Abandoned.

Wow, so this is definitely going to be a darker blog, but I encourage you to hang with me until the end. Remember, I promised honesty and vulnerability.  At the end there is great hope.

My encounter with church

Throughout my school aged years my family occasionally went to church, but I was never really into it.  I remember in middle school going to the local methodist church on Sundays and sometimes on Wednesdays.  I’m not sure how how many times I went, but I know that I only have a few memories of ever going.  The memories are quite vague.  The first is sitting in sunday service (yes, that’s it), the second is after a service looking at the model that was set up to show some sort of future expansion, the third was on a wednesday playing a game, and the last was sitting in sunday school with my friend Ryan.

I didn’t really get the church thing, but it never bothered me to go to church things.  There were other events that I went to with other friends, but I didn’t really see them as church things.  I saw them as more of a hanging out with friends kind of thing, and I was cool with that.  I was invited to a fall hang out time where we played games in the dark in a church parking lot.  There were girls there.  My friend Joel invited me and it was a lot of fun.

In high school, I was invited to weekend at a cabin in the middle of nowhere with my friend, Ryan.  He had found a new friend group who all went to a nondenominational church.  To be honest I thought nondenominational was weird but that was because I had never heard of it.  I thought churches were catholic or baptist or methodist, etc.  I agreed to go and so we all piled into a car or two and headed out.

Melon Collie and The Infinite Sadness

I have to take a tangent here.  I never really listened to the Smashing Pumpkins until after this story I’m telling, but I fell in love with their music because it matched so closely with how I felt about myself inside.  So this is first time talking about them in my blog, but I will say that it may not be the last time, so I apologize in advance!  All my life I have felt different, like I didn’t belong.  Many times growing up I felt invisible to others because I was different.  Nothing took away the emptiness.  In high school I had a hard time expressing what was actually going on inside because I could never put words to it.  Billy Corgan, the lead of the Smashing Pumpkins, put words to the things I had always felt.  If you are able to, listen to the song Blank that they put out on one of their EPs.

Listen to Blank on Spotify

Here’s the lyrics if you can’t listen.

I wish I was blank
I wish I was blank
I wish I could thank
I wish I was blank

I write a letter to you
And there’d be nothing to it
I wouldn’t hem and haw
On just how to start it

I wish I was blank
I wish I was blank
I wish I could thank
I wish I was blank

I wish I’d stand up straight
I wish I’d said things different
I wish I’d said nothing
Things would be so perfect
I wish myself to keep
I pray myself to sleep
I wish myself away
I wish I was blank

The Cabin

(My memory is fuzzy on some details, like I can’t remember which day these events happened, or if they even happened on the same evening or across multiple evenings., but every event that I describe did actually happen.)

This was a co-ed trip with a church youth group, although some of the “youth” were older than high school.  On the way out to the cabin, we stopped at a store and one of the guys got some Mad Dog 20/20 and various beers.  I didn’t drink, not for religious reasons, but it just didn’t hold any appeal to me at the time and I generally preferred to do the right thing, so underage drinking was not for me.  I felt kind of out of place, because I now got the sense that this was a drinking trip, and that I would be the only one not drinking, but i was stuck.

I remember as we drove, we had to cross several bridges and each time we crossed a bridge, we all held our breath until we reached the end.  We listened to music and laughed and generally had a great time.  When we got to the cabin, I remember the water smelled like rotten eggs.  The sulfur smell was overpowering, turning on the faucet made the whole room stink.  I also remember shooting a .22 pistol at cans in the woods.

That evening the drinking started, but there was some hope for me.  One of the girls on the trip told me she was not going to drink.  I finally had a partner and I wouldn’t be alone.  She was drinking Dr Pepper, just like me!  I found out later that evening that there was more than just Dr. Pepper in her can, and it broke my heart.  I was alone.

I wished myself away

Here’s the crazy thing, as I think back.  There was an “older” couple, probably young 20s who brought there child with them to this cabin.  I think they were supposed to be our chaperones.  Maybe they showed up later than the rest of us, either way, they brought their kid with them.  The kid was maybe 2 or 3 years old.  On one of the evenings, everyone was drinking, and I was again alone.  The girl I was interested in was having fun elsewhere, my good friend who had invited me was having fun, but I wasn’t.  

I felt like I had been abandoned.  I couldn’t explain it, and I would have told anyone else who might have asked at the time that I was fine and having a good time.  But I was empty and wished I could just make myself disappear.

I’ll spare you the details, but at one point of this evening, there were certain sexual innuendo that occurred and it happened right in front of the child.  For whatever reason I needed to disappear.  It triggered something in me that made me want to run away and hide, and so late at night in the middle of nowhere, Texas, I ran away into the darkness of night.

The Tree

I had to get away, but I didn’t know where.  I don’t think I made a big deal of it, so I just slipped away.  I don’t think i ended up far, but I hid behind a tree and I wept and I didn’t fully know why at the time.  I know better now though.  I wept because I was different, and I was broken, and I was abandoned, and I was alone.  I never shared anything with anyone and kept mostly to myself, but this evening, after weeping I started talking.  No one was around, so I talked to a tree.

I poured my heart out as to what I was feeling.  I shared that I felt misunderstood and that no one could possibly know me.  It never responded.  It never uttered a word, expect maybe the clicking of it’s branches in the breeze.  It said nothing, but it did listen.  This tree listened to what I had to say, and it didn’t offer reason or explanation or condemnation or ridicule.

Listening was what I needed.  I needed someone to hear me and see me for who I was.  The real, naked, unashamed me.  I felt accepted.

Eventually I returned, and the weekend came to a close and went on with the rest of high school.  I don’t think I saw much of those folks after that weekend.  Here the funny thing about this story, because I didn’t know it at the time.  Years and years later when this story came back to my mind, I realized that I wasn’t talking to a tree.  I was having my first conversation with God.