Back when I dated my ex, “S”, he would often express that I should be a pastor. He remarked that I had a lot of thoughts about God that would resonate with so many people out there. S seemed to really believe that my faith was genuine.

We would end up going to a grand total of two churches in our relationship.

The first one was led by a kickass female boss bitch whose love for the community was impressive and heartwarming to me. The second church was its complete polar opposite. What an acid trip.

S often remarked that I should follow my dreams and be in ministry.

I would like to point out that my dream once was to be in ministry. It was my dream to be one of the leaders in a faith revolution. I hoped and prayed my ass off to gain respect for my views by church leaders so that I could open up conversations about welcoming queer people into church spaces. I was often comforted by church communities and longed to open those up to commonly excluded groups.

At that first church, I was part of a ministry called “Celebrate Recovery” and we focused on helping people with various life dilemmas, including issues of mental illness and addiction. It was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever been through.

I didn’t get the chance to truly be a volunteer with the ministry due to leaving the church (before I’d ever wanted to) at S insisting us to.

I would later learn from S, that S felt that my involvement in the ministry was giving me too much confidence in myself. He often hated that I had the opportunity to lead in churches as a female while he couldn’t seem to get his dream met.

The funny thing isn’t that he was absolutely wrong in his assessment of the situation.

Rather, it was comical how he blamed me for his inability to grow as a human being. I was more than happy to help and cheer him on while he worked on his own issues. He didn’t like that, though, and turned away from resources that were designed for him, in favor of pastoral guidance.

This is not me saying pastors are bad.

This is me declaring that pastoral trainings are horrifically dangerous when used as or (much more appalling) in place of clinical mental health counseling or interventions.

See, I’m a deconstructed Christian.

Becoming deconstructed gave me complete joy. I often declare that God is bigger and bolder in my eyes than in the eyes of traditional, often conservative, Christian teachings and doctrine.

Perhaps that’s why S thought I wanted to become a badass bitch pastor with my own church.

In reality, part of deconstruction is admiring what you held as undeniable truth and then questioning if that belief was beneficial to your faith and your spiritual growth in God. The other aspect is taking back power over the malicious doctrines often twisted and spewed in “brotherly love” at the people most unloved by religious leaders.

Deconstruction was a necessary process for me as a woman who was told by the church, in no uncertain terms, that she was unworthy of salvation due to her love for the unloved.

When I first began this journey, I read the Gutenberg print of the Bible. (I’ll admit it was through an app, but I’m not sure that I like hard copies of anything much anymore.) I am fluent enough in German to get through the verses I don’t know and gain deeper perspectives over ones I’ve had ingrained in my heart since childhood.

This gave me the peace of mind that my intuition that transliteration errors were rampant in the English version, at the very least.

There are words and phrases scattered throughout the Gutenberg original edition that read completely differently in modern English translations. I’m not talking about synonyms with minutely coded connotations. Rather, it is different words with different sociopolitical and linguistic characteristics such as literal definition and colloquial uses.

This is unfortunately not the post for a deep dive into my personal vendetta against Leviticus.

What I wanted to express (hopefully this comes as a complete redundancy) is that although I have the ability and knowledge to teach the Bible throughly, I have my own experiences with religion that have turned me away from wanting that pastoral path.

However, S determined on his own merit that I was a really great biblical teacher and somehow hoped that I could miraculously disciple him, a boy who often claimed he regrets being baptized and wanted to renounce it, into loving God.

I often said I was going to become the world’s most talented behavioral health therapist.

But not once did I say I could save people.

Spiritual leadership was not my passion.

I would become a worthless whore in S eyes as he thought I was just some floozy whose love for God was performative at best. He would be blatant in how much he hated my desire to counsel queer communities and help them see their worth is intrinsic. I would explain how I was queer and my desire was pure and my faith was genuine.

None of that mattered.

He thought I would save him from himself. But he didn’t want to put in the work. He ran from church leader to church leader, hoping pridefully that I would take the bait that I was doing wrong.

I never once accepted his bullying.

I’m proud of that.

My longstanding trauma and chronic pain were certainly worth fighting for myself and my values over being forced to be someone I’m not. I didn’t painfully deconstruct myself just to have someone reconstruct me into pain and heartache.

I was never trying to guide him toward God.

In fact, I wanted to discuss the Bible and related topics with him, not at him. I wanted to hear his opinions and views on scripture. He wouldn’t admit his votes would never align with mine, and often just said that he didn’t understand how to read the verses and it was thus my job to teach him.

There’s a lot I can put up with. Being a grown ass man who expects someone else to guide him on how to read – that’s a hard limit. Part of scripture reading is simply just gathering initial impressions on the content. That doesn’t require heavy duty analytical skills. Observational analysis is just exploring feelings or ideas that may be sparked, with a valid understanding being that it meant nothing or was irrelevant in some aspect.

I may have been a tutor for elementary school students one summer, but that didn’t mean I taught them how to read. I taught higher level critical and creative thinking skills to students so that they could learn different ways to enjoy reading.

I am a teacher at heart.

During that summer, my lower grade set of students was comprised of several female students and only one male student. He was adorably bright and articulated his opinions boldly and comprehensively. He wanted us to read “boy books” because he didn’t want to be too girly.

I am more sneaky than that, though.

I knew from being an intelligent girl in lower elementary grades that when there is one boy in a sea of intelligent girls, he often is trying to impress them through kindness and friendship efforts. Yet, because he’s still young enough to want to assert that boys and girls are completely different in all regards, admitting this out loud is improbable.

So I made sure he was the one who got to select our final book of the summer.

I kid you not, he selected a princess book (admittedly I did urge this on him, citing that these books give great reason to have a craft where he can color with all the markers at once – which was his heart’s desire every coloring opportunity). I thought it was kind of sweet.

Reader, the book was delightful.

This boy who wanted to play stubborn and salty over being the only boy in the class was the one whose eyes sparkled brightest as I read the silly princess names with voices and distinction.

I know he won’t truly understand what he displayed in terms of selflessness. I’m assuming that it isn’t even a highlight memory of his. But to me, it was the best moment of the summer.

See, the whole summer was full of this boy refusing to admit he really liked reading. He was a sweet kid, and my coworker often seemed frustrated that he didn’t often like the books she chose.

We had a limited library, in all honesty.

My goal was to show this boy that reading is sometimes more about having fun imagining how the characters sound and move. Sometimes reading is really just about enjoying a story for being worth reading – sometimes over and over again.

I may not have a teaching degree or license.

Yet, I count that as earning some wings on the plane ride to being an educator. He learned to drop the façade of disdain. He grew to love each subsequent page of the silly book and leaned in with each carefully poised pause I elaborated.

Maybe I’m a talented artist.

But honestly, I think he came to the conclusion on his own that it is sometimes better to enjoy love for what it is rather than fighting it completely.

I’m not much of a savior.

Wouldn’t want to be. Sounds painful.

I’m more of a talented listener who understands that life isn’t easy enough to put yourself in a tiny box just to endure it. It’s not worth it. Being able to laugh about life is better. Not everything is a funny story, but everything has the potential to be morally and personally neutral. At least that’s a much more effective place to begin learning to love life for simply continuing on with no predictable end.

Going with the flow is the closest summary I’ve got; and it’s not really all that useful to follow at all times when dilemma occur.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.