BOOM!

I am surrounded by lightning.

It is everywhere…near, far, beautiful flashes off in the distance, spidery webs from cloud to cloud; bold, blinding streaks of electricity connecting to the ground.

I adore storms. I am one of those people who will be racing up the stairs as you’re on your way to the basement during a storm warning, headed outside to watch Mother Nature’s brew of magic unfold in the heavens. And she is really throwing it down tonight, limbs out and hair flying free, the main event dead center on the dance floor, a spectacularly brilliant display of light and sound.

I am perched on the roof of my Chevy van on a hill in the center of this massive electrical storm begging God to take me out. Crying out loud, just end this already. I am more than prepared to check out, I’ve had enough.

BOOM! a close strike, but not close enough.

And wouldn’t it be poetic, justice served to a spiritual leader gone rotten?

The lightning is everywhere, each streak a juror ready to cast their guilty vote and sentence me to an electrical death.

Struck by lightning, a life ended by a cliche. It’s almost too perfect. And it’s exactly what I deserve for my failure to make this work.

I’m not sure when exactly I started contemplating taking myself out, but once I had made the commitment to the congregation that I would fix my marriage, I felt destroyed. For over twenty years now, Monica has been systematically and daily dismantled, as I tried to make pastors, churches, everyone around me satisfied that I was living my life correctly. I have nothing left in me, there is no longer a Monica. It feels like all of my interior has been scraped out and I am just an ambulatory shell of skin, a gutted Jack-O-Lantern having served its purpose left to rot on the front porch. I am completely void. I feel hollow, I have no idea who I am anymore. All I am is a product of what everyone around me wanted.

The day I made the public statement to the church, I sat on a too-tall stool on the platform, microphone in hand in front of the entire congregation, and as the necessary words fell from my mouth, I could almost see dark bars sliding, hear the creak of metal against metal, smell the iron of the doors as they slammed shut…

and all of Tiny Town is watching to see how I navigate my imprisonment.

It is not going well.

I consider pills, but I could wind up brain damaged, thus forcing someone to take care of me. I don’t own a gun, and I’ve never been a cutter. And I wouldn’t want someone finding me and being traumatized. So, even on that stormy night, I eventually give up my rantings to the god somewhere over the black flickering clouds above and head inside.

There are two main reasons I am alive today, one is sleeping in her bedroom twenty feet away as I write, and the other is sleeping in his apartment forty miles away.

When people tell me how strong I am for surviving it all, I’m not sure they realize how close I was to ending it all. But I have a beautiful beloved brother who chose this kind of exit, and having lived through the ensuing damage, I absolutely could not do this to my kids, much less my family, although only my one sister is aware of what’s going on with me.

Somewhere around this time, I start to run. I’m mentally running away from everything. I run for hours. I’m running ten miles at a time, I run, and think, and think, and run. I’m literally trying to outrun my life. It’s not working. It catches up with me every time, although I am down to a size zero by now. Women I know want to know my secret to how I got this thin. Heyyyy, try Monica’s diet plan! Make your life so miserable you can barely eat, smoke a lot and attempt to run away from everything.

And I go though cigarettes like a three-toothed carny, the great irony being that I’m teaching a rather intense workout class at the gym several days a week. After this murder workout, I cower in a niche outside the gym and smoke, and think, and cry. If those gym ladies only knew.

And I have pain. Chronic abdominal pain that is getting more severe with each passing day. I go to the doctor seeking answers. He sends me to see a pelvic physical therapist. What the hell is that? I get a second opinion, he sends me to the same pelvic physical therapist. Fine. I’ll go, already.

At times in my story, I come up to parts of the tale that are incredibly difficult to tell. I hesitate here, but in the end, I need to confess what can happen when you’re living a lie.

I drive to a neighboring larger city, not a whole lot of specialists in Tiny Town, as you might imagine. I pull into the parking lot, park my car, and enter the building. I weave through a labyrinth of corridors, finally locate the correct office, and fill out the ensuing cascade of paperwork. And I sit on a table in a tiny room, somewhat bent over from what doctors invariably call discomfort. Liars.

She enters the room, a dark-haired intense looking woman. She has a head of unruly curls, and a no-bullshit demeanor. She introduces herself, and has me lie back, and I unfold onto the padded table. I miraculously retain all of my clothing for this first exam. She presses her hands into my abdomen, feeling ligaments, tendons, muscles, and whatever the hell else resides in my lower quadrant.

She sits back in her chair, looks me straight in the eye, and delivers a bombshell.

The single page letter trembles in my hand.

Someone hates me… and I dont mean just dislike, but visceral, passionate hatred. This isn’t your garden variety abhorrence. They want me completely destroyed. This is deep loathing, to take the time to purposefully and maliciously mess with someone else’s life, put in the effort to actually find addresses in the days before Google made it easy, type essays and construct memes, print everything out and pay to have it all mailed properly.

Oh, yes, this is more than hate, this is a vendetta.

I stare at the lengthy inventory of insults and vitriol.

I am a bitch. I am a hypocrite. I am a fucking piece of shit. I am worse than the vilest piece of worm-eaten garbage in the gutter. I don’t deserve to live, and most definitely do not belong anywhere near the church. The strongest curse words possible are used for this condescending rant; dense, single-space type jamming an entire page of damnation to Dante’s deepest level of hell. I am an impostor. I am a phony. it goes on, and on, and on ranting about the horrible person I am. And it is a threat. They know what I privately confessed to a couple of my best friends and sister, and will tell everyone they can broadcast this to in Tiny Town…unless I resign my position. Somehow, someone who REALLY hates me found out about my deep, dark secret, which is clearly no longer a secret at all.

Who would do this? Who would even have the time?

As I am trying to figure out the whom, I am sent another what.

This time it is a meme.

A photo of Obama. It is currently 2012.

The caption proclaims “I MAY GET ELECTED BUT YOU… MONICA BARDEN SHOULD LEAVE OFFICE! AA AND YOU DONT LOVE YOUR HUSBAND WHILE ON STAFF AT A CHURCH. DISGRACEFUL! I am guessing you didn’t resign. You better get ready for a shit storm you two faced hypocrite. Consider this news leaked.”

My guts are water. Who would want to see me destroyed like this?

The only person I can imagine hating me this much is Joe Sham, especially because I’m pretty sure he overheard us in the restaurant. I had been worried about this even before the postman started delivering bombshells, but I have no way of knowing if he is the one behind the letters…there are other possibilities, and it is years before the most likely suspect makes themselves manifest.

Within a few days Pastor Almost calls me into his office. He sets down a piece of paper, a Willy Wonka meme with all-caps screaming MONICA BARDEN IS IN AA …AND SHE HATES HER HUSBAND!! He tells me this has been sent to him and several members of the worship team I lead.

How far has this gone? The worship team at Pastor Almost’s church? The one at Pastor South’s church? The team I used to lead at Pastor Real’s? Everyone on staff? Everyone in the community?!

I shrink in embarrassment. This is being sent to the people who work for me, and God only knows who else. I am absolutely terrified. Who knows this much information? How do they know? How was it leaked? Who threw me under the bus, so carefully chartered, destination the Ruin Monica Convention?

I cower, and ultimately, give in.

The situation succeeds in scaring the everliving hell out of me, and once again I decide I cannot leave, and somehow have to make the best of things. I resolve once again, that dammit, I am going to make this work. And I desperately go to seminars, and do research, and read every book I can get my hands on to win this cliffside battle before it all topples over with a big Wilhelm scream, and in the midst of this high-peril drama, I discover a book called Act As If. And I have my answer.

I’m going to Act As If!!

I double down my efforts. Dammit, I HAVE TO MAKE THIS WORK.

I start doing everything as if I have a fabulous marriage. I force myself to hold hands, kiss, everything. I even journal about how a miracle has happened and now I am passionately in love with the man I married. I have no choice. Someone out there has it in for me, and I am making everything exponentially worse for all involved by having opened up my secret Pandora’s box. I’m busy stuffing snakes, demons, swirling dark clouds and all manner of evil back into this suitcase, and I’m sitting on the lid feeling it bounce beneath me as it all threatens to burst asunder.

I do the only thing I can do, and join the ranks of a million celebrity spiritual leaders before me who got their hands caught in the financial cookie jar, chocolate chip stained fingertips notwithstanding, or gave in to the temptation of a bountifully bosomed blonde secretary in possession of a delightfully whispery voice, or were caught receiving a massage with a very happy ending indeed, thank you very much, sir, I shall tip you quite well, please keep this a secret.

I go public, and confess to the church body that I have had struggles with my marriage, and that I have been going to AA. I commit to the congregation that we will work on our marriage, and I manage to put out this dumpster fire before it consumes my entire life. And it looks like it’s out, but there are embers that will never extinguish, at the moment I have managed merely to bury them.

And I read Act As If again, and again, and again. I am obsessed with this book, I have to be. At this point I have also read The Secret, and I’m playing create-your-own-reality chess, an eleventh-hour attempt to manifest chemistry where there is none, the desperate alchemist on the millionth try lying collapsed and totally frustrated pounding fists on the floor in the lab as a petri dish rests on the counter, once again synthesizing absolutely zero actual gold.

We go on a second honeymoon. We go on date nights. We stay in hotels. I even confess to DH that I was tempted to cheat with a guy who had flirted with me on Facebook. Nothing physical happened, but I feel terrible for the conversation, it’s the closest I ever came to infidelity. DH buys me a beautiful recommitment ring. He’s a good man, and he is doing his best. He buys me candy. He buys me flowers.

I suck.

I Act As If again, and again, and again.

And, because I am doing the Right Thing, the congregation embraces us, and supports us, and rallies around us.

And all is well.

Except I am starting to view death as a great option.

Amazing how you can think you have some great plan, and you’re confidently reeling it in, but you have no awareness something’s sneaking up behind you in the boat, and suddenly everything skids sideways and you’re drowning instead of fishing, and as the murky lake water fills your lungs, your last thought as you dwindle out of existence… what the hell just happened…

A woman frantically rushes up the center aisle.

In addition to serving at Pastor Almost’s church, we have also taken on a side gig at a Lutheran church in town. They are in the midst of a search for a worship pastor and we have been hired interim to lead their Wednesday night contemporary service. We are rehearsing the evening’s litany of songs with their team when she reaches the front and tells DH he has a phone call in the church office. DH looks at me, totally bewildered. Who would even know we are here? Why wouldn’t they call his cell phone? Weird.

He exits for a couple of minutes, and I am chatting and goofing off with the worship team members, I have been enjoying this little gig, and it is interesting to me to see the differences in a Lutheran contemporary church as opposed to my usual AG setting. I was raised Catholic and Lutheranism to me is similar except less statues, saints, songs about Mary, and, of course, guilt. Yeahh, I know the doctrine goes deeper than that, but I’m writing this for entertainment and am under no obligation to explain transubstantiation or Purgatory. I’ll let some other author comb through these things and endlessly debate doctrine with those who are into that, I would rather swim through rusty needles, not my gig, no doctrinal emails, please.

DH rushes back in, and delivers five rather significant words.

“Our house is on fire.”

WHAT??!

And thank GOD we have our kids with us, we scoop them up and toss them in our relative cars, and do the fastest five-mile drive in the history of mankind, flying down the highway not giving any care whatsoever as to how many cops we may sail right past doing 90. I am trying to be positive and encouraging to my daughter, and minimizing the situation to myself, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe it’s just the garage, or a minor part of the kitchen, or just a small part of the house, maybe it was put out quickly…

But we see a pillar of black smoke billowing up into the sky before we even pull into our neighborhood…and the smell, oh my God the smell is not what you would expect…it’s a chemical smell, random whatever going up in a plume of toxic stench. Whatever the hell kind of chemistry happens when a house burns, it has a very distinctive odor I will never forget.

Our cul-de-sac is crammed with emergency vehicles, my daughter is crying now because it’s obvious to anyone with two eyes and half a brain that this is no minor kitchen oopsie fire and now she’s worried about the cat, and we jump out and run past squad cars and firetrucks to what’s left of our house.

It is the tail end of the fire. Smoke pours out underneath the eaves of the misshapen roof, there’s absolutely nothing but a burning heap where the attached garage is supposed to be, and we stare dumbly at the whole smoldering mess.

Now what?

The fire chief is talking to us, they have already contacted the Red Cross and they will be here soon.

Pastor Almost is quickly on the scene, and we are extremely grateful for the support, but honestly we are all just standing there watching the house smoldering as they tear down sections to get to the areas that are still burning.

And water… soooo much water. I never realized how much gets destroyed by water while putting out a fire. We watch massive amounts of water being dumped into our house. The fire department is amazing and manages to get in after the main blaze is out and cover the computers in the basement recording studio with a tarp, thus saving 20 years worth of recorded material. DH has been a recording engineer ever since college and has a massive library from a huge variety of bands and businesses, including my two albums and everything else I’ve ever recorded.

The fire chief informs us what should have been totally obvious, we absolutely will NOT be staying here, there is no power, it’s not safe, duh lady, this was a major house fire, shit’s gonna get weird for a while, buckle up.

My daughter finds the cat who miraculously escaped, we still have no idea how, nine lives, right? She stops crying. The Red Cross arrives and gives her a teddy bear. She goes back to play on the swingset and watch the firemen pull down the eaves, digging out hot spots. My son watches with us, being a bit older. Ridiculous thoughts race…how are we going to sleep here tonight? Isn’t the rain going to fall right into the house now? Unrealistic scenarios play through my head, we’re in denial as to the gravity of this situation and the state of the house.

A while later, could have been minutes or hours, time has lost all meaning…they finally have it completely out and we are allowed to briefly enter the shell that was once a house.

The garage is totally gone, even the concrete foundation has giant craters in it from the heat. Days later, the fire investigator will come and inform us that the fire started here, an electrical mishap evidenced by a pile of molten copper in the corner. We are asked repeatedly if there was some kind of charger plugged in, there was not, but this is how I find out chargers can sometimes start house fires, heyyy good to know since only the all of us have like thirty of them plugged in at any given moment.

The walls are still standing, but there are huge gaping holes in the roof where the fire burned through, and the ceiling is collapsed. We enter what was once the living room, now buried under a foot and a half of waterlogged burnt insulation. My beloved irreplaceable original model Charles Walter piano is destroyed. Our Ikea furniture looks interesting, the waterlogged pressboard expands and explodes, so the furniture looks like a larger caricature of itself. We now live in the Far Side. The bedrooms are on the opposite end and are less affected, and we are able to grab some smoke-stench clothing, though the fire chief wants us out quickly, it’s not considered very safe. The denial is weird, I’m still feeling like, okay, you mean for sure we aren’t staying here? Shouldn’t we just be camping out on the floor? We don’t know this yet, but we won’t be staying here for almost five months.

The Red Cross puts us up in a hotel for a few days, and we sit on the beds and talk endlessly to the insurance company, cancel appointments, and figure out what the hell we are going to do. The house is deemed a near total loss, and is unliveable. The insurance company juggles us to a different hotel for two weeks, and we are now living out of plastic bins.

All thoughts of escaping my marriage exit my mind. No freaking way will I toss a divorce on top of a house fire for my kids to sort out. The house is destroyed enough that we could have actually taken a check and walked away, but we both think this is too jarring for our son and daughter, and opt to rebuild, keeping the situation as stable as possible for them. The irony is, of course, this could have been the easiest divorce ever, split the check and be done, but the level of trauma to the kids…well, there’s just no way I could do that to them.

The adjuster comes and Monica the Zombie paws through the wreckage with her, there’s no power so it’s very dim, and it’s drizzling and dreary and very strangely raining inside the house, which made me feel like I’m in Silent Hill waiting to be the next victim. Very creepy feeling. You could film a thriller in this place right now. Perfect horror set.

After a few weeks in the hotel, we are displaced for four months in a rental, it is an insane flurry of builder calls and meetings, insurance calls, collecting receipts for everything… when you have a house fire, they want you to replace everything as quickly as possible. The house is gutted until all that remains is three exterior walls. No roof, no interior walls. In retrospect, we would have been much better off had we taken off of work for a good deal of the summer to figure this out, but we don’t have any experience with house fires, and keep working, while simultaneously redesigning and picking out everything for the entire house. The insurance company wants you to do all of this as quickly as possible, and we are under the gun, not only rebuilding but replacing every last thing inside, every fork, barrette, paperclip, towel, pencil. It’s four and a half months of insanity.

Our community, though, is wonderful! They take an offering at church, they take an offering at my workplace, random people send us money to help us out. People volunteer to help us put things back together. I am still moved to this day by the generosity and thoughtfulness of those around us while we were in the midst of this.

The builders are doing an amazing job as well. The house is coming back together beautifully.

But as the house is going up, I am starting to crumble…

Accepting, Real, Relational.

That’s the tagline for this church. And it’s kinda true. We have folks coming here from all walks of life, and they aren’t judged. It’s a beautiful thing. Honestly, if you’re going to emulate the life of Jesus, you’re going to hang around with all kinds of interesting and sometimes odd and sometimes what the hell is up with them people. We become known as the church where anyone is accepted, arms wide open to the community at large. This place catered to those who were not okay with traditional church, and we were having a blast. Come on in, the water’s great!

All of this cool shit we are doing to reach out to the community is going spectacularly well. We feed the hungry in Tiny Town. We go to Nashville to work with a homeless ministry. We are actively involved in helping the community. We put on a Candy Carnival during Halloween in the middle of Tiny Town, and I build a life-size maze in which even the adults are getting lost, to my great pleasure. Pastor Almost buys a bike to give away at this event, the winning kid is absolutely over the moon. This is what Church 3 of Tiny Town was like. Real, gritty, awesome.

I had always wanted to be in a nondenominational church, free from the bonds of an overseeing organization, free to make our own decisions, free to focus on actually doing ministry as opposed to arguing about how to micromanage everyone. Liberated from the staggering amount of time, energy and resources wasted on making sure everyone’s following the rules. And we are presenting this church to the community as nondenominational.

Only………it’s not.

It’s almost nondenominational.

I love working with Pastor Almost, and his wife is very sweet, but they are most definitely not nondenominational.

Pastor Almost is licensed by the Assembly of God. This is an Assembly of God church in nondenominational clothing. Some of you will know what this means, and what their doctrine is, others of you are all what the hell is Assembly of God? Let’s see if I can make this explanation interesting for you.

Remember Pastor Strict and the United Pentecostal Church way back at the beginning of this book? The church where I couldn’t wear pants, makeup, jewelry, tank tops, or even trim my hair? (Haaa those of you who jumped into the pool late are now going to have to return to Chapter One to find out what in the name of holiness standards I’m talking about.) This church (UPC), and Assembly of God (AG), both have the same roots in the Azusa Street Revival circa 1906, in which a praying group of Californians was knocked to the ground and started speaking in tongues (unknown languages) as they received the gift of the Holy Spirit. *yawn* Yeah, I know.

People were healed, people were saved, (yadda yadda) this stuff all spread like wildfire and this is where Pentecostalism started, referring to the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts in which similar things happened. Okay, you’re totally falling asleep. This is most definitely NOT interesting. I’m absolutely losing your attention to that cobweb you just noticed up in the corner…does that mean there’s a spider in here? WAKE UP I’m almost done with the exposition bit, hang in there, this gets better. Well, around the 1940’s or so, half these people decided gee, maybe our wives would like a haircut and a pair of jeans and the Pentecostals split into two denominations, they are pretty similar except at an AG church, the women don’t have to look like they walked out of a Jane Austen novel.

Wait a minute, YES YOU DO know Assembly of God, because at least once in the 90’s you were channel surfing and screeched to a halt like a guy driving past a nudist colony at the sight of a lady with a massive pink bouffant hairstyle dressed in what I can only describe as late Marie Antoinette, a fashion designer’s night terror complete with heavy brocade puff sleeves embellished with satin bows and dripping with ribbons, seated in the most ostentatious palatial furniture, tufted velour with heavily scrolled gold trim. Google Jan Crouch if you think I am exaggerating for one split second, I am not. This was Trinity Broadcasting network, and they wanted you to believe and receive. Blab and grab. This entire network was owned by an AG family. A regular guest on TBN was Benny Hinn, the guy who would just wave his coat at a crowd and they’d all fall slap over. Jim and Tammy Bakker were AG, Tammy being the notorious running mascara lady. So was Jimmy Swaggart, though I don’t recall him having the running mascara bit.

We are back in a Charismatic church. Again.

Back to all of the craziness we thought we left behind in the camp in North Carolina…yep.

We have seen 50 shades of religion, only to come full circle, back to signs’n wonders once again.

But all of the positive things happening in this church are so great, what does it matter? Do I really care that Pastor Almost believes in anointing with oil or speaking in tongues?

So what?

I hate to start this next section, some of you aren’t going to like me very much. A large part of the community definitely didn’t.

There’s a reason why this being an AG church is going to be a problem.

I have a dirty little secret.

One I’ve been hiding for a very, VERY long time.

Green slime oozes long drips from the eaves of the church building.

And I am absolutely not kidding. Pastor Almost and I plan messages together in a series, about 4-6 weeks long, dealing with various aspects of the same theme. Then, we flesh it out, often using secular music, various visual arts, and even dance to get the point across.

This particular series is called Toxic Faith. We definitely raised eyebrows in the community. Church #3 was on a fairly well traveled road in the town of Tiny, and we had decked out the eaves in long drips of green slime, wood cut into three-foot curves painted sickly Mr. Yuk green nailed to the fascia of the building. Joining the drips were three massive metal drums previously used to hold a mysterious something that were reassigned to being painted the same neon-green with a toxic waste symbol painted on the front. These were in a pyramid in front, closer to the road. TOXIC FAITH, a sign shouted in front, along with the dates the series was running.

You may recall I had said there were friends who stood with us, and stand with us they did. A good number of members from Pastor Jock’s flock flew the coop and joined our nest, including several of the best musicians from the worship team. Their worship team was effectively annihilated overnight, many of them abruptly switched over, and the professional musicians we knew who we occasionally called in refused to play there once we were fired. The ever-prolific small town grapevine informed us that, shortly after we were excised, Pastor Jock fired the entire 40-member worship team. Yep, I can’t make this shit up. He replaced the entire worship team with one twentysomething guy who played guitar, then after a few months Pastor Jock fired him, too. He also fired the youth pastor he had hired himself. This guy was on a roll, hatchet in hand, better not step out of line or you’re next! Being fired sucked, but it felt great to no longer have to walk on eggshells in fear that we weren’t compliant with his view of How Things Should Be, TM.

While he was busy at Church #2 burning shit down, we were busy rebuilding our lives across town with this series about how churches can be toxic. I mean, it’s not like the messages were all about what had happened at Pastor Jock’s church specifically, but what had just happened most definitely fit under the category of Toxic Faith. Between us and Pastor Almost, we had three lifetimes full of firsthand experience of what can go wrong at church. It was cathartic to finally see these things called out.

DH starts a blog, I don’t recall exactly what it was called, but, having nothing to lose, he tells a lot of our side of what happened. It gets pretty popular. The leadership at Church #2 is NOT happy, but what can they do? It’s not much, but at least some people become aware of what really happened.

Months later, my phone buzzes with a text from one of the elder’s wives from Jock’s church. Wouldn’t I please get together for coffee and chat? I used to spent a significant amount of time with this woman, we were close friends back then. I messaged back informing her that if she couldn’t be there for us during the time we were left alone in the dust after being fired, why the hell would I want to talk to her now? Their thinly veiled attempt at damage control is foiled, and I don’t hear from her again.

But, as vengeance always is, the steam eventually dissipates…we are never getting our position back at Pastor Jock’s church, hell, we wouldn’t even want it now. It’s like being exiled from your home country and then it burns to the ground, you miss it, but don’t want to go back because it’s not what it once was anyway. They are STILL a much more conservative church than under Pastor Real, it never got the fire back that we had in the glory days. Today, it’s a tribute to the mediocrity that happens when you have too many rules. Freedom feeds the arts. Tough to sing He set me free when you’re in chains.

At the moment, however, we are running amok, Pastor Almost knows that there is deep meaning in secular music as well as sacred, and we use both profusely. Musicians draw musicians, and freedom feeds music, and the worship team grows and expands to 22, mostly instrumentalists, mostly professionals. This music is stupidly amazing for a church that runs around 80.

We have a pro drummer who brings in a twelve thousand dollar Pearl set. as well as two good backup drummers.

We have a killer bass player.

We have a pro guitar player who can peel off things like Eruption in his sleep. He’s also a pro sound guy, and installs a sound system that would have been appropriate in a stadium.

We have a pro flautist, as in one who has a degree in flute.

DH is pro piano, and we also have a second keys player, also professional.

We have two dancers, a matched pair who are majoring in dance at college, and both of whom are proficient on pointe (that cool ballet technique where you dance on your toes)

And this is just seven of the 22 we have, and they’re all auditioned, and they’re all really good.

We… are spoiled.

We construct a float for the community parade and throw the entire band on a trailer, playing “Good Times” with a four foot mirrored disco ball looming over us. We do an entire series based on Pink Floyd music, and build a wall in the church, enough bricks removed so the worship team is peeking out the middle. I find unusual worship music with odd meters. We do every style you can imagine, including Latin and classical. Our flautist can absolutely nail very difficult passages, it’s amazing to be able to open a service with Debussy. We do Welcome To My Nightmare, Ghostbusters, and Thriller in October. We do California Dreaming, complete with the flute part, of course. We do Loves Me Like A Rock. We do Ain’t Nothing Wrong With That. We do Sly and the Family Stone.

And the worship music. We do Magnificent by U2. We play Jesus Is Just All Right. I scour the corners of the earth for sophisticated and unusual worship music, and sometimes just write my own.

In our Christmas services, we hire in a cellist friend, and we do excerpts from the Nutcracker suite, a matching set of beautiful ballerinas in traditional pristine white tutus on toe shoes dancing the hell out of the Sugar Plum Fairy while the ethereal strings and bells are being played live behind them, a masterpiece lit under thousands of white Christmas lights encased in gossamer netting, afront a forest of sparkling branches. I still remember my young niece in the front row wide-eyed in wonder, watching the magic unfold. By the time the service is over, we have worked our way up to a frenzy of Trans-Siberian Orchestra music, fronted by the dueling electric guitars just about anyone recognizes. We do a Gospel version of the Hallelujah chorus, as well as Gospel versions of other Christmas songs, with sophisticated jazz-based harmonies. I lived to create magical moments and create them we did.

We do a Christmas series based on the Island of Misfit Toys. We make four eight-foot tall wooden models of the characters to place out front including Dolly and the Abominable Snowman. It’s one of my favorite series we did, I think all of us feel like misfit toys at times. We are having an incredible time with all of this.

So, are you wondering yet why he’s called Pastor Almost?

Coffee.

The delicious liquid calling my name every morning, “Monicaaaaa, come drink meeee”. The scent wakes up my brain, the taste is an immediate jolt to a tired mind. I have a lifelong, rather passionate love affair and a solid addiction to this substance. Please don’t send me a twelve-step pamphlet, I’m no quitter, and I’d only use the back of it to jot down BUY MORE COFFEE.

I’m not sure it’s the substance itself, but what it represents that is so tantalizing. Coffee is a morning drink, and no matter how bad yesterday was, a shit pile on a raging dumpster fire aboard the Hindenburg, as I pour a cup of delectable, somewhat bitter bean juice, I am delivered a new chance. One could point out it’s just another opportunity to create a whole new shit pile, but a new chance it remains, and I remain stubbornly (stupidly?) optimistic.

And I do eventually awake from zombie-slumber, and cautiously pull back the covers, one brown eye peeking out from my blanket-fort to see if there’s a reason to climb out today. I test out my sea legs, tentative steps into an unknown future. Days are relentlessly persistent in their visit to your door, no matter how undesirable a guest they may be, bearing mysterious surprise gifts, what’ll it be today?? OHBOYOHBOYOHBOY Aaaahhh, shit. I didn’t need this at all.

Hang on, now I somehow want more coffee…

There! ahhh… So. What happened next, you ask?

DH is done. Finished. Kaput. Exit, stage left. I have watched this man give the last 18 years of his life completely to the church, but he exits the train at this platform, no longer anywhere near interested in being a pastor. He actually rather flees the platform in a get me the hell out of here sprint. Makes perfect sense to me.

I’m not quite as wise.

I love doing what I do, but I am in a quandary with how to proceed. I have given up the idea of interviewing at churches, having no idea what kind of craziness I’m getting myself into. Not my first rodeo, folks, there’s always some kind of hidden shitshow at church, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. But for me, the curtain has been pulled back, and I can’t unsee the shenanigans previously concealed. Unbelievably, and a little irrationally I am still open to the possibility of leading again.

What could possibly go wrong?

We had heard of a smaller, kind of renegade church in Tiny Town that was causing a bit of a stir, known for trying new things and breaking the rules.

Perfect.

As busted up as we are, I decide we should set foot in a new church one Sunday, a fraction of the size of the church we were tossed from, and completely different.

It’s a very relaxed atmosphere, they have a little coffee area, and by golly you can bring that magical drink with you to sip during the service! So, we grab a couple cappucinos and sit in the padded blue chairs (WHY are churches always blue? Every. Single. Church we were at was blue. Blue chairs, blue curtains, blue on the walls…when we first started at Church #2 in Tiny Town, I was thrilled at the totally outdated-but at least not blue-burnt orange chairs, but when we built the new auditorium, the new chairs were… blue. Ugh.). The end of that sentence looks like it’s flipping you off, heh heh.

The pastor is speaking about things that go wrong in the church, about finding your faith after it has been trashed, about redemption and hope. This is good. This is great! I think I may be able to work with this.

After the service, we speak to the pastor.

Pastor Almost.

He has heard our story, he knows who we are already from the community. And, he… kind of gets it! He experienced two bad church situations, the first one in which he was working for a pastor he loved and trusted who turned out to be having affairs, or much more colorfully, in the second case, the senior pastor was caught in a prostitution sting. A prostitution sting! Yes, you read that correctly. My brain can’t avoid picturing the look on that pastor’s face as he realized that his deep, dark secret was about to become billboard-public front page news, sexual excitement crashing to a limp finale as he realized he was staring at a police badge.

Kills the moment every time.

I can’t remember how exactly it came about, but it was inevitable. As any skilled musician will tell you, when you are in a church, it’s only a matter of time before they start hinting that gee, they sure could use you on the worship team. I have to give Pastor Almost credit, though, knowing we had already been traumatized in the church, he really didn’t push us, he just left the door open, and damn if I didn’t walk through that door once again, and BOOM I found myself hired as the worship director. DH, who has no interest in ever being employed by a church again, wisely chooses to simply volunteer on the worship team, a side dish this time through the buffet line, so if it falls off, he merely misses out on dessert, instead of the whole damn plate crashing to the ground.

This time will be different, I tell myself. Seventh time is the charm, isn’t that the saying?

I set about restructuring, rebuilding, teaching and leading once again. This church was much smaller, but holy wow, what we pulled off on this team.

Pastor Almost is delightfully hands-off. He isn’t a musician, but has been involved in the Christian contemporary music scene his entire life, and well understands the Proper Care And Feeding Of Your Music Leaders. He gives us free rein, and suddenly we are kids tearing through a toy store, let’s try this, I wonder what that will do, let’s climb up there, OOOHHH look what I found!

So what happens when spiritual leaders get pitched from one church in a small town and are hired at another with the carte blanche to do damn near anything they want?

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.

Fired.

I just stand there, struck dumb.

“They…FIRED you?!!”

There has been absolutely no warning. Zero pink slips, no bad reviews. in fact I had thought things were looking up, we were adapting to working together and doing what we had been asked, had figured out a way to make the best of this new situation.

At first, I am hopeful. There must be some kind of mistake. Maybe it’s just a warning. How are they going to get away with this when most of the congregation loves us and our ministry? The members of this church and this community look up to DH as a spiritual leader, this would be a horribly unpopular decision. Can they really get away with this? They can, and they did, and this is how.

Allow me to invite DH to step into these pages for a moment, there are only three players in this dreadful tale as it unfolded, and I believe he deserves his own voice in this particular story, the unsuspecting target in the chair at ground zero that day, pin pulled, grenade launched, bits of life-shrapnel flying. In my mind it evokes first-act scenes of James Bond films, a group of businessmen all sitting at a conference table when suddenly one’s chair tips back and dumps the infidel not on board with the plan right the slap out the window, cue Wilhelm scream.

DH:

I walk into the church building, expecting to carpool with two other pastors and head out for a Pastor’s conference. Upon entering the building, the church secretary (remember Sportie and Sidekick? Sidekick is now the Pastoral assistant/Secretary. Figures. Ok, I’ll quit interrupting.) informed me I needed to meet them in Pastor Jock’s office. I did, and saw PJ sitting at his big shiny new Lead Pastor desk, facing his computer.

I had a seat, and PJ said a couple things I don’t remember, but summarized some of our recent unpleasantness…the punchline being “we have decided your days at this church have come to an end.”

I was stunned. This caught me completely off guard. Other followup words ensued, Pastor 2 in agreement. This was a Monday morning, and I was told to have my office cleared out by the end of the week.

There were no advance warnings or indication this were a thing that could happen, like you would expect in an ethically run business, but churches do not have to abide by those pesky HR laws like those other worldly businesses.

This was way too much to process at once. Not only the fact that I had invested my life in this place for 10 years. but also the fact that this was a sole income loss just as the great recession of 2008 was getting rolling. I did my best to respond calmly and graciously, while dying inside. Job-wise, I had no plan B. I had already long given up my previous profession of choice, so that I could pursue this life of higher purpose.

Then, Pastor Jock handed me a prewritten letter for me to sign.

My resignation letter.

Despite my completely disoriented state of mind, I did have enough clarity to see that
the purpose of my signing it was to make it appear as if I had decided to leave the church,
and therefore make it look like they had not fired me. In my catatonic condition, I still knew enough to refuse to sign that document-so it would be on them to explain to the church that they fired me.

Only they didn’t do that.

The following Sunday morning they explained we were leaving (there’s an audible collective gasp on the recording of that service, this shocked the congregation as much as it did us), and that there would be a special church meeting that night to explain what happened.

In this meeting, they explained that Monica and I had decided to step down.

A complete fabrication.

Of course, I wasn’t there to hear this for myself, I had to hear it back through our friends who were in the meeting.

We did indeed have friends who saw through this charade, and decided to cut ties with the church over seeing this level of self-protective deception from the leadership. But of course, most people accepted this as truth from the Man of God, and it became the accepted narrative within the church. And once the myth was accepted, I had no way to convincingly tell the truth, which was that I was abruptly fired from my ministry position of 10 years without any warning.

Back to the meeting, both pastors gave me a hug in Christian “love” and I numbly drove home to tell Monica and the kids.

And he did, and we all sat there in shock, the rug has been pulled out but all is suspended and is waiting for time and gravity to legally demand all of it crash to the ground.

All that week, DH cleaned out his office. Papers, planners, family pictures and instruments paraded back to our house, a somber homecoming of ten year’s evidence, boxes glaring at me from the foyer shouting YES THIS JUST HAPPENED in the face of my denial. Ain’t just a river, ha ha.

At first, we thought this wouldn’t happen, this COULDN’T happen, how can they get away with this? They would change their minds, maybe the congregation would demand….

But once they fed the congregation the lie that we had stepped down, we knew we were done. I mean, what could we do? They had the platform, they had the audience, they had the Man of God, you gotta believe the Senior Pastor, right??

We even discuss taking out an ad in the local paper explaining the reality, but our plans are quickly foiled by realizing this would only make us look even worse, sour grapes spilling rotten wine all over Tiny Town.

Not only were we done, but because they had chosen to create the narrative that we stepped down, it was implied there was something we had done wrong, why would we step down when things were going so well?

Where there is a void of information, people will fill it with their own fanciful explanations…and THOSE tall tales of darkness and debauchery are only beginning.

.

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ps yes that’s an Easter egg