All In

I dropped the weights and collapsed onto the weight bench. I wasn't physically tired, but an intrusive thought had shut me down again. My mind kept replaying the scene of a Christian leader bullying me, and the memory overloaded my body with anger. The worst part wasn't the evil they had initially done to me, but my fear that they had deformed my soul. I didn't want to be an angry person, but I didn't know how to stop hating them for what they had done.

"You might be right, but you're not doing it in the right way." When my high school English teacher confronted me on the steps outside the administrative building, I didn't know what to say. I had tried to share my beliefs in a school club by arguing that everyone else was wrong. But to my surprise, no one felt loved.

When I lived in Cambridge, I found the indifference to religion to be a tough barrier. So I asked my pastor how he shared the gospel with his neighbors. He told me, "I just try to fit into my neighborhood like anyone else. I don't want anyone to think I'm different just because I'm a pastor." I didn't have any follow-up questions.

Shivering, burning, sweating, moaning. The fever has run through your entire household, and the only reason you're alive is a neighbor moved in. He cooked, cleaned, drew water, and washed the soiled bedding. But in nursing your family back to life, he caught the disease that will end his. His final words were, "Your humble servant bids you goodbye." Dionysius, the Bishop of Alexandria, watched this happen as a plague tore through his city in the third century. When everyone else ran away, Christians cared for the infected. An "empty courtesy," he wrote, had become true.

After enduring spiritual abuse as an employee at RZIM, I could only trust a very small handful of people. I no longer knew how to tell who was safe. I started to look past what people said and examine how they lived.