clarification

My name along with my husband's was brought up recently on a Facebook thread, much to my astonishment, mentioning how we were "chewed up and spit out" of a local church some five years ago. I thought at the time that it was an amazing analysis, especially since I never spoke about the subject to the person writing the statement. Thinking I should weigh-in on statements referring to us, I wrote this:

"To clarify a bit, we weren't literally "chewed up and spit out". It felt more like passive aggressive shunning. Despite the roller coaster of emotions which I experienced during that time in my life, I look back now and can understand better what happened. Most people get hurt to some degree when they buy into the idea of the church as a body of believers that care and then find out from personal experience that it's not true. The safety net that I thought existed had many holes in it. The church is simply a group of human beings who purport to believe pretty much the same thing, thus "group think" is at work. If a person breaks one of the important rules of behavior, they must be disciplined, shunned, or "spit out". To a degree we felt disciplined and shunned, but we were not forced to leave. We left on our own free will and today are pleased that we did.

One thing that I've learned from the experience is that I will never again be open and honest with any "group" of people about my personal life. We were too honest and open with too many people. If I could do it over, I would have talked to people I knew and trusted. But even knowing who to trust would have been a bit of a conundrum. Most people are not equipped to handle difficult life situations in other people's lives. By nature we humans feel threatened when faced with other people's failures. "What if that happened to me?" "I'm not going to get too close to those people. There's some sort of 'disease' going on there." I don't blame anyone for thinking these thoughts. I'm sure that many people at (name of church) thought these things about us because I know I thought them about other people through the years. I'm learning that we all are simple human beings with lots and lots of inadequacies. Our shortcomings are not helped though if we refuse to recognize and admit to our human frailties and instead attempt to be super-human and ignore them. IMO, the church excels in encouraging people to become something they are not. In one sense that's good. But there is one thing we will always be on this planet. We will always be human. I think that if we deny that we tread on dangerous ground.