The Quest Continues

Veteran's Cemetery Photo rights: TA Boland

Recently I had opportunity to honor my husband’s memory on the 10th anniversary of his passing. It was a complicated, emotional time. I spent weeks in advance writing letters to him, having conversations with friends and a counselor. I wanted the day to be simple and straightforward.

The morning I was to drive to the town where the cemetery sits, I was full of anxiety. I didn’t want to run into anyone I used to know. I didn’t want to deal with the other issues that arise when I remember that town.

For years I’ve been trying to understand how and why my grief over my husband's death became so entangled with my grief for the church. So many bad moments of church life sit heavy on me. It’s more than personality conflicts, disagreements, or differences of opinion. It’s evil behind closed doors, moral failures that go unaccounted and unrepented, the prideful assumption that church goers owe the church something and should prove themselves worthy.

The two griefs collided as we drove past the church we attended for more than a decade. I heard my heart say, “The church let us down badly”. It was then I realized the memory that brings the two griefs together.

My husband was confined to a wheelchair when he began hospice. His mental decline had begun. He could remember 20 years ago but he couldn’t remember yesterday. I didn’t have the heart to remind him every day why we had left the church and all of the backlash we received from it. He remembered none of that.

He sat in his wheelchair one morning and broke down emotionally. It’s hard to watch a once healthy young man cry. He said, “I don’t understand why my friends don’t care about me anymore.” He was talking about his friends from church. I begged people to come visit him.

And there the two griefs coexisted. My dying husband and the church who no longer loved us. Because we were no longer worthy of the church’s love, my husband felt alone and abandoned. To this day, there is a deep sting in my heart when I remember it.  

The Pain of the Past

Since my husband’s death, I’ve sat with grief and trauma counselors, dug into scripture, and cried out to God many times. Many people ask me if it’s been ten years, aren’t I “over it” yet? Well, my husband is still dead. I’m still navigating life without my partner. I’m still a widow that often feels like half a person because half of me has been amputated. So no, I’m not over it yet.

But, I can gratefully say that I am learning a lot about being a better human being. In the pride of youth, I thought I could conquer anything with enough knowledge and determination. I now understand just how weak I am against the realities of living in this world. I could not carry on without relationship with the living God who cares for me.

Me and the Church

I’ve spent years struggling to find a healthy concept of the church. I wasn’t disappointed by one church experience. It was a lifelong pattern of failure in numerous churches. As a teen, the pastor who ran off with the church secretary while I was babysitting his three small kids. The youth pastor going through a divorce who hired my 17-year-old friend as a nanny and took her into his bed. The married youth pastor of another church who impregnated one of the highschoolers in his care. The married worship pastor who slept with my friend whose husband was deployed at the time. In still another church, the worship pastor who turned out to be a sexual predator who’d been given a good reference from his previous church because they wanted to get rid of the problem.

My disappointment with the church is lifelong.

I discovered last week that I am still angry. I am angry that the church tells me that I am required to serve it (the church) even though I only qualify for love and acceptance if I measure up to its standards. I am angry that the church preaches morality but does nothing to stop immorality inside its doors. I am angry that the biblical mandate for repentance is shoved aside to make room for things that make people feel good. It makes me angry that, in many congregations, love and worship of God is not the primary point of gathering. I am angry and sad that the idea of “love your neighbor” has been distilled down to good deeds in the community while ignoring the person sitting next to you on the pew.

I’ve slowly come to realize over the last several years that what we call “church” is an entity and entities are neutral, neither good nor bad. I was never targeted by the church, although it felt like it for a while. There was nothing so wrong with me that I was drawn to bad churches, as I believed for a long time. I was on a sincere quest to know God and his people. I was hurt many times because there is a systemic sickness in the body of Christ at large.

It hurts my heart that people who have distanced themselves from the sickness are labeled as traitors and unfaithful followers.

Reconciliation

Is there a way to reconcile my experiences with church and what spiritual disciplines in the present honor God? Can I interact with an entity if I’m still angry? The truth is, I don't think you can reconcile with an entity. The entity of church is a scheduled set of behaviors determined by the priorities of the individuals within the entity.

If I can’t hold an entity responsible, in what direction do I point all that anger? Free will means every individual makes choices. We all make poor choices sometimes.

As the church is quick to remind me, I am required in Christ to forgive. Absolutely true. However, forgiveness alone does not bring reconciliation. “Without repentance, there is no remission of sin”. I can forgive someone without ever talking to them again.

While I work to forgive all of the hurts and offenses, I still grieve those other people wounded by an unrepentant group of individuals claiming to be of God. I grieve the generations that carry harmful ideas of a loving God because of perverse groups calling themselves part of Christ’s body. I grieve the unrepented brothers and sisters who have convinced themselves they have no sin.

Gratitude

At the same time, I am grateful.

God has walked by my side through extreme emotional dysregulation and my inability to navigate cognitive dissonance between the past and present and my inability to sort the experiences of the past versus my expectations in the here and now. The Lord has accepted the pain I have carried within when many people have dismissed it. Jesus has held my tears and has spoken words of strength, correction, and wisdom.

I am also grateful to God for his provision. The Lord made sure I was taken care of as a widow, physically and financially. Along the way, the Lord has sent good people who weren’t afraid to walk into my mess. I know that God has true believers within the entity of church and he has graciously allowed me to meet some of them.

As I continue to wrestle to find meaning in the scheduled set of behaviors within the entity of church, I know that true fellowship is found among the individuals, the people of God. It’s difficult in many ways, complicated by human tendencies, challenged by preference and life experience and our collective inability to love like Jesus.

But is it not the gift of the Lord Jesus? That we would be united by his Spirit, in the love God, to love the Father and love each other? So that God’s will is accomplished among us and we bring glory to His name.

I continue to wrestle in the name of Jesus.

When I am tired, He gives me rest.

When I hurt, He gives me comfort.

When I am angry, He listens and reproves.

When nothing makes sense to me, He teaches me to stand still and wait.

And here, in the body of Jesus, I stand and wait. How will He answer me?

Copyright@ TA Boland 2025