning I felt I was okay to drive. IF the Psalms were playing. Anything else or nothing over the speakers left me rocking and jittery. But praise God, by Psalm 70 I had stabilized, and then had a car to myself for wonderful, wide hours of phone conversations. That night, at a childhood friend’s house, I slept in an unknown bed with an unknown pillow in a strange room of a strange house better than I’d slept in a week. Finally, tackling the final couple driving hours the next morning, I was back on the road to being myself again. 

_____________

At breakfast I was met by friends driving down just to be with me. When we arrived at the event together, I held back with hat, sunglasses, and covid mask, desperate to stay anonymous. While at the same time fighting to stave off wild imaginings about God engineering deliverance from our nightmare by sending some rescuer with more power than those who’d come against us. Foolishness.

I was there to say good-bye and nothing else. I took my moment alone in front of the demolition fence and reflected on my entire professional life. And felt nothing. Disappointing? Perhaps, but hardly surprising seeing as how I was standing in a parking lot I’d never been in looking at a building I’d never entered.

No catharsis, no tears, no word from above, no sense about the future, no anger, no self-pity. Silence.

“Well, it was really nice seeing you, Dann. We’re so glad we came to eat breakfast with you. We’re going to take off, now. You?”

“Actually, you guys go ahead. I’m going to find a spot at the edge of the parking lot for one more listen in case I’m still going to hear why He sent me up here. Thank you guys so much for coming. I will remember it for the rest of my life.”

I walked to the back of the parking lot and headed to a light pole where it looked like maybe I could sit down. 

Even before I’d gotten to it, He started in:

What if it wasn’t Me who told you to drive up here? What if it was just your imagination?

Yeah, and? I replied.

Oh, my. 

Apparently 2021 is irrelevant even in 2021, then?

Thirty years back, now, sitting there in my mind, even as my physical body is sitting here in the present. I already know his next question––and simultaneously my next answer.

How would you be?

I’d be fine. I’d be… totally fine…

BOOM.

See how far you’ve come? You’ve grown to absolutely know My voice. Along with knowing that it doesn’t matter about reaching 100% certainty about every thing every time, as that is not to be expected. It threatens nothing.

_____________

It truly did not matter to me if “You’re going to be at that” had turned out to be me––though I didn’t believe that––instead of Him. Without thinking much about it, I’d just acted anyway, allowing Him to direct from there. Neither my own faith/worthiness or his faithfulness/worthiness were connected to it like they had so very much been in my youthful episode. So what if I’d gotten this one wrong? I’d done the best I could with the spiritual discernment I possess at this time, and I did what I thought was obeying. If it turned out not to be? Okay, fine.  

The King had just reminded me that I have obeyed his voice over and over again in the fifteen years since my great wound concerning it healed over. Not to mention those times in the previous 15 where I’d stumbled through learning to navigate intimacy and abiding while still unresolved. 

And here, now––during the trials of 2021––I have yet to tell most people some of the ways He has at times spoken. Some of the most spectacular ways of my entire life. 

He has seen me. He knows it all. 

And He cares so much for me that he brought me nine hours from home to say something totally off topic that He declared was the topic. To sit me on a piece of hot concrete that would symbolize a piece of cold marble from thirty years earlier and grant one final healing touch to an old wound I hadn’t even realized could still use it. 

He hadn’t abandoned me then or ever. And isn’t it something how even our failures become integral pieces of how He fashions us into the child He is making us? Every part of me…100% redeemable.

I’d have driven nine hundred hours to be given a message like that.

I looked up and saw my car across the emptying parking lot. 

It was time to go home.