Life since the robbery

Yes, I am calling it a robbery.  There was not any material possessions taken at the time, but something that was more precious to me than anything that I owned was taken.  I am talking about relationships.  The relationships that I had with friends and family.  Of those relationships, only the family ones have really hurt, because I have always figured that I could and would make new friends anytime I lost old ones.

This all happened in the 1990's when some Seminary graduates came into our lives.  Before then, we had lived 20+ years married.  Oh we had our faults and were working through baggage that we had brought into the marriage, but we were committed to each other and would work through anything that came up and as it came up.  The Seminary graduates however started exploiting those faults in order to gain control and to authenticate their position within the church. ( I often refer to these people as Jim Jones wannabes, because that is just what I think of them).  To summarize what I have already blogged about, they used their influence to make sure that everyone gave me the cold shoulder, including my family.  They even told my wife and kids that they should only talk to and heed the Seminary Graduates and only listen and heed me when I am saying what they wanted to hear.  That has continued through today.

I want to make it clear before I go any further, that I am very proud of my family and that in no way are they bad people.  I am dealing with the relationship between me and them and nothing else.  

 That has been over 12 years since those events culminated.  I am still married to the same woman.  I still love her and all my family, although I usually feel like their feelings toward me are no different than   a tick's feeling for a dog.  There is not a day that goes by even now that at some point I still feel the pain and hurt of what I have lost.  This has affected me in other areas as well.

Whenever I am in a position of being with families (who are enjoying being together with other families) tends to remind me of what I no longer have.  A real problem for me is the hurt and the feeling that I do not belong, because my family will not come with me.  This first showed up in church.   Most churches are established for people in come in wearing masks of being ok.  You ask someone how they are doing there and they will say something along the lines of I'm ok.  Most churches can't handle people not being ok, especially those with long term problems.  So, if and when I show up, it is obvious that I'm not ok.  This causes me to be shunned or they feel the need to lecture and come down on me, because since I'm a man, it must be my fault and I should be condemned.

That feeling of not belonging is not limited to church though.  There have been times when even within the alumni group where people have been harsh with their words, because they  can't understand why my family does not want to have a relationship with them (even though there are some who know both me and my wife and she has no problem with the relationship with them apart from me).

 I still feel it at other times also.  I felt it Saturday at the Cedar Creek Lake.  I did really enjoy being with and getting to know new friends better as well as meeting people that I had never met before.  As the day wore on though, I was really feeling it.  It was a full day of families being together and enjoying other families.  In middle of that, I was there alone, knowing that my family wanted to avoid the group as well as any mention of the group or my friends within the group.  So I ended up leaving the restaurant where the festivities came to a climax early, not because of the heat, but because of the isolated feeling that ate at me & was really hurting within me.

I write this for two reasons, first as therapy for me.  When I am hurting, it helps me to write about it.  The second would be that if me expressing these thoughts can help someone else, than I am all for it.  We all have grown up in a society that doesn't know how to handle pain and disappointments.  We have all shunned people from time to time, not because we don't like them, but because we are put into situations where we don't how to handle the experiences that they are going through.  So I hope that this helps.

My thoughts about relationship with God.

I have this wonderful friend named Cindy.  Many of you know her or at least know of her.  She is a beautiful person both inside and out.  For those of you who do not know her, you are missing out on having a good friend.

So, how do I get those of you who do not know her to be her friend?  Would it help if I coerced and/or manipulated you into saying that you wanted to be friends with her?  I don't think so.  I really think that would make you not want to be her friend if that were to happen.

What if I just limited my friends to those people who were her friends also?  Would that make you want to be friends with her?  Again, I don't think so.  I would just lose out on having some amazing friends.

I think that the best way is to just be friends with both Cindy and you.  If in doing this, you find out what an amazing person that Cindy is and want to be her friend, then that would be great.  If you choose not to want to be her friend, then that is your choice also and that would not affect our relationship.

It is funny to me that we can see this in our dealings with people but cannot in dealing with God who is a real being also.  I really believe that "Christians" have really pushed more people away from God than drawn to God just because of these actions.  Oh you may be able to get people to recite some incantation that is called the sinners prayer and notch your Bible for a conversion, but that does not mean that a relationship has been formed.  People who do these types of actions, I believe, just push others away from God as well as themselves making this whole process nothing but a stumbling block.

So here is my deal.  I have this friend who is God  and I do not want to deny our friendship or kinship.   Nor will I push this relationship onto anyone else.  If you do not want a relationship, then that is up to you, just as it is up to you about a relationship with Cindy.  If you see something in the relationship that I have with God and want to know more, than at that point I am more than happy to talk to you about it.  That is no different than my relationship with Cindy.  If you notice how having her as a friend has really been beneficial to me, and want to be friends with her then I would be more than happy to talk to you about that also.

I love having each and everyone one of you as a friend and I don't want to lose that friendship by coercing my beliefs and relationships on you.  For me it is really all about living loved and loving others.

Some of my heretical beliefs as a man of faith - pleasure

I have been labeled a Christian and a heretic for my beliefs, but few people know what I believe and what I believe is a changing paradigm and not a static one.  So I thought that might be a good thing to go through some of what I believe.

Here is my view on whether God is for us having pleasure or not.  I have heard many a sermon over the years about how wrong it is to experience pleasure in our lives.  How that pleasure keeps us from God.  However I disagree with that premise.  I really believe that God wants us to have pleasure.  Before anyone ever did anything wrong by eating a certain fruit, there was a naked man and a naked woman in paradise and the first words that we read that were spoken to them basically said that they were to go have sex and keep having sex until there was not enough room on this Earth for another person to be born.  To me that shows that we were created to have pleasure.  God wants us to have pleasure.  I believe that God is happy when we are having pleasure.

So what then is the deal with all the "Thou shall nots"?  I believe that God did not put those in there to punish us or to keep us from pleasure, but those are to keep us from getting hurt and/or hurting others.  It is a lot like us teaching our kids not to stick their fingers into an electrical socket.  They might think that is fun to do such things but we teach them differently because we know that sticking your finger into an electrical socket will hurt you.  I do not believe that God is wanting to keep us away from pleasure, but wants us to enjoy it without getting hurt or hurting others.

Another aspect of these "rules" are that they are the natural result of true love.  If we truly love then that love will cause us to act rightly towards others.  It does not diminish pleasure, but it makes pleasure more pleasurable.  I believe that pleasure that flows from love is the highest form of pleasure that we will experience.

Dennis