The Cross Killed Jesus and Tried to Kill Me

If I had to identify the hardest part about being a Christian, one of the contenders is the emphasis on denying my humanity.

“Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

I interpreted Jesus’s words to mean that when my feelings and thoughts wanted to deviate from the group I associated with within my church, I needed to deny my feelings and thoughts.

Maybe it’s debatable what it means to take up one’s cross. It’s been a long time since I read a theologian’s interpretation. But for me at the time, “to take up one’s cross” meant that any place in my life where I suffered, I needed to press into it, not flee from it. For example, especially in my 20s, I spent most of my time with people I didn’t want to be in a relationship with.

When my first son was born, his dad and I were leaders of a small group that met every week. Except for one other couple, I didn’t like any of them. We rotated homes, and every several weeks, we met in a man’s apartment. He was a bachelor and lived with two cats. I don’t think he did a lot of cleaning because as soon as I walked into his apartment, my throat began to close from the cat dander. Yet I believed I needed to push that side of myself away to do what Jesus wanted me to do; I was called to be a leader to this man and show that I would do what was best for the collective, not for myself. So I swallowed my Benedryl and kept going. It’s possible my throat also closed up every time because I disliked the experience so much.

Maybe because he lived close by, my husband and I considered this man for our first babysitter. 🤦‍♀️ When my son was five weeks old, I thought I needed to get it together enough to go on a date (I really don’t like that expression) with my husband. I pushed aside my anxiety for several days about leaving my infant son with this man. I was supposed to put my marriage above my desire to be with my son 24/7. Thankfully, I pulled the plug at the last minute. Looking back, I shake my head and cry a little. My beliefs, reinforced by our group’s culture*, asked me to shove aside what was true about myself over and over again. Now I know it is when I ignore myself the most, I am the least healthy.

Children show their individuality from the time they take their first breath. My firstborn was no different. He waited, impervious of others’ demands until they earned his trust before he gave them attention. This began early. When he was two, we were teaching him to say hello to people when they greeted him. He rarely did. Many of our community had young children simultaneously, and it was hard for me to separate how I wanted to parent from their expectations and choices. Members of our group often disciplined punitively, spanking children to make them conform.

Our pastor’s wife was overbearing. She expected life to greet her with her ideals. She would burst through my front door with her loud ebullient voice in greeting and expect my two-year-old to respond in kind. I watched this woman discipline her own daughter, who was a year or two older than my son. My pastor’s wife corrected her with a hand slap on her daughter’s thigh if her daughter pushed away, which toddlers always do. “We do not push away from Mommy,” she would admonish. I believed this woman was an authority in my life put there by God, and I had to emulate her. My son had no such commitment and responded to her invasion of his boundaries with disdain. He definitely did not say hello in return. He was pushing away from her “authority”. I admit, I spanked him a couple of times for it as had been modeled to me.

Parenting came with high enough stakes that, over time, I could not conform to this expectation. My inner dissonance with actions such as these was too strong, and I had to come down on the side of my children. Their individuality and spirits were too important to me, and I could not squash them. Unfortunately, I didn’t fight for myself the same way.

I still struggle to bring my whole self to anyone I consider an authority. Too often, I find myself adjusting my behavior and language based on what I sense the other person wants from me. I don’t attend church anymore. But I find myself in conversations with those that do, and I can slip right back into the verbiage. It is hard, to be honest with others that I have left my religion behind. I don’t share face-to-face that I no longer believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God. I don’t shout what inside makes me scream. I am NOT a sinner saved by grace. I lost decades of my life believing God was an authority expressed through those I thought I had to respect. When I didn’t respect them, I thought it was my problem, not theirs. I had to deny myself (my intuition), take up my cross (suffer through the situation), and follow Jesus (not go after what I wanted instead). That I had to teach my children the same thing. I was wrong.

From my journal July 1997. My oldest is 19 months old.

““How did God make P? What is his bend?

As his mom, I see that he is observant, joyful, does not express his needs easily, but can wait until he is angry and frustrated and then lashes out. He enjoys being physically active. He is affectionate.

How do I see this affecting my parenting? I need to teach P from the beginning to tell me what he needs and how to communicate his emotions. I want to give him lots of opportunities to be with other kids and play outside. I want to give him transition and be aware of what makes him frustrated and prepare him for what’s coming next, especially if I say one thing and then have to do another. I want to be affectionate and playful with him.

I believe moral training is of utmost importance, but not as it negates my child’s emotional needs.””

One week before…

“When we get back from vacation, we have to face our responsibilities to P. We’ve seen some destructive behavior…”

He’s NINETEEN MONTHS, Jenny. There’s no such thing.

“…and attitudes surface in him while we’ve been gone. It has been so fun to have him with us - he has been so animated and playful! But it is not coupled with obedience, but disrespect.”

It is painful to see those words on the paper. I thought I had to keep him on as tight of a leash as I kept myself. I am positive now that “disrespectful behavior” was a toddler relishing ice cream and his grandparents’ attention. Of course, he didn’t want to take a nap.

Since I left the church seven years ago, I have asked myself what I asked about my son. “Jenny, how are you wired?” To answer this, I often look to the places where try as I might, I couldn’t conform. I tell myself I am my own authority now. It’s hard. But to live in this self-knowledge and make choices that allow me to be true to what I now know about myself is like diving into cool, clear water after hiking through dust and heat. This is something I wrote recently.

“One of my primal needs is to be independent and develop self-awareness.”

I see clues of this as far back as I remember. No one could discipline it out of me. Leaving the evangelical church freed me to pursue the self-awareness that is so essential to the health of my soul.

*P.S. Part of the reason the church culture, especially in my 20s was so extreme was that the Bible taught us children are born with sin. We followed teaching called, “Growing Kids God’s Way”, a destructive curriculum that still is espoused throughout American Evangelicalism.