Both here and there.

Reflections on grieving the past in the present.

My body knew the melody before my brain placed the song. Something about the chord progression was known down in my bones, more than familiar, nearly imprinted in me. I could imagine standing next to one of my best friends in college, singing together, blissfully enjoying the simplicity of faith and life that wasn’t yet complicated beyond what we could have comprehended back then. The song was one that was played over and over my freshman year, a long 17 years ago.

Yesterday was the first time I heard this song in nearly that long. I was in a church, a place that has not been simple for a while in my life. And even though church has been a complicated place for years, whatever happened yesterday morning was different from anything I’ve experienced before.

Something about that song brought me back to the sweet simplicity of my faith back then. I remembered — not just in my mind but in my body — how beautifully pure faith + community used to be when none of it was yet tainted in my life. When faith + community was not yet harmed. When faith + community was not yet wounded. It was all still intact. I was still intact.

And as my body remembered just how simple things were back then, I could feel the weight of just how different things are here in the now—and remembering this broke my heart.

In the now, I live on the other side of what was previously bliss. In the now, what used to be known as a safe place feels inseparable from the harm done by different faith communities across three different states, giving wounded and protective parts of me way too much evidence that abuse in faith communities is not isolated to one space, but lives all over.

In the now, when I walk into church, part of me wants to be there and another part thinks, run, it might seem fine now, but we’ve seen how this narrative goes. Everything might look shiny on the outside, but we’ve learned better. It’s only a matter of time before abuse or scandal takes over.

And while I could go over statistics about how common and detrimental spiritual abuse are, and how grateful I am for people who are speaking life into these wounded spaces, I just miss the simplicity of back then, when faith + community was home and the idea of spiritual abuse was a foreign concept to me. But that’s not my reality here in the now.

I wish that Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to Church wasn’t so personally meaningful in my life. But it is. I wish that Hillary McBride’s podcast Holy Hurt hadn’t resonated so deeply that it left my jaw wide open, helping me piece together what was shattered years ago. But it did. I wish A Church Called Tov by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill with Mike Cosper hadn’t hit home so intimately. But they did. And they still do.

So I stood there yesterday, very aware that I was standing in 2024 in a church in Scotland. And at the same time, it was as though I could see through the eyes of 18 year old me on a college campus in Ohio—a fierce, passionate, and joyful woman who both loved God and loved being in a faith community, surrounded by what she considered to be sisters and brothers, surrounded by what she believed to be a family, or more precisely, who she believed to be her family. And it was too much for my heart to feel the full weight of the distinction that I live in now—when I still deeply love God, and so long to feel safely anchored in a faith community, but don’t know if that’s really possible.

Part of me wonders, was it really real? 18 year old me didn’t know what I would soon walk through, and that the very people around me would be ones to inflict more harm than I could have ever imagined. And even on the other side of that ministry in Ohio, I’d be blindsided again in North Carolina and Tennessee, leaving me with scars to take with me across the sea.

Now, I’m very aware of perspectives I could take here to help me move on. I could simply stop trying to find a safe spiritual place and thereby stop being disappointed. Or I could accept that there is no faith community I’ll engage with that is going to be fully safe because people make up the church, again, helping me no longer be disappointed.

But neither of those meet me where I am, and would still leave me disappointed in other ways.

I love God and I long for spiritual community. And I long for spiritual community that is safe.

The first part of that statements isn’t as simple as it seems, so maybe it’s helpful to clarify if you’re feeling similar things. I love God, and also, I’m mad at God, confused by God, unsure if our idea of God is anything like what God is really like, and have no idea how to make sense of how God interacts with us and the world around us when there is so much pain and suffering everywhere.

And still, I love God and I long for spiritual community. And I long for spiritual community that is safe.

And so I stood there yesterday morning, feeling salty tears gently roll down the sides of my face, grieving what once was, a past experience that I’m not sure will ever be again, a past experience that I would give anything to make a true reality today.

Will I ever feel that simple sweetness of faith + community again? Is it possible to feel so free, safe, and anchored with others in a context that is so similar to a place that caused detrimental harm?

If this were a space where I didn’t write out stream of consciousness thoughts, I might have a better conclusion to offer you at this point in your reading. But if you’ve been here before, you know I really do follow my ADHD brain’s stream of consciousness in all of its nonlinear paths and raw landing points. And I wonder right now, maybe that’s actually most fitting. I know if I were on the other side of the screen, I wouldn’t want a neat and tidy bow that tried to tie this all together. And so if that’s where you are too, please know that without helpful answers to offer, what I can offer is this: You’re not alone.

And maybe that’s the most important thing we need to know.