Secrets Revealed

During the time following my stint as youth intern, we continued to attend First Baptist. I taught Sunday School in the youth department. And I swallowed an ungodly amount of hatred and anger every time David Pierce walked the steps up to the pulpit to lead worship. I didn't let it show on the outside at first, but I was letting the anger and hatred kill me emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. I began looking for reasons not to attend church. My wife, who had married a strong, outspoken christian leader, could not understand what was happening. Not that I understood it much better myself.

Slowly, what initially affected me only spiritually began to leak out into other areas of my life. It was just like a slow action poison, killing first my relationship with God, then poisoning my marriage, then my relationships with my family, then friends, then affecting my ability to do my job. And just as I was incapable of recognizing David's actions as abuse, I was also unable to recognize how my refusal to deal with the abuse was slowly killing me from the inside. All of it, the spiritual deadness, the problems with my marriage, the lack of support from family and friends because of bridges I burned, continued to build.

I became more and more withdrawn, prone to some pretty extreme mood swings, and in general just not a very fun person to be around. As with air pressure in a closed vessel is want to do, all that building emptiness, hatred, anger, depression, and deadness began to look for a weak point to escape through. Finally, in 2008, the day before Thanksgiving it found its exit point.

I had spent most of the day at my in-laws with my wife. At the end of the evening, what started as an argument about my wife's sister triggered something in me that I'll never be able to explain. For someone that had, over the course of the last several years become very adept at controlling my emotions, I became very emotional. And by very emotional, I mean completely, utterly, emotionally out of control. I was sobbing uncontrollably. I couldn't get any words out, but the one that that kept going through my mind was "She has no idea. I have to tell her."

Finally, I pulled myself together just enough to answer her "What's going on with you?" with a single word. "David." We both sat quietly for a few minutes while I continued to pull myself together. Finally, between sobs, I was able to get out "there was more to David than just discipleship. He abused me." We stayed up most of the rest of that night talking. I tried to tell her as many details as I could. She went through every emotion in 2 hours that I had gone through in 6 years. Anger, sadness, betrayal, fear. My wife is an amazing woman of action. When I finished telling everything, the first thing she said was "do we call the police or Rick [FBC's Pastor]?"

Ultimately, we went to Rick first. I still don't know if that was the right decision or not.