My big-sister-at-church, whose ambition is to build an enormous, luxurious shelter for homeless women to teach them about beauty and God’s love and to be responsible and live clean, was waiting for a contest prize. You see, many people at church ahd given her signs, and just as they had decided they were about to start setting up the retreat using the prize, they set a price on their house and the next day a stranger came to their door, though the house had no sign, and offered the amount they were thinking of asking. They celebrated, cried, prayed, danced, whooped, packed and said goodbye – and someone else got the prize. They were just confused and tired. They fought. She had a drink… And soon enough they didn’t go to church much anymore, rarely answered the phone, rarely answered the door. They didn’t want to set a bad example being seen as they were, drinking, fighting and staying up all night.
I couldn’t understand it.
The new church system was the G-12 Vision, and the denomination our little nondenominational church was joining was Foursquare, which is Aimee Semple MacPherson’s organization that goes all the way back to the 1920’s. These aren’t connected organizations. Foursquare lets any church join that agrees with (I believe) ten points of doctrine. I don’t remember all of them. Foursquare wasn’t goign to influence us much; G-12 was going to redesign our life in a nine-month period. “It takes nine months to be born” they said. I was apprehensive. Everyone burst with excitement and I joined in automatically.
Right before my “sister” (my best friend in the church, who had guided me in) quit going, I’d gone to the women’s potluck to tell my history in hope God would use it to help others. I have quite a history. Some asked me for advice and seemed grateful, so it looked as if my real mission in the world had finally begun. Finally, my existence would do good.
A pastor and others said I ought to record my story for use in the library. I was afraid but felt guilty about being afraid, after all they had done for me because I would do great things for God. I went to a family’s house to record it. While there, I had a nervous tic. It happens sometimes. They summoned church leaders, who rushed over and urged me to get “delivered” as soon as possible. I was baffled. I wasn’t sure what delivered meant. I explained about the tic but this was not going to be accepted, it was as if I hadn’t said it. Somehow afraid and embarrassed that I didn’t need anything from them, I blurted out all my social awkwardness. I rambled about feeling inadequate and not having a close friend and feeling I was always doing something wrong. So they set up a healing, deliverance and discipling program for me. This was something apparently everyone was going to go through soon anyway, and I would get special attention as I was such a wreck.
I thought that the sessions would be open to whatever I needed. I filled out forms about extremely personal stuff. The wording made it hard to answer correctly. It seemed impossible not to end up overstating and twisting things because of the way it was written.
Then I met with them. It was nighttime. The group smiled dewily at me and told me how they’d suffered for me because they loved me and that they had been through this too and it hadn’t hurt them. I signed away my physical safety after arguing awhile. I couldn’t imagine them hurting anyone, after all. They said some people just do things to hurt themselves and this is something the law group likes to nail down.
Then they asked me for a recovered memory, spoke to me like children singing kind of, held me, cried, screamed, lay me on the floor, urged me to relax while pacing around me shouting, barked at me whenever I reacted or shifted weight, and whenever I stopped paying attention. And I knew whatever I believed about what was happening would contradict something i’d heard there, and that doing so was disobedient and very dangerous. I lay in totally suspended judgment focused tightly on a dramatic scene I was not allowed to react to or unfocus from at all. In no time, it became as if their voices were from somewhere timeless and I struggled to sort out what they’d said from what I’d thought.
There were two of these. Other strange things happened, too, such as the urging to read a Rebecca Brown book and “see a lot in it that sounds familiar” and tell someone so. Rebecca Brown is a public speaker who says she is the only one who can combat a worldwide satanic conspiracy that includes what sounds like most people.
After two sessions I read the book and couldn’t tell what my mind was getting fromt he book and what I was remembering from my past and what was a dream I’d had or something. They had told me that I was to consider myself a new person after these meetings. Even innocuous parts of my identity were officially not part of me anymore. My “logic and analytical” traits were condemned and cast out.
I could go on and on. But I went through a preview of a longer and deeper rpocess they were alls cheduled to go through eventually, from what i can figure out by now.
I guess I’m still not at the part where I became Catholic.
I speak to God all the time and He does speak back everytime I read the Scriptures. Something new that I never saw before usually pokes out of those words that I’ve read many times before, and that’s yet another thing I’m thankful for! 
My story is SO similar!
