What I Need Calvary Gospel To Know

Today I went to my second EMDR session. I left the session exhausted and completely drained. I cried the entire time and I left feeling so angry. I was not planning to write here today but I need to say this even if I have no hope that Calvary Gospel will hear me. I cannot blame Calvary Gospel for all of the abuse I suffered due to how my parents decided to parent me but the church did not make it any better. Along with that, my mother’s association with them brought so much drama into her life and reinforced all the things her parents passed onto her. By taking me to church there she reinforced her beliefs and thrust me into a very toxic enviroment that would impact me for the rest of my life.

Now unto Calvary Gospel….you might feel that I am unfairly targeting John Grant Sr. but I can assure you that I have given this a lot of thought. Yes, Steve Dahl is the man who sexually abused me and he deserves all the blame for his actions. That being said, John Grant Sr. was the pastor of our church and superintendent of our state and he was in authority over everything in my world. I went to John Grant and told him what Steve was doing to me and he did nothing to help me. He was supposed to be my shepherd but instead, he left me to suffer alone with no support. Sure my parents have their roles to play but to pretend that John Grant wasn’t in power over my life is insane. He was the ultimate decision-maker with regards to the school I attended and the church and all of the ministries I was involved with. He said jump and all of the adults around me said how high. He could have helped me. He was the head of a racist church that neglected the poor and favored the rich. He preyed on his congregation’s fear by preaching about hell and the end times and rarely speaking about grace. This fear keeps people stuck there, afraid to leave even when they see how sick his congregation is. If they leave they often can find no solace anywhere else because they have been told that any church that isn’t UPCI affiliated is doomed. Even within the UPCI, some churches are seen as good or bad.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters to me in part because I have C-PTSD. What do I hope to accomplish with this post? I hope to show the very real and long-lasting consequences of attending this church and having John Grant as a pastor. I have great health insurance but it doesn’t cover my EMDR provider so I have to pay out of pocket for her help. I have spent most of my adult life in and out of therapy trying to deal with the aftermath of being raised with Calvary Gospel. I grew up feeling bad about being half Mexican in part due to the church’s racism and feelings about multiracial marriages. That standard came from John Grant. I felt bad about being a woman and I felt bad about being poor. Yes, the teachings of the church about women came from above John Grant but he was the mouthpiece who delivered that message to me. He cultivated an enviroment where I learned that we were poor because my mother must have some sin in her life, and she was sick for the same reasons. Give yourself out of poverty! Clean up your life and your asthma will disappear. Even though I no longer believe any of this the scars of all it all are engraved deep within me. I don’t sleep. That might not seem like a big deal until you realize I’m not talking about sometimes. I mean for most of my adult life I have had severe debilitating insomnia. It has made it hard for me to live a normal life. I have anxiety even when everything is going great in my present life. Because you see it isn’t about the present it is about the past. I’m not choosing to live in the past, you have to understand that when a person has been traumatized their brain isn’t the same as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. It isn’t something you just put down because ultimately it isn’t within your control to choose to do that. I’m not saying you should use that as an excuse not to work on yourself, I am the queen of self improvement and transformation, I’m just saying that it isn’t as simple as some folks would like you to believe. What John Grant taught and how he ran his church impacted me severely and it still does. My EMDR session today wrecked me for the rest of the day. I am angry that I’m STILL dealing with all of this. I am angry that Calvary Gospel’s doors are still open and I’m angry that I feel powerless to do anything about it.

I think sometimes people who defend John Grant forget that he was a man and I was a little girl. He created an environment where abusers felt they could get away with sexually abusing children. He turned a blind eye to what was reported to him and to what any person who was paying attention could see. To me that is unforgivable not that he would ever ask for forgiveness. In his world, I am nothing but a problem a bitter woman drudging up the past, I wish that was true. The reality is that his past is my everyday and has been ever since I walked into his church around age 8, I will be 50 on Sunday. If you’ve stuck around till the end of this post thank you. i know sometimes it must seem like I’m repeating myself but I have to keep saying it over and over because it’s true and as of now we survivors have seen no justice.

D