Life, Church And All Other Things

LIFE, CHURCH AND ALL THE OTHER THINGS

 Index

Finally I was actively researching and searching for a church. Growing up in a small town, the only church I knew was the Dutch Reformed Church that my mother attended. My dad never went to church except for weddings and funerals.
My dad, a well-respected school teacher, was always present. His primary responsibility was to provide us with a roof over our heads. He never gave me a reason to believe he was a bad father. He was always physically present, but he was emotionally absent.
 
Many years later, I had a conversation with my eldest sister, Monica. She told me about an argument she had overheard between my mom and dad when she was a young child. At that time, it was just her and our oldest brother. My parents disagreed on how to raise the kids. Both were very stubborn. My dad, fed up, told my mother that, from then on, she alone would raise the kids. This vow he made ultimately cost us kids everything.
 
There were times I needed my dad to be there for me, to speak up and protect me from my brothers, but he left it all to my mom. She was often too busy with her sewing and, frankly, didn’t care much. It was only when I started crying that she would yell at us or grab the belt and give us a hiding. Unfortunately, it was mostly me who faced this punishment, as my brothers knew how to avoid it. They pulled my hair, pinched me, and made faces at me. Then, they put on their sweet angel faces, pretending they did nothing.
 
When it came to church, all I remember about my dad was what my mum told us about him. I don’t think his parents went to church either. However, my dad lived in student housing while training to be a teacher. So, he had to attend church every week. My dad wrote a letter. It said the church was full of hypocrites. Authorities confiscated the letter, and he got in trouble for it. Religious education was part of the curriculum in primary schools, so it’s not like he had never read the Bible.
 
When I was twenty-one, my dad was in the hospital with a serious illness and approaching death. He asked my brother-in-law, who was with him at the time, to read a scripture from the Bible. Afterwards, he said, “My family never knew me.” I find that so sad. I loved my dad and had a great deal of respect for him.
My mum, on the other hand, attended church quite often. She sang in the church choir alongside a neighbour, which meant she always got a ride with her to church in their car. We lived far from the church. My mischievous brothers walked the long way with me every Sunday.
 
During the first part of the service, the elders required all the children to sit in the front two rows. There was an Elder who seemed to believe it was his sole purpose in life to stare us down with his angry gaze. If you so much as moved your hands, you could be sure to receive that fierce look from him. I don’t think he ever paid attention to a single word spoken from the pulpit.
 
When I was about seven, I was sexually abused by someone in the family. Nobody knew about this at the time because I was too ashamed to talk about it. I felt I couldn’t trust anyone, so I tried to pretend it never happened and tried to stay out of the way of that person.
 
At about ten or eleven, I was riding my bike home. A car failed to stop at a stop sign. It hit me and threw me 15 meters through the air. We lived in a small town without a hospital. I couldn’t walk, so they lifted me onto a small mat and placed me in the back of someone’s car to take me home. After many hours, a doctor finally agreed to examine me at home. He called an ambulance to take me to the nearest hospital, 25 miles away. I had dislocated my hip in the accident. But, after an hour of a rough ride in a speeding ambulance, the hip popped back into the socket. They patched me up and sent me back home.
 
What they didn’t realise was that I had also injured my back, and this only became evident in my late twenties.

 

 

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