The Wrong Medicine Can Be Deadly

When I was a child, I almost died of a drug mistake.  A pharmacist gave my parents the wrong drug when I was just a toddler, and the results put me in a coma.  Had it not been for my dad being aware and arguing with the doctor when his instincts said something was wrong, I would have died.  The next session in our lives were much like this.  When wrong medicine can do massive harm.

After a few years of us functioning in a fog and PTSD taking a toll on our relationships and life, our church finally grew deeply concerned about us, and communicated to our mission that we were not doing well.  They finally decided to do something about it.

There was only one drawback - the mission leaders, who were not with us, who did not know us, and who did not talk with us made the decision about what was wrong and what we needed....

They discussed it a little with our pastor... who had absolutely no experience with missions, trauma, or member care... and who also made the decision without talking to us.

What happened was that we got called in to a meeting with our pastor and mission leader who informed us that we had marriage issues due to personal moral failure and that we would be seeing a marriage counselor.  We asked if we could see someone with experience in post-traumatic stress care, and were coldly informed that we should not try to blame our moral failure on other things.  We had no options, but we had hopes that the counselor would help us process life and recover, so we went.  He was a decent guy, but he focused on skills we already knew - listening and paraphrasing the other's message back to them.  Nice skills, but not helping us with the nightmares, lack of ability to handle emotions, severe panic at times, and numbness at other times.  We went until the summer travels interrupted the visits.  It had helped a small amount just to be talking on our long drives to this counselor's office.

That fall, when we returned and still were having the same issues, the mission decided to send a retired pastor to assess us.  He sat in our living room one afternoon, and tried to figure out where we were in our thinking.  He deeply offended my husband by telling him that if he gets angry, he doesn't have the Spirit of God and he needs to question if he is a believer.  We sat in shock, staring at him.  Two years ago, my husband was willing to lay his life down not to deny his faith.  He faced the loss of many of his close friends including ones who helped him get home safely.  He received no care for the trauma, and now his salvation was being questioned!!  It was like a slow moving nightmare unfolding.

After this visit, Harry and Dick conferred and decided that I might actually be the problem, and decided to send us to a psychiatrist for an evaluation.  This may have been a good step, if it had been done ethically, but we found out something later that shocked me as a medical person.  They chose a doctor who was the son of someone in the office who they had known most of his life, and they told this doctor what they thought of our diagnosis and what they expected to find.  Then, not knowing this, we went to see him.  He interviewed both of us separately, after assuring us of confidentiality.  He questioned our background, our family up-bringing, sexual history, abuse history, marriage issues, and other very personal details.  At the end, he said that he would write a summary of his findings and send it to Harry and the team that Harry had put together to "help" us, including our pastor, the missions pastor of our home church, Dick, Tom, and Daisy, a woman asked to join because I requested that a woman be on the "team".

Although we had provided the doctor with separate e-mails, he claimed that he had "forgotten", and sent the summary (which was actually about three pages of all the confidential details he had asked about and assured us of confidentiality) to both of us at our joint e-mail.  If that was not bad enough, he told us he was just waiting for our permission before sending it to Harry AND THE WHOLE OF THE "HEALING TEAM"!!!

Whoa!  We immediately objected that this was no summary of what he thought was wrong, but a collection of details he had promised confidentiality on, and that we were uncomfortable with details of our sexual lives, details of my past history of abuse, and other details being sent out to such a wide group.  We were very bluntly told by Harry that if we did not agree to these summaries being sent to the "team", that we would be asked to leave the mission.  It was degrading.  But we didn't see an option but to say yes, under duress.

 (I did phone the medical board and report the doctor for unethical conduct, but that was all I could do.  The board assured me that they could file a complaint and bring it up for arbitration and protect me from any repercussions from it, but I declined to go for arbitration.  They hadn't yet met Christians, and I knew they could not protect me from them.  The laws meant nothing to these people.)

We suffered through the humiliation of our very intimate details being sent to people we barely knew.  The doctor questioned my sanity and said that I seemed to be operating out of fear but he didn't see any reason for it, so he questioned an underlying mental issue.  Don't worry - I was questioning my sanity at this point too!!  All this stress was making our lives and our relationship even harder, and we were not functioning well at all.  Thankfully, my work was a safe place full of caring people who understood grace and believed in me.  I hung on and rested in their firm love of me through this difficult time.

Dick phoned again about six months later and had a solution.  They had a couple who were counselors and they would send us there for a week.  They were experts and had worked in a similar culture and would be great to help us.  I specifically asked that the wife would also be involved in the counseling because I was losing faith in men's ability to listen.  I was assured that both husband and wife would be working with us, and this would be a good place.

What followed was one of the oddest experiences we have ever have.  It did serve to draw us together, but really only out of a deep instinctual desire to protect each other.  We arrived at the house of this couple and were shown to our room.  We were informed that the wife was in school, and we would not see her barely at all.  So much for the promise that she would be in sessions.  We were then told we would have one session a day.  The rest of the time, our host, the counselor, and his wife when she was home, went in their bedroom and shut the door and left us for the rest of the day.  They popped out when food came, ate, did dishes, and went back to their rooms.  We stared at the walls of this fairly empty house - no games, no tv, no books, nothing.  Well, books on psychology, but not relaxing reading!  We took some walks, but didn't want to be gone long.  We had no clue when the next session was.  We stared at the closed bedroom door and were puzzled.

As the week dragged on, we noticed that our host had fairly severe OCD, so we amused ourselves by finding something small to "adjust" and laying bets to how many minutes it would take him when he appeared out of the bedroom to fix what we had adjusted.  We moved the rug slightly off square.  We bumped a picture on the wall just slightly.  We moved the salt shaker from the middle of the back of the stove to the side.  (It really was the only entertainment we had that whole long boring week!)  It never took more than ten minutes before it was exactingly readjusted, but it kept us laughing, and laughter is needed.

Half-way through the week, the psychologist hit on what he thought was the problem.  He found out that a man had been mentoring me for a few years.  Seth had been, from across the ocean, been mentoring both my husband and me.  Still is.  We love him and his wife.  Ah ha!  That was it!  He told me firmly that "all relationships across gender lines that are not blood related are wrong".  (This was a man who was supposed to have extensive experience on the mission field - did he not know that we all grew up with substitute uncles and aunties because we left our blood related family behind???!!)  The problem in our marriage, he told us, was because I had a relationship with another man.  Yup, that was it.  My husband stared at him like he had grown three heads, and told him that he had absolutely no doubt about his wife's integrity and no doubt about this relationship with this man who is like a father to both of us.  Nope.  He knew the truth, and he told us it was the truth.

I was emotionally worn out, and I began to cry.  This he took as evidence that I was wrong, and he offered to help me "break away from this emotional affair."  I declined his help.  He told me he was ordering me not to speak to Seth again and would put that in his report to Harry and Dick.  I could not speak.  I was humiliated!  I also knew that it would be embarrassing for Seth to have that said. It was far better to have my sanity doubted than my purity!  My husband was outraged.  But he would not listen to him.  At the end of that session, we ran from the house, took bikes, and got as far away as we possibly could.  We reached a small mountain lake, just barely clear of winter ice.  Crystal clear and clean.  I stripped down and dove in, letting the ice-cold water wash this awful man's words away.  I dressed again, shivering, and we returned.  He thought I was crazy to have gone swimming in lakes in that area, but he never knew it was only to get the filth of his words off.

We suffered through four more days with this man.  We agreed to say as little as possible to him and nod and agree.  He rarely stopped talking anyway, so it was easy to do.  Then we flew home.  We were done, but "they" weren't.  But for now, we were more traumatized and stunned.  He had also forbid us to talk to Seth again.  Life was just utterly confusing and we began to have more horrible nightmares after our time with this man.  We also began to wonder if all counselors needed to be in the looney bins themselves. We had totally lost trust in getting help and promised we'd never try again.  Thankfully, God did have some good people out there, but it took us awhile before we got there.  Life was going to get far worse before it got better.

The Cost of No Member Care

Our mission repeatedly told me that they just didn't have the resources to have a member care person.  Well, officially, they had one, but it was more of an intake person.  They had someone to help people through the process of joining.  Questions about taxes, passports, visas, etc.

They had no one to care for people once they were on the field.  That, apparently, was to be cared for by an on the field person, the team leader.  Sadly, that didn't work for us for two reasons:  1.  We were the local team leaders and 2. We were not on our field.  We lived elsewhere in a relatively safe location and traveled to a very unsafe location because of the nature of our specific work.  So we had no one immediately caring for us as team leaders and we fell under the jurisdiction of a office in a fairly safe country who had no idea of how to care for people in unsafe locations.

Those are just explanations that might give mild insight into the situation, but not solid excuses.  The people who should have stepped in had years of experience and were leaders for years and years.  They were not newbies and should have at least had the experience to know that help was needed, what was needed, and to ask for help from wiser people to assist.  They didn't. 

What happens when there is no member care after trauma?  I guess it could be described as a slow spiral downwards.  We had the immediate of no sleep for a week or so.  Horrific nightmares woke us the minute we slipped into REM sleep.  Our bodies ached and our minds were on hyper alert.  We were exhausted, but everything hurt and the slightest noise set us on edge.  We had a hard time processing logical thoughts because we were so exhausted.  After a few weeks of this, we hit a wall where we could sleep.  The hyper alertness settled, but nightmares still woke us several times a week. The lack of sleep dulled our emotions and we became "flat".  It was hard to muster a feeling besides a vague deadness.  Our eyes looked out of our heads stunned and confused.

As more trauma hit our field, we had a hard time.  Not only did we feel grief for our friends, we felt a deep sense of guilt or pain.  Why did we get the miracle and they didn't?  How do you explain to yourself that you lived and your friends were killed?  How do you process grief that is mixed with guilt?  How do you ask for resources and help when you already got the miracle?  When others maybe need those resources?  Were we whining to keep saying we weren't doing well?  We were alive... others weren't.

As the trauma settled in, we grew more exhausted.  We lost patience with each other.  We still didn't sleep.  I couldn't eat without pain.  Our children suffered, and we could not leave them even to run to the store without them worrying about us.  We stopped asking for help because no one was listening.  We didn't know how to write a prayer letter.  We didn't know what to say.  We felt dead and defeated.  Our church began to have questions about our "fitness" as missionaries because we weren't showing the joy of the Lord.  We weren't living victoriously.  We knew they were judging us, and we were unable to explain how we were feeling.  It was months in now, and most people in the church assumed it was "in the past", and they had no clue that we still dealt with fears, nightmares, and difficulty regulating our emotions.  Then we felt ignored and not valued on top of it.

A year went by, and we say our mission headquarters people again at the next conference.  We asked again for some debriefing and that some sort of member care protocol be put into place in case this ever happens to anyone else.  They nodded, but nothing was ever done.  Nothing has been done to this day.

We never healed.  We tried to do life by sheer force of will and habit.  It didn't work.  We just piled up stress on stress.  Our marriage began to suffer, our family life began to suffer, and of course our director stepped back into my husband's life to tell him that this was all his wife's fault because she was weak.  We literally began to fall apart.  And as we did, the church and mission was quick to step in and judge us for "moral failures".  It was a nightmare of a time, and we longed for someone to listen and help us process, but there was no one.

Surprised by God

If you were here with me, you could sit and laugh with me.  God is doing something that is simply amazing and still makes me giggle.  I've been swamped and busy, so not able to sit back and work through the rest of the story.  I will one day.  I feel it is valuable for me to write out.  Maybe I will learn; maybe others will learn from it.

But now....

Our support was low, so we were asked to raise support.  Oh how we all love that job!!  So we were asked by a friend to come to his church and speak to his pastor.  We did.  The meeting went for hours, until 11:30 at night!!  He did not want to let us go.  But at the end of the day, the pastor had a strange request.  "We've been looking and praying for a women's pastor.  Would you be interested?"  I laughed!  I have never even led a ladies Bible study!  Teens once, yes.  Years of children's work, yes.  Women?  Never.  

Before we got home, we got a text.  Would I consider sharing my testimony with the women's group?  I thought I could do that...  The day I showed up, the pastor was there and introduced me as "the woman he is strongly recommending for women's pastor."  I was a little shocked, but ignored him.  The funny thing is that this is a church of immigrants, and a people group I have never worked with.  

The meeting went well, and the women were wonderful to be with.  Before I got home, my husband had a message from the pastor again saying that the women were very happy and came to him and wanted me to teach their study.  Mild panic.  Mild is a mild word.  It was more like gut wrenching fear.  My mentor was gone - something about celebrating his 40th wedding anniversary.... some people!  So I phoned another friend who used to be a youth pastor and who knew me.  He laughed, and then talked me through some of it.  My husband and I decided I would take the offered one month trial position.

So here I am, three weeks in to being an interim women's pastor in an immigrant church.  I am one of the few white people there.  And yet, I fit so much more in with these immigrants than I do with the typical American church.  I feel at home.

I've been teaching on what I have been taught for ten years.  Who God is.  God is not a task master judging how well we do our faith.  He is a quiet God who sings over us with delight, who is gentle with those with young.  I taught them about our God-image that we have developed over our lives and how distortions in our God image leave us with handicaps in our relationship with God.  Then I began teaching them about us in community.... that God is not enough; He designed us to be in community with others. Also how community is not enough; He puts within our hearts a remnant of dissatisfaction with even the most perfect of relationships because we were designed for relationship with Him, and we were created with eternity in our hearts.  Next week, I will be teaching on God's plan for reaching out and healing is to work with people.  How we need to function both as wounded and those helping the wounded.  Community again, and the knowledge that God is smiling and encouraging our faltering steps towards Him.

In this church, these women have not heard this - it is a good church, but they came out of a first generation immigrant church that is more legalistic.  Every week, they have been in tears....  They are being challenged to rest with God, to know they are loved.

And I go away each week feeling both a sense of bubbling joy and a sense of wanting to sit down and cry.  Joy because it is unbelievable - here I am, a year ago, kicked out of a mission, strongly censored by my church, horrifically slandered by a team leader.  Now teaching, sharing with women in a church.  I suspect I will get called to go on past this trial month.  I am enjoying these women.  Enjoying seeing God work.  And laughing that God has this sense of humor.

But as I teach, as I see them benefit from the lessons I learned over these years of pain, as I hear them talk about how God is talking to them, I myself heal.  God is quietly healing the wounds of being rejected in my heart.

In a week or two, I will hear if we are asked to join this church with me in a pastoral role.  I'll let you know.  I still giggle at the thought.  But I have a quiet sense of calm.  God is working here, and I stand amazed.

When No One Cared

My husband left early that afternoon for that trip that changed our lives.  It was a routine trip that he had done many times, and we had nothing to worry about.  But it did not end up routine.  I still am unable to blog about all the details of what happened, but he was taken and went missing.

I knew almost instantly because he was going to phone me the minute he got through an upcoming checkpoint - a task normally taking less than five minutes, but I never heard from him again and his phone and his friends phones went silent.  I knew immediately we had serious problems.

But what was I to do?  Phone Dick?  The man who demeaned me at every turn and labeled me as unbalanced and talked behind my back?  I hesitated, waiting, hoping that my husband just met a friend and was talking and forgot.  Dick would belittle me and use it as another example of my instability and weakness.  So I waited.  I phoned others who I knew could pray and be silent.

Two hours later, Dick phoned me.  He had heard an hour before, but decided to phone all the other people on the team and tell them first and me last.  I was only the wife after all.  I still remember that call.   "Hi.  We just heard from (a friend who saw) that your husband was taken.  I've told everyone else on the team.  If I hear anything more, I'll tell you.  Oh, do you have (another friend's) number, I need to tell her.  You do, thanks.  Ok, bye."

That was it.  Nothing more.

My whole life had been spent in the "missionary family".  I already knew without a doubt that this was a distinct possibility and had already battled it out with God before I headed into this ministry.  I had also had the expectation that if such an event happened, I would have the immediate support of my missionary family and we would get through it.

I remember the overwhelming silence after the phone clicked down and Dick moved on.  He never even asked if I was ok, if I needed anything.  No expression of sympathy.  No prayer.  No nothing.  Still, that is Dick.  He is likely somewhere on the Asperger's scale - never been one to do interpersonal relationships well.  He thinks he does them well because he can teach on the "how" of them, but he doesn't actually do what he teaches, just teaches it.  But nothing.

Still, I remember the distinct thought that people would be coming.  After all, we are only two hours from the head office for our mission in this country - from people that will be working to help get him back.  Someone will be here in no time at all.  We also have a local team; they will be here in ten minutes, for sure.  So I quickly cleared up the living room of some games I was sorting, and made tea and set out cookies.  It was the last logical step that my mind was able to accomplish before the fog set it.  I then phoned a few friends, but they were out of town, and I told them to check on me when they got in, but that my team and my mission would be here soon, no doubt, and we would be ok.

Instead Silence.  No one came.  No one even phoned.  Two hours away, and my head office, who were quite aware that my husband was taken and his life was in serious risk, did not either phone me to see how I was or drive over to be with me.  To this day, I can not understand that, and it left a wound that may never completely heal.  I still flinch at the memory and struggle with it.

The next four days were a marathon of pain and hard work and strategic silence.  Everyone needed me.  Getting them out was my job.  The mission did phone the next day and ask for my help with another person.  Then they phoned me the next day and told me that they did not want their name involved, and my husband's best chance lay with the government, so I should phone them and ask them to help get him back.  So I did.  I don't think they ever phoned me again during that time.  I was entirely alone.  Dick phoned a few times.  He told me what was happening over there, which was that no one knew anything.  Once he told me he was turning his phone off and taking a sleeping pill so he could sleep.  Thanks.  I didn't sleep.  Besides trying to get my husband out, I also had to assume that my husband was being tortured and I had to block all methods he had of accessing data that would endanger others.  I worked night and day, and when there was no work, I sat.  I organized prayer support, and I sat quietly.  My church stepped in and the school, but no word from the mission.  Three days later, someone from our local team did come by and provide some support, but from our head offices, nothing.  On the third day, I got a two minute phone call from "Harry", the director to tell me they were thinking of me.  I said thank-you.  I was too busy and too numb to call him out on it.  Besides, he was Dick's good friend and Dick had already stated in his letter that he had shared freely with Harry all he thought about me.  I assumed that my mission did not support me because they thought I was worthless anyway.

Thankfully, God was still there when His people failed, and he had a few people who stepped in totally unexpectedly when people failed.  A widow who lost her husband in conflict phoned me and helped me process the next hours.  A good friend came over and wrapped his arms around me and held me since his wife was out of town and couldn't.  Another friend stopped by and brought snacks.  Others stepped in with food.  People were there after the first 36 hours.  But not the mission.  I guess two hours is a long drive...

And after four very long days, God worked a miracle and returned my husband to our family.  Then began the next season in a very twisted and complicated story with our mission.  My husband wanted me to fly and meet him and spend time with him and his friend who had been with him, but separated.  They needed time together.  Harry, the director of our mission, told me that I should not go, that my kids needed me, and that if I went I would be being a bad mother.  My husband insisted, and I flew to meet them.  I left my kids with my mother who flew in.  But we had to pay for our ticket ourselves and do all the arrangements.  The mission still did nothing, except tell me that my kids needed me and I should just wait until my husband came home.  My husband was furious with them by that point and bluntly told me to tell them that he needed his wife and I needed him, and that was that.  So I left.

Now my husband had already had one night in transit and Dick was able to phone him that night and gather all the critical information to ensure others were safe and all, but on our first night together, Dick phoned at 11:30 at night and was on the phone with my husband until after 1.  That was after being on the phone with his friend all afternoon.  He had no clue of decency, of the fact that we hadn't slept in four days, and that we needed rest and each other.  He continued to phone and disrupt the few days that we had with the four of us trying to recover.  He wanted to talk to help himself process it and decide what to do later.  When my husband refused to take his calls, he began e-mailing me very rude letters insisting that I "make" my husband take his calls.  It was disturbing.

After a week, we came home, and sure enough, Dick flew in and wanted to see us both that first night.  My mother forbid him to come to the house and insisted that the kids get first dibs on their dad.  Then we began the process of a team debreif - what happened and what will the policies be next.  In that team debrief, there was a lot of criticism of us that we did not do enough to reassure people and talk to them during our first 48 hours of freedom.  They felt that because they were all concerned (even though never stopped by our house to show that concern), they each wanted to talk to my husband themselves to reassure themselves.  We had issued a statement that we were ok, but it wasn't good enough.  They were upset that they didn't get to talk to us personally.  No one was there to advocate for us that we needed some rest and recover time.  After a day of talking policy and procedures, Dick was ready to move on to strategic planning for the next six months.

At no time was there ever a personal debrief.  At no time during, after, or in the months to come, did anyone from our mission sit down with us as a couple and ask how we were.  At no time was counseling or trauma debreif offered to us.  At no time did anyone come have a cup of coffee with us and listen.  We actually made the two hour trip hoping to meet our home team, be heard, and be with "family".  We went to an evening event, walked in, and someone came up to my husband, slapped him on the back, and said, "Hey, heard about your adventure!  Four days - that's nothing; so and so spent three weeks in jail in Turkey!"  We were stunned.  We still were not sleeping from the nightmares that would plague us for six months every night, and then decreased to only three or four times a week.  We still have them.  The case in Turkey was a totally different situation,  That man had no fear of death.  It was awful, and he faced separation, but it was not the same.  No one seemed to care more than a few more slaps on the back and an occasional, "Good to see you; we were praying!"  We left feeling ignored.  No one asked how we were doing.  They didn't even sit still long enough to ask.

We came home, and existed for the next several weeks.  We couldn't function.  Thinking through cooking a meal was too much.  I stared at the washing machine once for ten minutes and couldn't figure out how it turned on.  My husband would come home, we'd put the kids in bed at 8:30, and go to bed ourselves to stare at the ceiling.  If we slept, we had nightmares and woke again.  But our brains were too tired to do anything but sleep.

After three months, we asked our mission for help with some debrief counseling.  They told us that perhaps our insurance would cover it, and we should check our policy and if it did, we could arrange it and bill insurance.  We hung up.  Life took so much energy to even write a shopping list; there was no way we would figure out an insurance policy.  We just lived, trying to manage one day at a time.

Now, years later, we look back and wonder what our lives would have been like with proper member care.  Honestly, it never crossed my mind that one could face that type of a crisis and have NO member care provided.  I expected someone with us during the crisis.  I expected at least to be called in to the main office and to meet with a member care person and be heard.  I expected some sort of debrief and trauma care.  But we had nothing.  Then the very fact of being completely ignored in trauma became in itself another trauma actually harder to recover from.  The first was perpetrated by evil men, and there was some sense in that.  Evil will fight against good.  The second was perpetrated by God's own people, and it was hard to comprehend.    Looking back, though, we wonder... had appropriate member care been given, could we have avoided some of the pain of dealing with years of PTSD?  I think the answer is a resounding yes.

Then only weeks after this trauma, our field was plunged into the worst season of trauma after trauma after trauma where you could not even catch your breath between them.  We lost so many friends that it was hard to count them; we cringed turning on our computers and reading the news in case it brought more news of deaths and missing.  We had no more time then to even deal with our own trauma since we were so caught up with others.  Nights brought nightmares and days brought grief.

And our churches began to drop us because we weren't "doing much" and we weren't getting our prayer letters done on time.  Money got tight, sleep didn't come, more deaths hit, and we just weren't functioning well.  Again we asked our mission headquarters for help, and this time they said that they would find someone, but months went by and we never heard from them again.  We felt entirely alone, and began to feel judged even by the church we attended in our "over here" location because Christians are joyful and victorious, and we sure didn't look it.

When no one helps, that itself becomes a secondary trauma.

Harder to heal from.

Then Things Got Strange

As we continued on in this new project, like I feared, things got worse.  I don't know if it was the increased work load, the detailed work focused on little things and not people (outside of my husband's energy-giving sphere), or an attack against us, but things got worse.  My husband would work a full day at the office, come home, nap on the couch until a late supper, and then work for another five hours on the new work.  He would be up early in the morning because that was when people on the other side of the world were up, and on his computer in our bedroom talking away and working.  It didn't do good for our relationship.  I began to parent alone again - entering the awful world of preteen boys all alone.  If the kids disturbed him or were loud at home when he was on the phone - which he so very often was for so very long - he was angry with me for not having them under control.  I had two boys with ADHD attempting to navigate school with varying degrees of success, and I was working a part time job to supplement our income.

We were far too busy.

I tried not to complain.  After all, I was also deeply invested in the work my husband was doing and was willing to sacrifice to see it done.  But I also wanted a husband and a father for our kids.  We hadn't learned to take time out for each other and for family.  A new couple joined us at the office and instead of being a help to us, they came with their own agenda and their own pressure because their sending agency wanted them to do things their way.  That ended up splitting the fledgling church that was in our city because they had to "plant" a church.  Working with an existing fledgling church and helping grow it would not meet the demands of their agency, so they pulled people out of the one to create another that they "planted".  This caused division and trouble among the little group.  They also came into the office and grew very close to one family of the two that worked with us and spent much time with them.... and not the other.  This also caused more problems.  My husband was the "hearer" of the problems and maintained a fairly calm demeanor at work, but then would come home and vent his emotions at home.  One day, I again tried to ask Dick, as our field leader, for help.  He told me at first that I must be lying or exaggerating because my husband "does not get angry".  He told me that my husband had lived with them for a year once and he had never seen him angry, so either I am lying or it is something wrong with me because he never gets angry at anyone else.  This began to erode more and more at my confidence and my sense of self that I hardly knew what to think any more.  I knew he was wrong, but there was no way to talk to him.  He either accused me of being too emotional  or being too logical.  He continued to tell me and my husband that I was "damaged" from my past and that I am weak.

In desperation, I went to our pastor, and my husband agreed to go with me for counseling.  I was actually really optimistic.   This was the first time he had agreed to go to someone besides Dick, and I had great hopes that things would being to work out if only we could talk and get some godly counsel.  The first session, the pastor listened to us talk.  At the end, he handed us this two page list of references.  Bible verses.  About 120 of them.  He wanted us to look them all up; they were references to different sins, and list the ways each of us were sinning according to these verses.  We were both stunned.... but we wanted to cooperate, so we tried to work our way through them all on top of our busy lives.  List after list of sins, we waded through.  When we went back, we mentioned that it was a lot of verses.  His comment was, "Some people would think it is not enough."  On the bright side, it did get us talking, because on the way home every week, we would talk about how odd this pastor's method of counseling was - that he seemed to have no idea of what to do other than condemn people.  But, the problem was, we couldn't stop going without looking like we were rebelling, so we went, but there was little value in it.  He was a good preacher, but not a counselor.

At some point in here, because Dick was still checking on us, and he heard that we were going to our pastor, our pastor wrote him and suggested that we have a break from ministry.  I really do not know what triggered Dick to do this because it only came across my attention later, but Dick wrote my pastor a letter and told him not to listen to me.  It was two pages long of some of the worst slander one has ever seen.  I am tempted some days to change names in it and post it on here because no one would believe it otherwise.  It was vile.  On and on he went, and just when you thought he was done, he added a page of postscript that was more vile than the letter.  He told him that I was lying, that I exaggerated, that I had a psychological disorder that he and another counselor (who when I asked her about it said that not only did she NOT say that, but that she would never because she didn't think it true, neither was she qualified to make such a statement!) both agreed that I had.  That this disorder was shown by my logic and skill in thinking.  He said it likely came from my past of severe abuse, and that I will never be normal or be able to be lived with and my poor husband will just have to endure it all his life; there is no other hope despite a miracle which he doesn't even think is possible.  He told my pastor that I am likely pathological liar and should not be listened too.  He even went so far as to mention all of my family members and drag their characters down stating "I do not even know how her mother lives with her father".  Then he quoted a letter from his wife saying how I do not even care for my own children and my poor husband has to take all the responsibility in our household.  Interestingly, his wife had only visited our house once in the last eight years, and we had visited her once.  When she visited us, I had just fallen on the stairs (yes, really, really - the ER asked me a few questions about that too!!  But I tripped running up them and took a flying fall into the next ones!) and had broken my clavicle and cracked my shoulder blade.  So, no, I wasn't doing much to care for my kids and my husband was very kindly taking most of the responsibility for the kids.  When we visited her for two days, I had just recovered from a pinched nerve in my arm, and my husband was doing most of the child care to give me a break and because he was about to leave for a three week trip and wanted to be with the kids.  I didn't see her point.  (Later, under questioning, he admitted that his wife had never written that, nor seen it, but that he made it up "from conversations we had had together".)  Then, to make matters worse, Dick sent this letter to my husband "to see if I have it right before I send it to the pastor"!  

It is hard to explain how I felt when I stumbled across that letter.  I had always had the passwords to my husband's e-mail accounts and at times would look for a letter or so in order to write prayer letters, and I came across this jewel.  I think my blood ran ice-cold.  I knew before then that Dick was a bad influence on my husband and had the feeling that things weren't being handled well, that I wasn't being listened to with any respect, but I had no idea!  At the time, I was still believing that my husband loved me, but was over worked, suffering from burnout, possible PTSD issues, and his moods were out of control due to the above and his uncontrolled diabetes issues and lack of sleep.  I needed this to change, for sure, but I believed it was possible, and I believed that people would help us in that.

Then this.  Wow.  I didn't even know how to react.  No one would ever believe me if I accused the team leader of something like that.  He was already saying I was illogical (and too logical) and paranoid and a pathological liar.  And honestly, I had no clue who to trust or where I was safe.  Was the pastor saying these things about me, too?  Is this what he was telling my husband about me behind my back?!  No wonder my husband was not being respectful of caring towards me!  I basically shut down.  I couldn't think.  I didn't dare ask for trust or for help again.  Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to copy the letter and save it.  That step saved me later because it gave me the ability to say no when I finally got strong enough to stand up to some of this.  (Years later, when I showed this letter to a few counselors working with us, even they could not hide the shock on their faces.  Two called it blatant spiritual abuse, and one who knew him, called him a misogynist.  But at the time, I had no one to carry the pain of that letter with me or to stand up and loudly contradict it.)

Still, my husband and I continued to work on our relationship, and Seth continued to mentor us, and we got to a relatively stable place and then even moved on to a good relationship.  We began talking more, sharing our hearts, taking time for each other, and life was good.  Then my husband was excited to start working in a new ministry... a culmination of the project he had taken on before.  He was so excited.  I was thrilled for him.  I went on a trip and began a new ministry myself of writing.  Life was good.  Seth was over visiting, and we had a relaxed and wonderful time.  A few weeks later, my husband packed to go on one trip that changed our lives.  We just didn't know it would when we packed his bags that last evening.  We were so happy with our family life and all we had struggled through to get to this point of peace.  Life was about to change, and we spent that last evening sewing some aprons together for a friend who wanted some.  (Shh... don't tell, but my husband can sew quite well!)

A Too Busy Life

Moving take a lot out of you!  Still working it all out...  but it is good here.

Back to the story..

We went on like that for a few years.  Dick consistently speaking bad of me to my husband, my husband up and down with good times and bad, times of managing well, and times of emotions and sleep all out of whack.  We lost more friends.  Just a few at this stage, but a few good ones. Seth and his wife continued to mentor us both.  I began to come to some peace with God and work through a lot of the pain of my past and began to grow and relax in my relationship with God.  I had a job I loved with old people besides my ministry.  Life was often stable with occasional bad times.  After two years attempting to make friends in a big church, we changed to a smaller one.  It was a good church, and we settled in and made friends.  We noticed that their theology was slightly more restrictive than ours - they weren't at all sure if the Holy Spirit had any role in the world today and were pretty sure that miracles only happened in the time of Acts for a reason then.  We ignored that because we were quite used to functioning in community with believers that have varying beliefs than ours.  We liked the church, liked the preaching, and had found a home for our hearts.

We had a few decent years.  Life went on well.  Ministry was going fairly well.  Then we went back into our default mode of working too much,  My husband brought work home; because his work involved so much virtual work, there was always someone up at any hour of the night that wanted to work with him, and he has a hard time saying no.  Family life suffered.  His travels took him at times for five to six weeks long trips.  Dick encouraged longer and longer trips because it was more cost effective to do even more "while you are there".  Seth warned that this was not good for the family, but Dick himself was gone from his family for extended periods and saw no problem with it at all.  If I said something, he complained to my husband about his "weak" wife.  The longer trips with the increased danger as the situation "over there" got more intense began to wear on my husband again and he began to be more and more short tempered.  I asked once to speak alone to Dick when he was visiting.  I was hoping to discuss this increase in exhaustion that my husband was showing and see if there could be some balance.  Even things like a day or two off after a month long trip for some family time and allowing us to decompress.  But Dick was too busy.  Despite my repeated requests for some time to meet with him and several trips a year that he made to our office, it took him over a year and a half to give me ten minutes of his time.  Then he agreed that my husband should not work so much, but did nothing to change his ways of constantly throwing more at him and needing him for about ten hours a day his first days home.  Nothing changed.

Then an important event occurred in our lives that I still think is key.  We were doing reasonably well in our marriage but just overworked.  Then we took on a very key project for my husband's country.  We ended up with this project because the person doing it before - their marriage almost ended.  I remember thinking when we agreed to take it on that "ack, that will put us on the front lines of the enemy's attack", and I wasn't sure I wanted it.  But it was critical, so we took it on.  I remember that we called our pastor over for a cup of coffee that week and shared with him what we will be doing.  We asked for prayer because doing this project would subject us to attacks of the evil one and asked for prayer, especially for our marriage and family life as we do this.  Our pastor looked straight back at us and said something that I still remember with absolute clarity.

"That is the scariest thing I have ever heard; people blaming their problems on the devil."

I remember it because I was stunned.  It felt like we had just been slapped.  We were not coming to him with problems.  Yes, he was aware that we had issues at times in our marriage, but we had been doing well for quite some time, and we were not going to him with problems,  We were simply asking for prayer protection over our family as we ventured into a new field of ministry.  We were asking because we had just seen our coworker who previously had this project have his marriage almost fall apart during his time with it.  But that was his response...  and we were stunned and speechless, feeling ashamed and scolded.

Needless to say, after that we did not go to him for little things.  We did not go to him and say, "We've had a rough week, can you pray with us or talk with us."  We felt already judged before anything happened.  We really didn't have too many other people to go to either.  Dick was still the same old Dick - running around too busy or too busy typing away at his computer not really aware of the people in his life to really pick up on issues and relationships.  We hadn't seen or heard from our head office two hours away except for three times a year: the Christmas party, a summer weekend retreat, and the board meetings.  We had Seth, still faithfully mentoring us from a distance, and we had our kid's school which was a community of caring people that we had friends in, but friends who were very removed from what we were doing that it would have been hard to explain what we were facing.  They, however, did end up to be the most supportive group we had.