(Read part 1 here)

I don’t really understand why it has been so hard for me to get past what happened. I tell myself that there are thousands of people who have gone through or are going through much worse; that it’s selfish to wallow in my misfortunes while others have suffered and do suffer much greater.

But every day I’m faced with the reality that my life has changed, and I struggle to see the silver lining in the dark cloud.

There were relationships broken beyond repair, others stretched to the limits. People that I interacted with almost daily were suddenly no longer in my life.

My whole family was affected in the process. All of my brothers and their families attended that church. Two of my sisters-in-law were on the worship team, two of my brothers helped with production and served in other ways as well. They didn’t leave with us, but after all that had transpired, they found that they couldn’t stay. It just wasn’t the same church anymore. And I can’t help but feel responsible. It had been the first time in years that my entire immediate family was serving in the same church, and losing that was very difficult.

I did take issue with the handling of the whole situation. I was the last person contacted when the original story surfaced, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was tried, judged and sentenced before I knew anything. And at that point, the truth really didn’t matter anymore.

More than anything, I think, it was the sense of betrayal that followed that did the most damage. My wife and I found out that some pretty awful things were said about us, some of them bordering on ridiculous, and all of them based on rumor and hearsay. The ones who were saying those things were people that we loved and trusted.

We live in a small community, one of the kind where everyone knows everyone else, especially among church goers. Even today, it’s hard to find someone that had not heard the gossip that flew around. Whether they believed it or not, it was still effective enough to damage what little bit of a reputation that I (and my family) had in the community, and as a minister, that is usually career ending.

The losses mounted, the wounds compounded, and this became the beginning of disillusionment. And in the midst of this, there was really no one for me to turn to (aside from God) to help me sort things out.

If it had only been me that had been affected by this, it might not have been as big a deal. But in facing all those losses, it seems I’ve lost a bit of myself in the process.

[Tomorrow - Part 3: Identity]

(Read my introduction to this post here)

I haven’t set foot in a church service anywhere since mid-August of last year, though not for the reasons you might expect.

Up until that time, my wife and I had served for the prior two years in a church plant in our home town. For most of that time, we served in the worship ministry and led a bible study for the young adults, but in January of last year, we were asked to assume leadership of the entire youth ministry (in addition to our other responsibilities). I was also a member of the church board of directors.

As leaders of the youth ministry, we helped put together a ministry team. That developed into a separate evangelistic ministry team, with my brother and his wife as co-leaders. That team was invited to minister at other churches and events across the state, and even in other states. Many of the young adults that we had in our bible studies became part of that team, and over the past two years, we had developed close relationships with them; they became like family to us.

When we took a trip to a beach resort on the Gulf Coast that summer to celebrate my wife and daughter’s birthday, we invited several of our young adult friends to come along. We rented a condo unit for a week in July, went down, and had a great time.

Shortly after our return, a story about our trip began floating around the gossip mill. According to this story, my wife and I had purchased volumes of alcohol to stock our condo, and had spent the week having drunken parties. (This is entirely NOT TRUE.) This story got back to our pastor, who immediately began making phone calls – to our directors, to other church leaders, to my parents – all under those false pretenses.

On a Saturday morning, I received a call from the pastor asking if he could come by my house and talk. When he arrived, he alluded that he had heard that some of us had consumed alcohol on the trip and asked us about it (he did not repeat the story I related above to us). We told him the truth.

When we arrived at our condo unit, the previous occupants had left a few beers in the refrigerator, and a bottle of wine on the counter. One night that week, I drank one of those beers. Another day that week, my wife bought a frozen drink from a beach side stand. We left the remaining beverages in the unit when we departed at the end of the week. There were no parties, drunken, or otherwise. Of the friends that accompanied us on our trip, only one was under 21; they didn’t need us to buy them anything had they wanted it.

Even after our explanation, the pastor still asked us to step down from our leadership positions in the church.

To digress for a moment: I do not endorse the use of alcohol as a recreational drug. The Bible condemns drunkenness, and I don’t argue that. There is nothing wrong, however, with enjoying beverages containing alcohol in moderation, which I have done on occasion.

My wife and I would later unravel the further details of the story that was passed around initially.

We never went back to the church. Our ministry team had one commitment that we had scheduled months before, and that event was the last appearance I made in a church in any capacity since.

Though seven months have passed, even the thought of stepping into a church service, any church service, creates a flood of conflicting emotions that I am not sure how to deal with.

[Tomorrow - Part 2: What's the Big Deal?]

I’m not a blogger that is known for being prolific or consistent in posting. For the most part, that’s just a matter of time. My wife and I have very demanding jobs that have been even more demanding in recent months, leaving us both scrambling to keep the household running.  Writing is just one of several non-essential activities that get pushed down the to-do list when there are more pressing matters at hand.

For the past two weeks, however, it’s been something different keeping the posts at bay. I have several drafts started, but I can’t develop them. The words will not come, and if they do come they are disjointed; there is no flow or cohesion in them.  Those words seem to stand on the page and stare back at me in indignation for my inability to work them into order. I think I know why this is.

There is a story I need to tell. My mind will not let go of it. When I think about writing anything, it is that story that keeps rising to the surface, regardless of where I attempt to put my focus. It’s a story I don’t want to tell.

I don’t want to tell this story, because in doing so I have to revisit one of the most uncomfortable circumstances in my recent history. I would rather bury it and let it die, but I’m finding it is impossible to do so, as it is the largest contributing factor to my current condition. Who am today does not exist without it, and I am still walking through the aftermath of everything that transpired. Delving into this would be some of the most personal and revealing writing I’ve ever done, and even the thought of that is terrifying.

So, I’m writing that story. Not only because it is an impediment to my writing process, but I think it is a necessary catharsis. I hope (perhaps selfishly) that someone somewhere may be able to identify with my story; maybe someone else might understand.  I hope that there’s a chance that someone else might find the heart to tell their story as well.

So, stay tuned to the next few posts, where I will begin to unravel the tangled thread of this story, and perhaps regain a bit of my sanity.

I spend a great deal of my life troubleshooting technology problems. It is, in fact, my job (or at least a big part of it), and because of my abilities, it is also part of my life outside of work as well (being the family/neighborhood help desk is tough….).

I work with critical systems, where an outage has the potential to cost my company a lot of money. The ability to quickly recover from an issue that keeps those systems from operating is an absolute requirement.

For the software systems I support, there are types of problems that reoccur enough that it is worthwhile to document how to spot the errors and the process to fix them. So, I spend part of my time writing troubleshooting guides, which is extremely useful in the case I am not available to fix the problem and someone else is trying to work through it without me (and also keeps me from having to do phone support at all hours of the night). A well documented guide can save a whole lot of time and effort.

If only life were so simple. In years past, I was around the sort of church people who were almost addicted to what I call ‘fad-formulas’. Somewhere they had stumbled across some piece of spiritual revelation that provided them a set of well-defined steps to reach a particular expectation. The source of that revelation varied, but usually came from a TV ‘evangelist’, a traveling preacher or a book (by a TV ‘evangelist’ or a traveling preacher). If you had problem ‘X’, then formula ‘Y’ would be able to get you past that problem. In my experience, however, this approach rarely worked for me. The more I think about it now, the more it seems like a multi-level-marketing scheme; the only person who really benefits, is the one who invented it.

The best computer troubleshooters have learned from their experience, but also are not afraid to draw from the experience and knowledge of others to solve a problem. Not all problems are exactly the same, but some are similar enough to give you a clue as to how to solve it. I can’t tell you how many times I found a solution for my system’s problem from an error resolution for a totally different system. It was not an exact formula, but it was enough to get me looking in the right direction.

Life is infinitely more complex than any computer system. We all face problems small and large and in varying degrees of difficulty. No one’s problem is exactly like another’s problem, even if they are generally the same issue. I don’t think you can create a formula that will work for everyone, every time. I do, however, see enormous value in learning from the experiences of others who have come through difficult times.

Twitter friend and fellow blogger Lindsey Nobles left a comment on this post that really resonated with me.  She said “Don’t tell me how to do it, tell me how you did it”. It got me thinking about the value of our stories as individuals: our testimonies, the difficult things we made it through, our mistakes, our poor decisions and the lessons we learned from them. These things are much more valuable if we are willing to share them with others. The Bible is full of the same kinds of examples.

We may not be able to develop a step-by-step troubleshooting guide for life, but as we share our stories, others can see that some of us have walked through those dark places that they are facing now and have made it past them. At the least, they can find hope in the fact that you made it through, and believe that maybe, they can too.

Forgiving someone who wronged us is one of hardest things we will ever have to do. It has to be done, not only as a biblical requirement, but practically to maintain our own sanity.

There are hundreds of overused ‘proverbs’ with regard to forgiveness or the lack thereof; I’m sure you’ve heard most of them, so I’ll spare you. What I will say, is that it is true that unforgiveness is more harmful to the person holding on to the offense than to the offender.

Sometimes, it is beyond our capability to forgive. Sometimes the hurt is too deep, the wound is too fresh, the offender too familiar, the circumstances too tragic. People respond in different ways. One feels justified in their anger, and withholding forgiveness satisfies their sense of justice. Others feel guilty because they hate to hold on to it, but can’t find it in themselves to forgive.

In my experience, part of the difficulty in forgiving lies in confusing the act of forgiveness with the feeling of forgiveness. We say we can’t forgive because we don’t feel forgiveness; we can’t emotionally disconnect the person from the offense. And while we may have said that we have forgiven, our minds and hearts don’t agree with the sentiment. Internally, we lack the capability to repair the trauma, and really, the wounds are what we are clinging to.

Sometimes forgiveness is a process. A process that begins with a decision. Making a decision to forgive, apart from the emotions involved, is the beginning of the act of forgiveness. That decision opens the door for healing to take place. Forgiveness is an act of humility; humility prepares you to receive grace. Grace includes the ability and strength to do things that you cannot do on your own; the ability to release the hurt that keeps the feeling of forgiveness at bay.  But, beyond that, grace provides healing for the wounds.

At times, for me it has required a daily decision to forgive. There are still things I have problems letting go of. But I have decided to forgive, and I anticipate the day that my heart will catch up.