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My Testimony

[this is long and not yet finished]

When I was a kid I went to a Lutheran (Missouri Synod I think) school. I remember attending service during school but I don't remember going much with my mom on Sundays. Occasionally I would go to church (Catholic) with my grandparents when I was with my dad on weekends. But basically church wasn't a very active part of my life at that time and I don't remember learning too much about God at school either. I do remember really enjoying church though.

In 4th grade I switched to public schools. I'm learned now that this was because the new pastor at the time decided to excommunicated us from the church because mom did not attend regularly enough. Also meaning I could no longer attend the school. I find this so completely wrong. That incident turned my mom away from church and religion so much that she stopped going and believing completely to this day.

Things got kind of bad at home after that too and you know what? Until now just writing this I never pinpointed it to being related to that one incident. I used to always say things went downhill once I reached 4th grade and always wondering what changed. Guess now I know why. We stopped letting God be in our lives and we stopped believing. No wonder I felt in total darkness all the time. Mom and I started fighting all the time. I was running over to my grandparents house all the time to get away from everything. I wasn't sleeping and having horrible nightmares all the time, getting in more trouble, doing poorly in school. Mom and I started fighting all the time, my perpetrator started perusing me (which led to sexual abuse later). She remarried to someone who is a verbally and physically abusive person. It was a really awful time in our lives and it lasted a long time.

When I was 16 I moved to my dad's to get away from things at home. Things weren't much better there. I did start going to church with them but it was more of a forced thing and even they were going more as an obligation and to look good to others then to go for God. How we looked and dressed when we went seemed more important than how we felt about going or what we got out of it. I hated it. We would get out of church service and as soon as we got into the car everyone was yelling and screaming at each other. In church when you were supposed to great one another and say "peace be with you" my brothers were so mad about being forced to go and just hurting in general they would say to me and each other "piss on you" instead. Kind of defeats the purpose of going to church. eh? Yeah, so I started to slip away from church once again and stopped going.

Some time later down the line (kind of fuzzy on timeframe of it) I started going back to my old church (were I went to school at earlier). My aunt and uncle went there and often invited me so I figured I would start going. Keep in mind that I didn't know the reasoning behind why I stopped going to school there at this point. I was lost and I was searching, and to me that place was still kind of like "going back home" and I still knew quite a few people there so that felt comforting.

To Be Continued....