some thoughts

i cannot seem to shake my past no matter how hard i try. it is like a sore in my mouth that i can't stop licking but it is that very action that prevents the healing. in my head i keep saying, “stop licking, your making it worse.” but alas, to no avail. still i am saying nothing, my thoughts have not yet been written....i can't shake the ghost of pullman's infamous self-worshipping church. it plagues me in the moments i least expect it, it interferes with many an interaction and comes up in too many conversations. kudos to those of you who have managed to escape the death grip this place still hold over my mind. for some reason, i cannot leave this confusion...sure there was good but it is not the good the good that leaves the bad taste in my mouth and thus it garners very little of my attention.

the whole concept of this "church" is still too much for me to understand. how does a place that perpetually abuses its members stay around. so many beautiful marraiges, certain successes, and happy families have been sacrificed on the proverbial altar of this place. and for what gain? bring us your tired, your hungry, your humbled masses; and we will manipulate them, exploit them, and when they become wise to our violation we will ostracize them. yes, that which they told us in trust we will broadcast to our members as a deterrent; publicly disgracing person after person. please bear with me as i try to put this entire scheme in plain english and i welcome your thoughts and corrections to my interpretation.

lff is some twisted monarchy that rules with an iron fist. somehow people get sucked in (by the conditional friendship of the evangelism department). “come to church, and i will be your best friend.” that is until i am sure you are going nowhere, then kiss our friendship goodbye. "fake" would be the most fitting word. its all a sham, people pretend to care and that is just where the pretending starts. isn’t Christianity about truth? how about this for truth.

would you like to come to church…here is the fine print. you need to give roughly a quarter of your gross monthly income to us, yes you heard right a quarter after all we need to pay our founding pastor $140,000 a year because yachts, gaudy rings, and water front property don’t come a dime a dozen these days. well we actually don’t pay him that anymore, we just had to buy him out to rid ourselves of his ludicrous financial burden. we also need you to pull your weight around here. this may include, but is not limited to, weeding, sweeping, cooking, cleaning, babysitting… oh wait, we forgot to tell you we need you to do all this at our church and our house. since we are the pastors and very busy with our meddling we expect you to, clean our home, raise our kids, fix our cars and yes, fold our underwear. and to thank you we will tell you how to run your life, because you are obviously incompetent and we, in our non-underwear-folding superiority know best.

how can people be so blind to the double standards and the utter fakeness of this elaborate counterfeit, the lies, the control, and the nepotism? and how does the blindness of the offending parties continue even after their loyalist of followers leave. people vote with their feet and even the dimmest people can conclude, lff is an abusive controlling place. it is said over and over as members finally muster the will power to escape, yet, the remaining parties see their departure as treason and discount everything they say. and it is said again and again, for years now countless people have pointed out the same flaws to deaf ears. it is so painfully obvious it is a wonder lff has not seen their flaws and changed. they are the only commonality in the destruction of hundreds, yet never once have they admitted they caused these people their problems. inability to take criticism, as small as at may be, is a serious flaw and the senior pastor’s wife is passing this flaw onto all who surround her. i can only conclude that the current leadership is one of three things; incompetently ignorant, deceived and thus incompetent, or acting out of plain malicious intentions and thus incompetent. sure they apologize, and then they do they same thing. it is like continually hitting someone, apologizing after each blow landed, only to proceed with your next blow.

i am puzzled to say the least…i cannot quite place my feelings. anger? no. but i have not yet become indifferent and that is the problem. how does something like this continue to exist? how do these people delude themselves into thinking they are part of the solution? how can I put this all behind me?