Church Musicals

Addicted to God

I just woke up from a church service. That’s a good thing…right? No.

I have church trauma.

I was raised in the church. I learned that being gay was either a choice or a demon. I turned out gay and learned that it was neither. I had to convince my father that it wasn’t a choice. So now…

The first church wasn’t good enough, so we traveled an hour and a half to a different church. This one had the right teachings. This one had different friends. Say hello friends! I had my first coffee here. Real men drink coffee. I “liked” coffee. I wanted to be a real man like my father.

That church suddenly didn’t work out. We had moved to be closer to that church, but we went back to a different church in the town we grew up in. An hour and a half away. Say hello to new friends! This one had a parking lot on a steep hill and was housed in a Branson show! I remember the steep climb up and down back and forth to the car. We spent the entire day there because we had services at night too!

Or maybe the churches were switched. I remember having to drive an hour and a half to two different churches in two different towns…

We settled down in a new church. New church, new friends. This is where I learned being gay was a demon. This is where I learned I didn’t fit in and to mask it under perfectionism. “Jesus Freak” or die. I was the chosen one. The celibate one. The missionary one. I was going to learn all the languages and get as far away from here as I could. Somewhere I could hopefully fit in, because if there was one place on earth that I could fit in, I was going to find it.

What???????

Meanwhile I got super spiritual. The gland in my brain that accesses spirituality lit up like a Christmas tree. Here I wanted to be the person who yelled to the church in foreign languages and then gave the interpretation. I wanted to be the guy who got the message from God.

I received a message from a foreign traveler. I had the “spirit of achievement” whatever that means. I had the potential to go places and do big things, and man, was I! The burden had been set. Celibacy. Missionary. Spirit of Achievement. Do Big Things. Big Potential. God Will Work Through Him. And I was only so young.

Despite everything, I liked most of the people at the church. This is the church where I was comforted after my mom’s passing. This is the church where my formative friends were. I never wanted to leave.

Our mom had the entire church convinced that my dad was a bad guy. He was a workaholic who only cared about money and didn’t care about his family. He was possibly having an affair. They should get a divorce. A divorce was the only solution to the problem. He abused her verbally, fight after fight, every night. She couldn’t stand it anymore, and it wasn’t right for the kids. This entire paragraph my mother manipulated the church into believing, whether it was true or not. I only found this out after my dad wrote me a letter years after my mom died, and I got his side of the story.

He started going to a different church a while before my mom passed. They divorced several months before she died and were doing nothing but fighting several months before that. They wanted to stay unified for the kids, but he had finally had enough going to a church where he felt unwelcomed. He invited the children to come along if they wanted to, but no pressure. After she died, no pressure. A few months later, pressure. Finally, we had to leave. There was no choice, no compromise: we were forced to leave that church. It was within walking distance of our house, and we were grown enough to walk there. But he had to have a unified family at his church.

New church, new friends, new pastor. This one took pride in other people calling his church a cult. In between two towns, his vision was to slowly buy the rest of the property between the two towns and call it Freedomville. He was very charismatic. He was very nice face to face. But he was known to hold a grudge. Get on his bad side, and you were on his bad side forever. But it would be a while before I knew that. One of the first Sundays there, I met in Sunday School (the meeting before the church service (yes, we “pre-gamed” with church before church)) someone whose parents were forcing him to come here. We instantly became friends. He didn’t want to go to church period, and I saw that as a reason to become even better friends with him, to “reach across the aisle” and get him on Jesus’ good side. OMG I was such a cringe Christian.

They played Hillsong loud enough with enough instruments that it was like a concert. And with enough people, it had a mega church mentality to it. Well, for Missouri anyways, it came close enough. That convinced me to stay. The worship part of the service was always my favorite part. I didn’t mention this before, but I started learning a little American Sign Language at my previous church, and there was an educational interpreter at this church. She gave me a sign language dictionary, my first, and taught me sign language the best she could. It was amazing! That was another reason I stayed. Another reason I stayed was because of the youth pastors who unfortunately didn’t stay for very long. They had a contest going on with a list of fifty scriptures. It was supposed to be whomever could memorize and keep these memorized would win some sort of prize at the end. The first week I was there was the second to last week of the challenge. So I took the list home, memorized all of them, and came back and recited all of them, in any order, to them. They were shocked. My memory was amazing back then. What shocked me back then was their compassion for other people and for themselves. They taught God’s love for yourself better than anyone I’ve ever heard since. In a household that taught competition for love, the thought of simply being loved by God because you existed was mind-blowing. I was still trying to wrap my mind and heart around it when they left. They started their own restaurant and were going to renovate their own church. How amazing is that!

Nobody could replace them. But the pastor by that time had heard about the amazing feats of our family and the Bible memorizing and knowledge we had from previous experience in Junior Bible Quiz (like Jeopardy for kids) at our old church and wanted to get to know us. He got close to my father until they butted heads. So he decided maybe he could more easily mold the children. My second oldest brother had already run away, so he took hold of the oldest and placed him in charge of the DC (for anonymity and typing, I will shorten it simply to the DC) for the men. It’s a program he took the idea from somewhere else and used the same concept: to transform lives of people who were addicted to substances and cons and ex-cons, and give them a chance to learn about Jesus in a year long program to give them a new outlook on life. While there, my brother met one of the women in the program and fell in love. They were eventually kicked out, and he married her. For the sake of brevity, that’s where I’ll end it for now.

My sister ended up marrying one of my best friends who was a few years older than me. I’m not exactly sure which church they still attend, but they sometimes attend the same church mentioned as they left on good terms. This pastor married them. I’m happy for them, but they think, as the church does, that I’m going to hell for being gay. So I can’t be friends with them. They think it’s an “agree to disagree” type of thing.

Anyway, I was single throughout all of this, of course, and they kind of decided to take me under their wing. I needed a summer job for college, so they decided to pay me (less than minimum wage) while giving me weight training, protein shakes, housing, new outfits, a bunch of new stuff, basically making me a part of their family, and all I had to do was whatever needed done for those three months, 24/7. I agreed to it, felt like I had a new family of brothers who would actually talk to me, came with the added bonus of leadership, nobody knew my secret that I was gay (and I stayed away from the showers. I’m not a perv, guys!) and all was well. It was one of the best summers of my life tainted by the trauma they showed me afterwards.

I finished college, my internship turned into a job. I was still going to that church on the Sundays I wasn’t being forced to go to my dad’s new church (because the pastor and he were both stubborn and things had to both be their way). His new pastor was compliant, a little more conservative, and heavily transphobic. The old pastor just didn’t say anything about transphobia because I didn’t think he knew it existed yet. But I got into my car accident, the long Facebook post about stepping out of God’s will and it all being my fault happened, then the threatening to kill me happened, then yeah. Haven’t been back since.

All that to say, recently I’ve been having these dreams of church services. These are like, someone is singing a solo and a choir is backing them up full-fledged numbers with a sermon to boot! I have no idea where they’re coming from, but I feel like singing along and waking up every time one comes on. I feel like I could use spirituality again, but not church! I have been hurt by church for too much for too long. I have been to a few churches in Pennsylvania since then. I have tried to get past it all. But even the “traditional” church service which is so far from what I grew up in is still not doing anything for me. I miss the emotional feeling of “God”, but looking back it just felt like emotional manipulation. But it was a high that I miss. I was addicted. I was addicted to God. There, I said it. And I’m needing a fix. I am so desperate for a fix that my brain is having “wet dreams” of a church service for me to experience that high again. THIS IS NOT NATURAL!!!

HELP ME. WHAT DO I DO???