i don't know where to begin on ywam. i came there with
the intention of making God and jamie both proud, but
i almost forgot about jamie after a while. every time
i got a letter from her, i was ecstatic, but i was so
busy with God and learning about Him that jamie fell into
the background. ywam is a very intense place. everyone
there has a specific calling that they are chasing, and
they will do whatever it takes to get to their dream of
being exactly who God wants them to be. what i noticed
that some people there forgot was that God only expects
us to love Him and to try not to sin. otherwise, unless
He says "NO" very clearly, we can chase whatever dreams
we can imagine. isaiah says that 'no eye has seen, no
mind concieved what God has in store for those who love
Him.' the leaders of ywam must have had a particularly
strong conviction about purity and the image we gave
off to the world because the rules were stricter and more well enforced than
the military, almost, because it was a sin not to obey,
and our goal was not to sin. in that way, it was mind
control also. i have an ad for a christian indie production called
"brainwash projects," and that just about describes what we were.
we really did want to "wash our brains" clean of all sin,
but there is SO much room for manipulation and for God's
word (written, felt, etc.) to be misinterpreted and
misconstrued. also, there is a LOT of power over others
with no real checks on who weilds it. not to say that
ywam was a mind controlling manipulative cult, but ywam
definitely wasn't a group of trained and educated moderates.
so i began my most intense search for God, for
the source of it all. i spent the alloted quiet time we
had each morning listening to margaret becker mostly and
talking to Him about something else new in my life...
infatuation. in the later part of september one night in
study hall, i sat next to a boy named jeremy. we started
writing notes back and forth about how boring and stupid
study hall was and how strange he was. he was a very
random boy, that's the best way to describe him. he wasn't
good looking, in fact he had a really big nose, but it
was friendship nonetheless, and my best friends have always
been guys. the only problem, however, was that the leaders
had forbidden any exclusive relationships to preserve
the unity of the whole class. even best friends was
considered "exclusive." as jeremy and i began to hang
out more, my small group leader (sort of like a mom/dad to
7 or 8 girls/boys respectively) karma noticed and began to
keep tabs on how much time we spent together.
we used
to take walks together and jam out together and visit
all his friends in his hometown of alma, only an hour from
ywam. we went for pizza and went to movies. once, on
the fall homecoming weekend when ex-ywamers gathered at
the base to reunite, jeremy and i took a drive to the lake
and just sat there talking until 2am, way past curfew.
we got into lots of trouble for it too. if you were in
2 or 3 minutes past curfew, you got extra chores. the
more we hung out, the more we liked eachother naturally.
in late october we started emailing eachother
childish love notes, and then we started talking about
the "m" word... marriage. to me, it was a little fast,
but the accepted way of getting together in that kind of
"christian" circle is to court to marry but never date.
my good friend kristy was an old friend of jeremy's, and
she was one year older than i was. she would report to me
what he said, and so she and i started to hang out a lot.
her husband, wes, was a total asshole, neglecting her when
she was sick even to go watch football with the boys.
i remember looking at him once and pointing at his face
and saying, "you're gonna lose her." he laughed and
told me she didn't have the guts to leave him. kristy
was the one girl i could hang with for long times and not
get sick to death of or annoyed out of my mind. finally,
the last day before thanksgiving is when it all came down.
my car's battery had been going bad for quite
some time (due to the fact that the alternator didn't work!)
and that evening when i was supposed to leave on my 10-hour
trip home, it didn't start well. when i put it in reverse,
it died. jeremy and i popped the hood and began to rummage
around in the engine. he was going to spend the night there
and then leave the next morning because a girl in the class,
cheranne, needed a ride to the airport the next morning,
and jeremy went home every weekend anyway so it wasn't that
important for him to leave immediately. no one else was on
base. we went inside after giving up on the car and just
talked for a long time, had some soup, and then got real
close. i, being the good little angelic christian girl,
had never really been kissed before
(cheeks don't count), and that was a totally new thing
for me. you know, when he said he wanted to marry me,
i really thought he meant it. you really don't expect
missionaries to lie just so they can get to you, but that's
really what he did. ywam's name for it is "defrauding;"
my name for it is "fucking bastard."
as soon as thanksgiving
was over and we were back at ywam, he wouldn't even look
at me. what had started out so perfectly as best friends and something
more turned into one of the biggest let-downs ever. i
didn't trust "unbelievers" further than i could spit, but
God-loving pure guys held my trust until then. the dream
shattered and i didn't know what to do. of course, the
next month was the stateside tour and we were on different
tours (i went to texas, he went to illinois), and then
after that was field assignment (overseas- i went to india,
he went to bulgaria). it was the worst time of my life.
not only did i just lose my first love to his own treachery,
but i hated india more than i can express. it was disgusting,
confining, dirty, smelly, loud, backwards, male-dominated,
crowded, and more foul than i can possibly put into words.
i loathed india and i counted the sticky hot days until
i would be on the sweetest airplane and out of that God-cursed
land. yeah, i learned a lot about the culture and the
people and all, and i wouldn't trade that experience for
, well, at least 1500 rupees, but i *never* will go back.
plus i got seriously deleriously sick.
jeremy didn't come back for the second half of the training.
(thank God). i made a new friend, though, in the new
incoming class. his name was mike and i though he was
the hottest, dorkiest, sweetest boy i'd met. he had a crush
on this girl in his class, but he had the same rules that
we did- dating was forbidden. we became good friends, and
i liked him a bit, but i never told him and we never
became anything more than friends.
karma and steve, our
small group leaders, pretty much forbade us to hang out together
because of what happened with me and jeremy. mike and i
got to know eachother better than jeremy and i did because of the fact
that he liked someone else and we didnn't have to worry about
playing the "liking" game. finally it got to
the point that if mike and i sat across from eachother at
the table in the dining hall, karma would come over and
hang around us to keep an eye on us. i started to get
sick of it, but there was nothing i could do. i was
bound and helpless.
during this whole time, kristy and i became closer friends
also because since i hung out with jeremy only the first
semester, i didn't really make close friends with the
rest of the class except kristy. she started telling me
how wes was treating her, and i just wanted to kick him
where he couldn't have kids for it. the leadership didn't
do anything about it, though. the lessons were turning from
God to missions, not my purpose for being there. karma
was on my back constantly. i was forbidden from seeing
my other best friend, mike, and i was even forbidden from playing
bass for a church on sunday morning because ywam had to
be first priority. it was all leading up to my breaking
point. i finally hit it in early april 1998, and i rose up against the authority.
