Crossroads was an experience that changed us forever. It changed how we saw each other, God, friends, family and church. It was our first experience in a church as a family and we really loved it.
Crossroads philosophy was that you were adopted into their family the minute you walked in the door. It was the supporting, loving family I had never had. Nor had Ron for that matter. The people in Crossroads loved us, taught us and nurtured us for many years. We learned and grew and served God there...I with the youth and in the music ministry and Ron in the healing/prayer ministry.
These were the best of times in our family. I remember driving to church on Sundays with the children in the back and we were all singing worship songs. I remember very moving music ministires. A youth group on fire and questioning. Good friends, good food and good times.
However, just as in any family, there was gossip and backbiting and cruelty. I don't know why it is that Christians cannot leave this behavior at the door, but it doesn't seem to be possible! Perhaps our sinful nature just cannot allow it. The love the church had for one another and it's people always seemed to help us through the tough times. It believed in not letting things fester, in facing up and 'fessing up to the one you had been hurt by. A not so easy task sometimes. We learned forgiveness by doing, not by saying and we all were blessed by it.
Because we were learning so much and praying so diligently about things here certain things became more apparent in my marriage. We did not have a good marriage. There was a desert where a marriage ought to be. And it was high on my prayer lists. I was repeatedly told that God could heal my marriage, even if my husband didn't want Him to. I don't personally believe this, mind you. It is part of our free will that if we don't want God to intervene and heal, he respects us and does not. The people I know are not always of that opinion, however. I was discouraged about my marriage and lonely. I had had a problem with infidelity early on in my marriage, and had gotten what I call sobriety in this area...but was still not making much progress at home. Ron and I had actually renewed our wedding vows on our fifteenth wedding anniversary and I was feeling invincible.
There is the scripture about pride going before destruction, and I don't know if I was proud or just not vigilant but just two years after renewing our vows I found myself in such a low place emotionally that I was vulnerable when I met a man, a younger man, who said all the right things and did all the right things and suddenly I was entrenched in sin and pregnant.
I went to my husband and offered to give up the other man and to try to make our marriage work. He said he had to think, and pray, and speak with the pastor. I understood that. His decision a week later was this, I could stay with him if I agreed that the father of this child would not be allowed to see the child for the first five years of his life. This was not a condition I could live with. I, of all people, knew what it was like to grow up without a father and I could not agree. Bonding is done very early in a child's life and to take the first five years away would permanantly interfere with this. I questioned this decision. I offered to allow the pastor and/or his wife to take the child to visitation so that I would not have contact. This offer was refused. Looking back I believe he set that condition knowing it was the one I could not agree to, so that I would leave and he would be free of me.
So I left. No one in the church offered me a place to stay so I moved in with the father of the baby. The pastor had left and the new pastor and his wife came to see me at work. They "suggested" that I not come back to church until I got my life together. And this begins the dark night of my soul...abandoned by husband, friends and church, my family angry and not speaking to me, my older children with my husband and I living in sin...
