Barely a year ago, I found myself completing a book that was written as a part of my healing process. With the opportunity to have that book published, I found myself wavering between sharing it and not sharing it with others. I teetered on a tightrope of emotions. At times, feeling assured that God wanted me to sound a warning by telling my story, and yet at other times, sensing that He wished me to remain silent. Someone dear to me once said, “Make sure it’s God’s voice you are hearing, and not your own.” So how does one decipher between the two?
In recalling the need for me to write that tell tell book, I would find myself becoming over run by feelings of both hurt and anger. For that reason, I felt certain that God did not intend me to share it with others. At least not in its entirety. There is one chapter from my book that I feel confident God wants me to share. It is a chapter, had it not happened to me, I would struggle to believe in its truth. Especially the location of where it happened.
1 Peter 5:8 says, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
For nearly five years I worked and attended the same church. My boss and pastor were one in the same. I enjoyed my job and the people whose lives that intertwined with mine. Still, there was always an uneasiness around me that kept me on edge. I knew God had placed me there. After all, the story of how I came to be in that place was pretty astounding. I will share more of that with you in another post. It seemed as if God himself had swung the door wide open, inviting me to both worshipping and working in that church. But why? In the beginning, I would learn God’s use for me was to make a positive change; to include those who were overlooked. In the end, He taught me a very valuable lesson, that Satan can be hiding in the least likeliest of places, including a church.
Before arriving at that church, I was joyful in my nature. I was known for my very happy and sunny disposition. So much so that my boss started calling me sunshine. I walked with God daily in my life and it was my one desire to show others the beauty in knowing Him. I hadn’t counted on how difficult that would eventually become for me. It is quite true that actions speak louder than words. Inaction speaks equally as loud.
An invisible line drawn between those who were deemed worthy and those who were not, became very much visible to my empathetic heart. Although the positivity of my demeanor began to have an encouraging affect within the church, darkness and light cannot exist together. For months, I sensed God willing me to leave; both the church and my job. I brushed that silent voice aside, assuming that perhaps it was my own I was hearing. After all, I was certain that God had placed me there.
There is one thing I am absolutely certain when it comes to God. If you don’t listen the first, second or even the third time, He will get your attention, one way or another. He was about to get my attention.
It happened innocently enough, while changing my clothes after work. I found what appeared to be flea bites on both my back and stomach. There was only one problem, I didn’t have animals, and so I dismissed the idea that the bites had come from fleas.
Each day after work, I would notice new bites on my body. Given the cluttered pattern, I felt certain I was getting bitten by fleas. That could only mean one thing, my office had a pest problem.
I’d often been witness to my boss’s uncaring attitude toward others. He was known for having an “if it didn’t affect him, it didn’t affect anybody” attitude. I’d seen it played out so often that I was certain he’d dismiss my concerns. He did at first, assuring me that my office couldn’t have fleas. Eventually he blamed the possibility of a flea problem on a couple from our church that he’d counseled a week earlier. Also blaming an elderly woman who’d came to the church months prior for financial aid. My heart felt the sting of his accusations. He’d drawn that invisible line between the worthy and unworthy again. Leaving out the possibility that his own dog could have been the source of the fleas in my office.
I don’t know why I expected anything different from my boss. After all, his inability to care about people as a whole, instead of a select few, had become a source of contention between us. I soon found myself smiling less and less, ever aware that God was willing me to leave.
Eventually a co-worker of mine was able to convince our boss that my office had fleas. I think she feared that unless the flea issue was taken care of, I would leave. I’d told her weeks prior that I felt certain that God was willing me to leave. I remember her saying to me in response to what I’d told her. “You can’t leave,” she pleaded, “What if it’s Satan trying to get you to leave and not God?” She finished by telling me that I had such a positive impact on the church and that if I left, she was going to leave also. Although she claimed that she wanted me to stay, she was keenly aware of what being there was doing to me. The once happy and joyful person that I had been was lost inside an angry and frustrated being that bore no resemblance to the former me. I even started wearing I-pods to work, listening to Christian music, in hopes of drowning out the negative atmosphere that clung to the air around me.
I don’t know what prompted her to convince our boss of the flea problem; my leaving or the change she saw happening to me. Whatever her reason, she’d convinced him and with his instructions, she flea bombed my office.
Within a few days of those bombs being set off, I found myself covered by flea bites again. The more I got ravaged by fleas, the more helpless I felt. Especially since not a single co-worker of mine was getting bitten. To make matters worse, they all seemed to want to convince me that the problem was in my head and that I’d somehow manifested the bites on my body. The treasurer even took it upon herself to come to the office dressed all in white, hoping to either prove once and for all, the existence or non-existence of fleas.
I remember the frustration I felt, eventually deciding that I was the source of those fleas. At one point, becoming so upset that I’d brought fleas to the church office that I’d asked my husband to reimburse the church for the flea bombs they’d used.
I will never forget the sternness of my husband’s otherwise very gentle voice as he firmly said to me, “Stop it! You know we don’t have fleas in our house. The bites only appear while you are at work. There are no new bites on your days off. You didn’t bring the fleas to the office; the fleas are in your office!” He was adamant in that conclusion. With tears in my eyes and his arm around me, he told me in no uncertain terms, “The flea situation needs to be addressed or you are quitting your job.” My husband had seen a change in me due to working at the church. He’d often begged me to quit, but always had left the decision up to me. This time, he was deciding for me.
I knew that my husband was right, I couldn’t continue allowing myself to feel guilty for something that wasn’t my fault, and so I gave my boss, my husband’s ultimatum.
The thought of me quitting my job, enacted my boss to call pest control. In the past, my boss’s controlling personality had made it difficult for others to endure working with him. I myself had no qualms with that and considered it to be proof of God’s sense of humor. After all, I had once been a former control freak and so working for one seemed a part of God’s plan for me. What I don’t think was a part of God’s plan was how negatively it would affect me having my boss and pastor as one in the same. It was difficult for me to see two different personalities within one person. The man behind the pulpit preaching to his congregation to be the church and the man behind his desk not heeding his own words. The day- to-day realization of that had left me with no other alternative, but to tell my boss the negative effect it was having on me. His response surprised me. He’d told me that he’d rather I quit the church than to quit my job.
Now once again, with the thought of me quitting my job, my boss took immediate action and pest control was called. I hadn’t expected such fast results. However, it didn’t come without a price.
My pastor’s call to my home was unexpected, the purpose for that call was not. He was calling to tell me that he’d called pest control and it was suggested to him that I might have bed bugs. According to him, he’d been told that the flea bombs should have worked. He was also told that it was “impossible” for fleas to jump high enough to bite me on the stomach and back, where the majority of my bites seemed to be. Feeling the urge to both scream and cry, I listened as my boss finished by telling me that his conversation with pest control had been a very interesting one. He then suggested that I should call them myself. There was no other conclusion for me to draw except that my pastor was blaming me for him having to call pest control.
I should have decided to leave in that moment, but instead, I did the very thing that my boss suggested I do, I called the pest control company.
It was during that conversation that I learned of my boss’s untruthfulness to me. He’d never been told that it was impossible for fleas to jump that high, but only that flea bites mostly occurred near the ankles. I knew it was fruitless to tell my boss what I’d learned during that phone call. I was just glad that finally the fleas would be taken care of. I was even more pleased that pest control had found fleas in my office.
That should have alleviated the problem. Unfortunately, the constant frustration of not being believed, as well as the lack of empathy from my pastor and others in the church, had taken a massive toll on me. What could have taken days to fix, ended up taking weeks, but the damage to me would take much longer to fix.
The pastor managed to make me feel guilty for the miniscule $300.00 that the church had to pay for pest control by often reminding me of that cost. He saw more value in money than me as both an employee and one of his flock. Three hundred dollars was barely four percent of what that church brought in weekly and yet that $300.00 seemed to mean more to him than me as a person.
Although the flea problem had been resolved, the damage to me was irrevocable. It had become all to clear why God had wanted me to leave.
On my final day there, although at the time I hadn’t planned on leaving, I sensed that day would be my last. When the pastor arrived for work that day, I brought to his attention a phone call that I’d received earlier that morning. I had hoped to find resolution with an occurring problem and I both needed and wanted my boss to back me on it. I was desperate to see that I mattered to him as a person and that I’d found my way into his worthy category. I’d given so much of myself to make his church a place where all were welcomed and not just a select few and I didn’t want to walk away as a failure.
As I pleaded with my boss saying to him, “I need you to be my pastor, not my boss,” I felt the weight of all that was happening crushing down upon me. I wanted to know that the man before me was the man of God that stood behind the pulpit. I needed desperately to know that his desire to be right would not override his desire to do right.
I pleaded to be heard, finally coming to the resolve that it was certainly God’s voice all along, willing me to leave.
Accepting that I’d been defeated, I could no longer be a light in a place of darkness, I barely spoke the words, “I just need to quit.”
My pastor’s reaction to those words did not surprise me and the anger in which he delivered his own, came expectantly. However, the content of them cut me much more deeply than I could have anticipated.
Death and power are in the life of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. Proverbs 18:21 (KJV)
The volume of his voice loomed over me as he slammed his hand down upon my desk. “You have been nothing, but trouble since your first day here, good riddance!” Everything else seemed to blur with the hatred behind his words. The person who’d often called me sunshine, was standing before me speaking words of death to my heart. I’d had enough and as I gathered my things to leave, I found myself feeling broken in so many ways that I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover. Had I been the problem all along? God was about to show me otherwise.
For weeks I hadn’t been bitten, but on my last day there, I received fresh bites upon my flesh. Within days of my quitting, those flea bites disappeared, never again to return.
Corrie ten Boom once gave thanks to God for the flea ridden jail cell that housed her suffering, believing that the fleas had protected her from further abuse from her captors. I too found myself thanking God for the fleas, but for a different reason. They had been my warning to leave a place that was destroying me piece by piece.
I know that there will be those who read this with much skepticism, unwilling to believe things like that can happen in a church. There will be those too who will happily point out that Christians are nothing, but hypocrites. To both I say this: Satan was a fallen angel and to falsely assume that Christians can’t fall or that Satan can’t be present in a church would have to disbelief in both the existence of God and Satan. To others I ask, how do you explain those fleas, relentless in their pursuit to inflict harm to my flesh? Disappearing momentarily, only to reappear on the very day on which my boss verbally attacked me, forcing me to quit my job.
Doubt if you want to, but I am certain that God was allowing me to see, the purpose of those fleas was to protect me, and just as Corrie Ten Boom had once done, I found myself thanking God for their existence.
Christ died for ALL of us and we each hold value in God’s eyes. Unlike with men, who sees value in others by what they can gain; instead of who they are as God’s children. We all have value and we all can have a relationship with God. It’s just a matter of reaching out and most importantly trusting that God loves us regardless of our flaws.
Several weeks after leaving my job, I felt God prompting me to reach out to my former boss.
With that came a reminder from God that people are flawed and they will always let you down in one way or another, but God Himself will never let us down. He will always be there to pick up the pieces that others have discarded and He will show us just how beautiful those pieces are to Him.