There’s so much I want to write but in fear I may begin rambling with no clear point to what I’m saying.
So I’ll keep it somewhat simple for now
I was baptized at the age of nine in 1994, but questioned my salvation from the day forward.
At this point, looking back, I do feel my father and mother were emotionally abusive on one level or another.
We traveled from preaching school to preaching school, congregation to congregation.
I remember questioning everyone and everything growing up, as behavior didn’t coincide with teachings.
I felt like the church always came before family relationships.
Some of my decisions as a teen were not wise (experimenting in different ways) - while I take personal responsibility for these decisions, I do feel my upbringing was directly related to my poor decision making at that time.
In 2006 I became engaged to a non member and was given 30 days to vacate the home.
I was 20 years old at this time. I chose to stay engaged. My father began cruel condescending language and I left in less than a week, living homeless for 3 weeks in my car (they didn’t know this as I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction in seeing me suffer in any way). After discussing with my now husband, I left the church for the first time and moved to Virginia.
I struggled with my relationship with God and after discussion with my family, repented.
My husband was baptized and we began worshiping in our home since “there are no faithful congregations near” where we used to live at that time.
We were seen as faithful.
My parents began urging us to move to Ohio. They wouldn’t accept during each phone call, that we needed a job that would pay the bills and urged my husband to cease his career and “take a job as a garbage man if I had to”.
We did not waiver in our desire for him to continue his career.
In 2010 my brother suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury.
I felt for my family and brother and after discussion, my husband and I decided to move to Ohio.
Rather than seeking proper medical assistance and psychological help for the family, to include my parents and my brother, they began to take on the role of victims. Bad behavior exhibited by them was swept under the rug by my husband and I, chalking it up to we needed to be patient with them given this situation. No one had ever had a family member go through this before, and we just wanted to do right by our family and right in the eyes of God.
In 2012 my son was born with a host of congenital birth defects.
My family was not actively present, did not learn to care for my son. The excuse was that they had enough on them with what was happening to my brother.
In 2016 I was admitted to the hospital for sepsis and almost lost my life.
The concern expressed for me during my near death experience was nothing compared to the involvement expressed toward my brother during his life altering injury.
The last straw was the attempted character assasinstion in 2017 on my husband, after my father saw him picking his nose. And used scripture to argue that elders and preachers have the right to approach anyone about anything to help promote positive life changes to be more pleasing to God.
This email was received on the morning of our first high risk OBGYN appointment for our second pregnancy.
My husband and I were diagnosed with PTSD after the traumatic birth of our first child.
We expressed to my family we needed to be deslt with differently to avoid anxiety.
We were met with unkind words, with the explanation that we needed to have frank talk so that we could continue to grow and mature in the Lord.
We decided to stop going to the church when they continued to character assassinate my husband and consider our stressful personal situation with our anxiety and also having a medically fragile child, while being pregnant with a second child.
My husband also stopped supporting the website (he is in IT).
The onslaught of emails received from my brother validated our decision to leave was correct.
We were told there is a special place in hell for us, and that our child’s birth defects were due to our living in sin, and our second child may be born dead due to these sins.
We sent a cease and desist letter to my family in May.
We were silent from February to May (until the cease and desist) and continued to remain silent regardless of my brother sending nasty emails until September when I wrote him to remind him he needed to stop or we would pursue legal action.
My father wrote a letter stating they had no idea my brother was writing, that he is “not justifying” what my brother wrote but requested me to see that he was in fact very bothered by the family situation.
He then concluded that because I’m unreasonable and I “have a tendency to not remember the past correctly” he would honor the cease and desist.
I chose to not respond and have remained silent still.
