Road to Salvation, Part 5

In upper elementary years, I became very curious about church. All of the kids at school talked about church. It was another way that I knew I did not fit in with everyone around me. Although I don’t remember the details, a friend of my mom’s took me to a Baptist church with her.


I wore the best clothes I had, which were stained shirts, pants with holes in them and shoes that had tape holding them together. I sat and listened, even though I didn’t understand anything that was said. When I returned home with activity sheets and bibles, my dad always took them away from me or made me throw them away. Every time, he warned me to not go again.

The last time I went to that church was Easter Sunday. The lady who picked me up gave me a purple dress and white shoes. I got to change before church started. I sat and listened to a story about Jesus. I didn’t know who that was, but I felt good in my pretty new dress. For one of the only times I can remember, I felt like somebody cared about me. Church was merely a background thought that day. The beauty of the day ended the minute I walked back in the door of my house. In his anger, my dad punished me for disobeying him. He destroyed the dress and threw the shoes away. My fear of being punished again would swallow any desire I had to go back to church.

During the same year, I developed my extreme distrust of people in church. My grandparents lived across the street from a Catholic church, where a Priest and Nun lived in a small house. My cousin, who had molested me for many years, often took me to a secluded area of trees in the church yard. The trees would hide the awful things he would do to me.

As he followed his normal routine on one day when I was nine at the church yard, I looked at the house that was only a few feet away. There my eyes were met by the Priest who was standing in the window watching every moment of what was happening. Only after our eyes met did he close the blind. As a nine year-old child, I never understood why an adult would not have stopped my cousin. My first and only thought, people in churches did not care about me.

It was an easy decision to make that day with all of my nine years of life experience that I would never go back in a church again.