(Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Anyone reading through this story will naturally have questions about where these things have brought me. Some questions may only be answered further down the road, when things are much clearer. The main question that most people may have, but may not ask might be “How has being out of church affected your relationship with God?”

If this had happened years ago, my faith would have suffered greatly. Back then, my relationship with God didn’t really extend that far from the church or church activities. The things of God were contained to what happened within the four walls of the church building, and not much else. I’ve found this to be the case for a lot of people. If I’m being honest, much of what previously drove me to live “right”, and to display a certain level of spirituality was to gain the approval and respect of the people in the church.

I’ve grown a lot since then, and I can say that my spiritual condition is much the same as it was before everything happened. I won’t say that being out of church has no effect at all, because there are benefits that being a part of a spiritual community provides.  But I will say it is possible for someone to maintain a relationship with God apart from regular church attendance (not that I would recommend that). I do think that it is very problematic when the only source of spiritual strength and nourishment for someone comes from church interaction. If things should go awry with the church, the damage to one’s spiritual life could be very detrimental. Having been there, I know what that’s like.

My faith in God was never the problem in this; my faith in people was, and to some degree still is. That is something that time and positive relationships with others with ultimately restore.

Regardless of the mental and emotional struggle through this tough time, in my heart I have always believed that the end result of this trial would be something better, and that I would be better. Though that hope is harder to hold onto some days, that hope still remains.

In the midst of this, I’ve found that there is a whole other kind of community in the online world. Through blogging and Twitter, I have found a number of people whose lives and stories I can relate to. Connecting with them had done a lot to counteract the sense of loneliness and the tendency to fall into self-pity.  It hasn’t been easy for me, but I have found others who have suffered much worse than I and their faith and perseverance has been an inspiration to me. I’ve found a lot of peace in prayer, not for myself and my situation, but for people I know only online.

It’s strange how you can have compassion for people you only know through their blog posts and twitter status updates. But there are a number of people who I find are on my heart often, if for nothing but to say a prayer for them.

I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to read and/or comment here on the blog, now and in the past, as well as those who I have conversed with on Twitter and through e-mail. You have no idea how much that has meant to me.

I’m still wondering what my next steps will be. I’m not sure which direction I’m taking just yet. But there is a world of possibilities out there, and I believe that some of those possibilities still have my name on them.

I’ve lost relationships, positions, opportunities and have failed to see the results of my efforts. I hope that like Job at the end of his trials, I too will see those things restored, and even in greater measure than before (not that my trials are on Job’s level, but they are trials none the less).  No matter what I gain, or what I lose:

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love…
(1 Corinthians 13:13)

(Read Part1, Part 2)

If you do something for long enough, it tends to become a part of your identity. At least, that’s how it was with me. Everything that happened launched me into an identity crisis that I am still sorting through even today.

For more than a decade, I have served in ministry in one way or another. I spent most of those years as a worship leader. Leading worship was a natural fit for me, and when I discovered there was such a thing, there was a sense of purpose and fulfillment I found in nothing else.

Although I’ve never been a “full-time” minister (I’ve always maintained a day job), I have made a fairly large time investment in church-related work. I student-taught an accredited two-year bible college course, received an associates degree in Ministry, and was officially licensed as a minister. I lead small groups, installed and repaired sound systems, and planned and hosted special events. I’ve done everything from cleaning the bathrooms to delivering sermons.  If it needed to be done, and I could do it, I did.

At the time I was suddenly relieved of my duties, I was working harder than I ever had. I lost a huge chunk of my life in a moment. Working on a church staff is always difficult and challenging work, and I see and hear people complain about it often.  I wonder if those same people would complain if they couldn’t do it anymore.

This identity struggle was further compounded by the fact that the band I started in 2004 had (for lack of a better term) retired several months before. We were a pretty decent band (I even have recorded evidence), but we weren’t going to make it in the business. I had already resigned myself to that fact. We were past our prime as rock stars when we started, but I still enjoyed the process of making music. There’s nothing like telling stories in songs. More than that, though, my band mates were my inner circle, my best friends, and the band kept us hanging out together. We saw each other through a lot, but after the band was over, we rarely saw one another.  That bothered me a lot.

When this latest event happened, it struck a lethal blow to the person I considered myself to be, leading me to wonder what, or who, was left. What does a person do when they can’t be who they have been most of their adult life?

What might be hardest for me to get past is the nagging sense of failure; that somehow I was not good enough or I did not work hard enough to be successful. And dealing with the thought that for whatever reason, I deserved this. It’s enough to make one question whether they were ever really called to do ministry at all.

Those thoughts might have made more sense if I had been leading some sort of double life, hiding a pile of secret sins and impropriety. If that were the case, I would have no qualms about laying those cards on the table for everyone to see, but it just isn’t so. I’m like everyone else, not perfect, but still striving to be a better person every day.

(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.

Speak the truth boldly; speak your opinions humbly.

I wonder:

If Jesus were living on the earth today, would he live in a million dollar home, travel in a private jet, and drive a Bentley?

Would he wear finely tailored Italian suits, and hand-crafted shoes that cost more than the average family’s weekly grocery budget?

Would he only share his wisdom from stages in stadium venues at major conferences, and rarely have personal interaction with the people who are seeking hope through his messages?

Would he write “Christian Living” books that hit number one on the New York Times bestsellers list?

Would he have a syndicated television show?

Would the only advice he gave to his financially struggling followers be to give their money to support his ministry and promise them that they would be blessed?

My apologies if this seems cynical, but I do think about these things sometimes. What questions do you ask yourself?