Chapter 30: Zombieland

We are undead.

Eyes sunken from a thousand tears, limbs dragged along through another pointless day, wake up, wander around, try to choke something down, go to bed.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

We have spent 20 of the best years of our lives building a ministry career together, and it is gone like cheap beer at a frathouse.

We wander as one lost in a labyrinth, kitchen to living room, to kitchen, to bedroom, to kitchen, to living room once again, having gone from a breakneck schedule to…crickets. We have no purpose, we are null and void. Numb.

Neither one of us is really sure how to proceed, why even try? what exactly is the point of going to yet another church and building yet another ministry if it is destined to be pried from your fingers? We are kids at the beach tired of the asshat who keeps knocking down our sandcastle. And this time the sandcastle was pretty freaking amazing, and took a really long time to build. It is a next level depression.

Why, why, WHY didn’t I pursue my original dreams? I could have had a marketable degree in the sciences by now, and likely a nice tidy 401K, good insurance and some security for my kids. But I believed that all we needed was faith, to believe, and that God owned the cattle on a thousand hills, and we would somehow mystically be okay.

But we no longer have any cattle, or hills, or job.

I’m almost finished producing my CD but have lost my audience… and my desire to pursue a tour in the Christian music world. I still have boxes of unsold copies of Broken Pieces, a relic of my church history.

There is an often repeated fallacy in Christian circles, a misinterpreted verse about temptation. Five bucks says you’ve had this said to you, likely after you lost someone close to you and MAN do people say some dumb things when you’re suffering. You’ll be sitting there having lost your world and someone invariably will come up to you and say…God won’t give you more than you can’t handle. So annoying.

Also…untrue!

the Bible doesn’t say this, anywhere, and I am venturing to guess that as Job sat in his heap of ashes scraping his boils with a broken Starbucks mug having lost his offspring, McMansion, and health, he wasn’t exactly thinking, Sure, I can handle this.

The entire book of Job is a big GOD WTF???!!!!!

And I can’t handle this.

We have a few friends who stand with us, but the spiritual community we served is taken away and we are relegated to being outside, gazing in the window at the fireplace-warmed living room that was our former church family, longing to be in the midst of them but finding the door now locked, key under the mat confiscated.

The chatty folks of Tiny Town have no explanation as to why Pastor DH and his wife Monica were stepping down in a prominent community church, and since nature abhors a vacuum, theories abound in this rural burg as to why. Unfounded rumors abound, of wrongdoing, of nonexistent affairs, they just had to have done something wrong or why would they resign when things were going so well? These stories trickle on down, a wretched sprouting, an unfortunately fruitful grapevine of totally bogus news.

We are the talk of the town. Yay us. King and Queen Pariah.

First at Pastor South’s church, then Pastor Real’s, we were known as spiritual leaders in this community for over 15 years, yet in days we have decomposed into the unwanted leftovers atop a too-cheap frail paper plate at a Sunday barbecue, a bit of overcooked meat being swept off into the garbage. I stop going to the stores, wherever I go I get sideways glances and judging glares. Church folk flee the other direction when I am coming down the aisle, running away as if joblessness is a contagion.

Wait, what’s this thing behind Door #2?

There’s a dirty little secret we discover about working in the church, one I believe should be printed in huge red warning letters at the top of any posted ministry position. The letters should flash if at all posible. As our few month’s severance runs out, we go to apply for unemployment, ony to discover… THERE IS NO UNEMPLOYMENT FOR PASTORS!

Of course! I do the facepalm of the century. I should have known this. Churches don’t pay taxes, so why would they pay unemployment?

We are SCREWED.

Neither one of us is qualified for anything other than ministry at this point, but DH is absolutely NOT continuing to pursue ministry, sick to death of all of the time invested having come to nothing.

I decide to pick up the mantle and carry on, and commence searching for a position as a worship director, and have some success interviewing, but quickly realize that we would be uprooting our family and putting the kids through moving to an unfamiliar city having no clue what’s really going on behind the sugarcoated shell at whatever church we start working in, obviously at this point we know more than we would like about only the everything that can go wrong. We just can’t stomach it anymore.

I eventually return to the job that was supposed to take me through college, being a hairdresser. I had been homeschooling, but now my son and daughter enroll in the public school system, Mom can’t work from home any longer. DH starts over at a company working in sales. Somehow we scrape it all up and move on, walking dead dragging on down the road. I’m picturing Bill Bixby as Bruce Banner, backpack slung over one shoulder, heading down the road thumbing a ride, commence somber piano underscore.

It’s over in Tiny Town.

Only it isn’t.