First of all I would like to thank the many kind and supportive comments sent along by those who find my articles and insights with my own experience as a minister in WCG helpful. I have to say it gives me a bit more sense of purpose in this life than just having to figure out what to do with the rest of my life now that the "wonder years" are long past.
I would like you all to know that writing is how I have processed my own experience as a man who really really wanted to be a part of the right church and teach the true Bible truth. I had been accepted to a Methodist Seminary at the same time I was accepted at AC and obviously made the "wrong" choice. I have no illusions about the fact that I believe that no matter where I had ended up learning someone's denominational truth, I would have had just about the same kind of crisis there too.
It is not my purpose to anger to challenge anyone's beliefs. Perhaps I just wish to open up our minds to the fact that there are bigger boxes to be looked in that when we first believed. Having been a WCG pastor, I know how we were "trained" and it was not well. You cannot understand origins and the history of the Bible by reading booklets written by in house wondermen or just by reading the text and commenting on what it seems to mean. An educated Pastor has a formidable education in the right place and often cannot bring all he "knows" to a congregation being about 50 years ahead of their ability to understand it. It is why pastors who fall out of favor with the company line usually end up teaching it if they have the initial credentials to keep on. In the WCG a minister did not and is why I now rub people the right way along with helping them with anything from headaches to injuries. I always had a medical side to me.
I have made some rather large mistakes since having to move on from those days. Actually I made some large ones during those days too. I have had to wrestle with the anxiety of separation from everything familiar and I caused it in some cases. My tone in some writings is a bit cheeky because it is my anger turned sideways which seems to be the definition of sarcasm. As a pastor in WCG one never expressed anger or that was it for you. I also grew up where "we don't say that," was a mantra to be obeyed. Thus one ends up a bit repressed an unable to express one's self when needed for good mental health.
I have had to find counselors through out this post WCG time and actually I had a few in the midst of it all. It is the sign of a wise person who has a counselor in this nutso world so I don't apologize for it. I am suspicious of having a "disorder" that briefly came up once in counseling as a possible explanation of feelings, thoughts and behaviors along the way that were and still are annoying, but I spare you. It's kinda like when I teach pathology for massage students. After awhile, if not careful, one begins to feel they have all the symptoms of all those diseases!!! So I'll do some homework on the disorder as it helps me but try not to buy into it too much. I have to say, I do have most of the symptoms so it can be a bit of a relief to at least know I didn't invent it.
Thank you for your support. I only wish to share so that we see the actions and reactions are normal for such life experiences as losing faith or at least having to move on to better perspectives. Most do, some struggle and a few have been lost in the shuffle along the way.
Be kind to each other. Be patient with yourself and remember...."How do we know the experience we are having is the experience we are supposed to be having? ........Because you are having it!" .....or so they say.
Amen
Monday, January 24, 2011
A Personal Note From Dennis Diehl
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8 comments:
Dennis said, "I had been accepted to a Methodist Seminary at the same time I was accepted at AC and obviously made the "wrong" choice".
MY COMMENT - Dennis, I am sure many others would agree with me when I say we are glad you made the "wrong" choice. You have been the independent voice "crying out in the wilderness" helping people like me to process the whole Worldwide Church of God experience. Perhaps that was your own personal destiny - a WCG minister who had integrity and stood on principle who couldn't be "bought off" with money.
Your writings on origns are very compelling. I no longer view every word in the Bible as literal or even inspired. I do, however, still believe in a God or Deity who has made Himself known to me at various times in my life - you may have read my letter to the editor of The Journal published recently about one such recent instance in my life. I believe there is a spiritual world and that it makes itself known to the physical world.
Like most people with a WCG background, I am just trying to live a good and honest life applying such positive principles as "thou shalt not steal", "thou shalt not murder", "thou shalt not covet what's not yours or bear false witness". I try to dwell on the positive principles the Church taught, and not on all the other BS the Church taught - including that I am a "weak and base thing" which I am not.
On a more personal note, I find it funny that we never knew each other in the WCG, yet we can immediately relate to one another because of the common experience and because we know (or knew) all the same people which connects us.
Keep up the good writing, Dennis. You are a damn good writer. You need to aggregate your writings into a book (and, sell it on Amazon.com).
Best wishes,
Richard
PS - You are welcome to preach at the pulpit of the Lake of Fire Church of God anytime!
Lake of Fire Church of God: Excellent comment.
Dennis, your last two paragraphs left an impression that you were winding up your posts. Please keep your ideas and thoughts coming.
I have printed many of your articles over the past few years, which I keep in a binder. This serves not only as a reference amd encouragement for me, but wisdom that I often pass along to my daughter as we're driving in the car or sitting at the kitchen table.
Your success as a person has proven invaluable to others.
One theory goes that people came into the Radio Church of God [the name should have given it away] / WCG to learn something. When they learned it, the experience was over and they left.
Maybe. Maybe not.
I'm of the opinion that if it weren't for that crazy, mixed-up, dysfunctional venue of distorted perceptions, most of us would not have had a clue about nut jobs, narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. We would have never known that to those who see themselves as the center of the Universe, the rest of us are nothing but pawns to provide their narcissistic source, whatever that represents to them, and after that, we are to be discarded as so much collateral damage.
My hope is that amongst all the pain, strife and divisions of the craziness of that which is Armstrongist, those of us paying attention will come to the epiphany that while the evil miscreants plunder their way through the innocent, taking the spoils as they can, those of us who have suffered enough would come to the point that we would never, ever, ever think of doing to our fellow man that which was done to us, without so much as a "by your leave" as being worthless and nothings in the scheme of things.
Aw thanks guys, I have to say it has been a very very difficult couple years here. I am not oblivious to spirituality. I just have no use for Religion. In my next life I want to get to be Neil Shubin and write, "Your Inner Fish." instead of him..ha. I want to discover the creature that has both lungs and gills, teeth and jaws, scales and skin, feet and flippers as he did.
I don't deal well with the alone part of all this. But it is what it is for now.
Thanks for your kind words and I am pleased to be of help.
Hi Dennis,
FWIW, even though I was brought up in the WCG and left as soon as I could, I know of a couple of couples in the church who'd made the trip, often, to where you were pastor, just because they found your talk more truthful and interesting than their local pastor's.
Like I said, "fwiw", and as it said on a napkin I once got from a Dunkin Donuts, "It's worth the trip"
Thanks FWIW, Nothing beats "Sabbath Donuts" we came to call them. I remember one Friday night at the YMCA my youngest was calling me but had locked himself in a locker. I told him to keep talking and I'd find him...it took awhile! Funny stuff
Douglas Becker said, “I'm of the opinion that if it weren't for that crazy, mixed-up, dysfunctional venue of distorted perceptions, most of us would not have had a clue about nut jobs, narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths.”
MY COMMENT – So true!
Douglas’s post reminds me of an excerpt in my unpublished essay entitled, “My Worldwide Church of God reflections – 1972 in Prophecy! God’s Practical Joke?” Here is the excerpt:
A Chosen People – A Peculiar People For Sure
Third, in retrospect, the Church seemed to attract some of the strangest and “fringe” members of society. To mention a few, I remember “the Rockefeller lady”. She believed Nelson Rockefeller controlled the whole world and was head of a secret organization known as “The Illuminati”. The belief was that this secret organization was trying to establish a new world government with Rockefeller as its head dictator. I remember a lady from West Virginia who took the Church’s ban against the use of cosmetics one step further. Apparently, she didn’t believe woman should be attractive at all – so she didn’t believe in shaving her legs! Grossly protruding out from under her dresses were the hairiest legs you’ve ever seen rivaling any of the ape characters in the movie Planet of the Apes.
Long after I had stopped attending, I still had some knowledge of Church people through
contact with my family members who remained in the Church after I departed in 1976. In
the 1980s, there was a drifter that attended Church that my family gave work to. The drifter laced watermelon with the drug PCP and caused one of my family members to be drugged and hospitalized. A couple years later, the same drifter walked into a Montgomery Wards and went to a gun rack in the sporting goods section, loaded a gun and blew his brains out. There was a tax cheat in the Church that was about to go to prison for tax evasion, who also committed suicide. Suffice it to say, the Worldwide Church had more than its fair share of weirdoes!
End of Excerpt
Richard
Dennis, leaving the WCG was sort of the easy part. The hardest was living with the fallout afterward. A marriage for all the wrong reasons (I wanted to have it all before the tribulation), raising my kids in it, and then have to explain to them why all the rituals and edicts were a bunch of hooey. Just plain learning how to communicate with the outside world, being able to say Merry Christmas without darting your eyes around the room to see if there were any other members around! :) Thankfully, I was somewhat of a rebel, I didn't always keep the letter of the laws, so it was a little easier to let it go, joyfully! But I still, after about 6 or so years, have regrets, wish I knew then what I know now, as usual. Don't we all? Everything we say or do leaves some kind of impression on someone, and things are hard to unlearn at the ripe old age of 56. We all have holes, missing pieces of life and emotion that leaves us a little deficient, but I will never be sorry that I left. I could use a good dose of therapy, so bravo for you! You're a few steps ahead of alot of us. Just think, 20 years ago, you'd have been lambasted for gettin therapy! Keep on truckin'!
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