That was interesting to say the least.

For a long period of time we were unable to find work, David was still working on his thesis and we were networking for the coffee shop ministry. We got connected with many great people who saw the vision and supported us, not financially because we never felt that we were supposed to receive an income from the ministry. However, the owners of several local coffee shops opened their doors to us and gave us free rein on the weekends to have people come in and share their art. It was a win-win for both parties because the coffee shop would gain new customers/business and the artists would gain exposure/business. There were times that it was very frustrating having churches tell us that they did not want it to be a mix of denominations. Then there was the business of trying to “sell” us to congregations.

One pastor of a megachurch told us that he could have his 1300 young adults there every Sat., all we had to do was join a small group.

We did not feel comfortable in that church or with the proposal so we just let it drop. It was mainly how the pastor made it clear that he could influence his people to go wherever he said. Scary. So many churches loved the idea but wanted us to be under their umbrella. We felt like it was not supposed to be a part of a specific church. Finally, we got involved with an internet ministry and became a parachurch ministry under them. They brought us on to write articles for them dealing with many different topics. We met different people and were exposed to a lot of different ministries. David eventually got an adjunct position at a Christian University and we had really warmed out our welcome at his parents house. They had their own financial burdens.

It was time for us to leave but we had no money and no place to go.

Many of the people we had met stepped up and rallied around us through prayer and funds. We were able to get a horrible apartment for $200 a month with David cleaning the grounds to help with rent. We felt like it was a palace! We didn’t care about the location or the black mold it was ours and it was huge compared to the room we had been in.   We finally managed to start the coffee shop ministry and had many different artists come through. We had paintings, photography, indie Christian films that would offend a lot of Christians but the messages were great because they were painful and challenging, poets, musicians, and some speakers. It didn’t last long though, we got pregnant and I started to get very sick from the mold and the pregnancy.

David had to find more work and I was in bed the first few months of the pregnancy.

From the beginning we felt like we were supposed to start it and others were to take over. After we got pregnant I just couldn’t keep up with getting artists to come and David had to get as much work as possible. Again people rallied around us and helped us get into a much nicer apartment. We had a great experience while we did the coffee shop, we met many believers who felt like they just couldn’t step into a church building ever again and they enjoyed the freedom of being themselves. There were artists who felt like their talent was wasting away because there was no outlet for them in the Body of Christ but the ministry was giving them the outlet they longed for. There was freedom of beliefs and freedom of expression. If ever I felt the power of God it was in the moments that the artists were operating freely in their gifting and expressing themselves before man and God.

I loved when people would say things like “I never knew Christians were creative.”

Doesn’t that seem wrong? I know not everyone is a Christian but the sheer belief that we are supposed to believe in the Creator, wouldn’t it seem like we would be VERY creative? Whatever our creative outlet may be, it is not limited to the arts but what we are gifted at. Wouldn’t our inspiration come from working with the Creator and knowing Him? I am not being a snot here I am being serious. It is a question that I have thought about a lot. I digress. The owners of the coffee shop did keep it going for a while and the owners franchised to several other Christians who did keep it going in their own way. Some of the churches we met with started their own version in their buildings. I liked how for a time it brought unity to people who ordinarily would not come together, I liked how it wasn’t about one church or artist but about a community trying to express the love of Christ through their gifting and sharing it with others through love.

David and I have been church vagabonds pretty much from the beginning.

Even before I met David I would frequent various churches throughout town, I liked being exposed to different churches and people. Though I was devoted to both of my home churches while I went to them, I still was visiting friends churches as well. When we moved we never felt like we found a church home, we went to many different churches from Denominational to Pentecostal to Messianic we were all over the place. We liked it like that. After the twins were born though our life changed drastically and we ended up in seclusion for a long time. We tried to go to church on several occasions but it just didn’t work, especially since we never belonged to a church there. This would lead to the path of us going to a church here that caused so much confusion and pain.

I completely lost my identity after the kids were born, ministry had become who I was.

I really lost any sense of self trying to understand what was going on with Daniel and taking care of the babies by myself. David had to work and I had no family, no friends and no help. We lost touch with all of the connections we had before and I was starting to get very depressed. I loved being a mom but I was so tired, lonely, and would be locked up in the house all the time. Where we lived it was cold! I do not do well with cold and snow anyway but the last year we were there we had been trapped in our house several times because of blizzards. I couldn’t drive the car we had and the city we lived in kept me in constant anxiety. I had no contact with people for long periods of time. When we moved here I was desperate for any social contact.

Because of my vulnerable state, I didn’t use very good judgment.

I am naive and gullible about people’s motives anyway, but I have been especially that way in church because I thought that all Christians (actually most people) were good and nice and would never do anything mean. I still do, mostly. I felt like if there were problems than it had to be my fault. I have written about this church enough, basically I had my guard down, I was tired, lonely and desperate because of that I fell for some twisted thinking and wrong doctrine. David was trying to be as supportive as possible and had hoped that I would see for myself what was taking place.

They used scriptures to control and manipulate, not for what they are truly for.

It didn’t take long but it was long enough for me to experience spiritual abuse and to feel like I was loosing my mind. The good thing is I learned a lot, I have forgiveness and no bitterness any longer. I know that my priority in life now is to take care of my kids and just love people as best as I can. We have never been evangelists or  apologetists (I think I made that word up.) but we have always wanted to share the love of Christ and the acceptance that community is supposed to be about no matter where people are on their spiritual or non-spiritual journey. :- ) We see and experience God through the gifts and freedom to share them with others. The goodness that comes from serving one another without seeking something for ourselves, that brings us great joy. For us that is what Jesus reflects, love, acceptance and building up people to be who God intended them to be.

We do not feel obligated or guilted in sharing the message of Jesus, we just try to live it out.

(And now this movie is done, on to the next one. )

Now to relationships of my past, from my last post you heard of the incredible first boyfriend I had. During that relationship, I became extremely depressed, eating disorders were manifested even more, dis morphia, which I still struggle with, self hatred, self doubt, and I ended up in the emergency room from trying to commit suicide. I felt that was my only way out. Things had been escalating and the final straw was when he called me at 6am and told me he had just slept with my best friend. That was it for me. He did save my life by rushing over to my house and waking my mom – he also called 911. I was 16 years old when that happened.

From that I had to start going to a counselor, who just thought I was a teenager in a bad relationship.

I was in a bad relationship but the counselor didn’t go beyond that (do you see a pattern here?). No one asked the right questions. No one dug deeper to find out what was going on in my mind. No one noticed all of my cries for help. This incident did help me get the strength to get out of that relationship. I finally got to the point of saying to him, “Fine if you want to kill me do it! I am not going to let you control what I do!” And I didn’t let him, he tried to run me off the road, he followed me, sent his girlfriend (now wife) after me, but finally she got pregnant and that gave me freedom for a while.

I had started a new relationship.

The guy I started dating was one of my obsessions throughout high school. I had a massive crush on him and I thought he was the one. He would be the man who would love me and we would have a great life now that I escaped the grasp of psycho. Long story short , he was just as much of a jerk as my first. He didn’t physically abuse me but he did mess with me emotionally and mentally. He probably has no clue that he was like that because from what I can tell he is still the same way he was 18 years ago.

I would venture to say that he would say that it was my fault and that I was crazy.

Those were the common answers I got from him. He did things like push me out the front door naked and not let me back in, for our neighbors to see. He thought that was hilarious. He would pin me down and dig his elbow in my chest or back and do the all so lovely pass gas on me. He was a great one for my sensory issues. He would choose to have lunch with other girls at work and talk to many of the gals then say I was jealous. Well I was, I couldn’t understand why he would prefer to be with other people when he had me. I wasn’t possessive I was jealous in the sense of wanting him to choose me. Why not me?  He liked to have parties all the time. I would just get drunk – that was the only way I could cope with all the stuff going on. One of the devastating things he did to me was go behind my back and plan to move back to our home town. He told me on a 15 min. break at work. Later that evening I found out that practically everyone at our place of work knew except for me.

I was crushed and it took a long time to recover from that.

My first boyfriend and my second boyfriend had caused me a lot of pain and confusion. I had no idea how to read them. I looked like such a fool to other people. Everyone else knew all of these things going on and I had no idea. With my first boyfriend, I would befriend the girls he slept with. Why? I don’t know. In both of these relationships I felt I was the one not giving enough, not loving enough, the one who was causing them to behave the way they were. Somehow it had to be me because they understood the world and I didn’t. I tried so hard to do better to give everything I could in the last relationship and I wasn’t good enough.

continue on to part II…

I believe I had an encounter that opened my eyes and began to show me that I had value.

By the time I met David, I had written off men and decided I would devote myself to Jesus. I devoted my life to doing what I felt Jesus wanted me to do, tell others how much He loves them. I still do that I believe God does love people and our mission on earth is to spread that love through letting others know they are valued. We all have gifts and talents that should be shared. We all need to know that we should be cared for, recognized, cherished for who were are. Not religion, not others interpretation of who God is and how you should live, just acceptance where you are for who you are and build into to you so that you can succeed in being the best unique you. Sorry, I didn’t mean to go off.

I met David which is a very long story that will have to wait.

He has been the best person to come into my life. I know God placed him in my life because he has loved me with no games. He has been everything that I have needed to overcome past pains. He has helped me to help myself. He has built into to me and encouraged me. He has brought me hope and not only told me that I am valued, he has valued me. We are open and honest with each other. We say what we mean and sometimes we hurt each other without meaning to but we discuss it. We talk. We share. We wrestle with the issues of our faith, the inconsistencies, the personal struggles, we work together to build into our children.

We also hardly leave our house, have limited friends, and keep a fortress of solitude.

We are two people with Aspie traits that just so happen to have enough of the same obsessions along with enough differences to challenge each other constantly. David works from home and I stay home with the kids. We like our life like this. We have to push ourselves to get out because otherwise we would never see anyone and be perfectly happy with that. Well we do like to  socialize but it takes so much out of us, we know that we have to for ourselves and especially our kids. We want to help them be able to be around people and have fun. Our kids have helped us to be more social. We all work together to help each other.

I say all of that to say it is not ok for people to be treated the way I was.

It is not ok for any person to go through a lot of what I went through but I do not know the major effects it can have on people who are on the autism spectrum. Abuse is not ok. People with autism and on the spectrum need people to be aware for them. We have got to watch out for abuse. I have been very protective of Daniel because he is still unable to tell me if someone has harmed him. He is just beginning to tell me when he has been hurt but still has a hard time telling me where and how. We have got to stay alert and on top of the way people treat those who are different, those who are unable to recognize abuse.

I would like to know how these kinds of situations effect other people on the spectrum.

I feel that several of things I have mentioned may seem quite silly, if I listed all of the things that were done to me I am positive people would think me crazy. However, for me these things were devastating. The situations caused me a lot of pain and suffering. I don’t think I am the only one and that is why I am writing this. I believe that it is both therapeutic for me and others to know that these things are not ok. No one should ever be treated this way and no one should feel like they deserve it. I am thankful to have David who helped me to understand that these things are wrong. If it wasn’t for him walking me through and building into me, I would still feel as though I deserved to be treated poorly by others. I have accepted this from people I dated, people I worked with, people I went to school with, people I went to church with over and over, I have accepted bullying and abuse as my fault. The majority of the time I didn’t even know it was abuse or bullying.

I know this is a long post and I hope you made it through without being terribly bored!

Here are some resources.

http://www.scn.org/autistics/abuse.html

http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/relationships/abuse.html

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/center_index.php?id=2

http://www.recovery-man.com/abusive/abusive_signs.htm

http://www.keepkidshealthy.com/welcome/commonproblems/Child_Abuse.html