No God Helped Me When I Needed It Most
If not then, what would it take?
CW: Emotional abuse
If you spend enough time in church environments, you have probably heard a few people give their Christian testimonies — that is, their stories about THE moment when they accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. Many of these stories, I have realized, tend to follow the same template: a person was either a non-believer or merely “lukewarm” in their faith, then the person experienced some life crisis or other overwhelming experience, then they called out for God to deliver them as only “He” can, and — voila — they gave their life over to Jesus and are happier for it.
But what happens when you experience the crisis without the ensuing revelation? What happens when the divine deliverance never comes? Well, eleven years ago, in my mid-twenties, I went through the very type of life crisis that seemed custom-made for those “Road to Damascus” stories: I was emotionally abused for almost a year.
While writing this article, I had to wrestle hard about how much of the story to tell, and how to tell it, going back and forth with writing and deleting. Ultimately, I think the story needs details from the beginning for the full context and gravity of what happened to me. Bizarre as it appears in retrospect, I’ll just have to do my best.
The story began when I shared an apartment with a now-former roommate, who experienced allergic reactions to an aerosol cleaner that I used around our apartment. There were multiple occasions when I believed she would be out of the house long enough for the aerosol to dissipate, only for her to return sooner than expected and have a reaction once again.
Yes, I should have either communicated with her beforehand about when I wanted to clean the apartment, or dump the products entirely and search for alternatives far sooner than I did. I acted irresponsibly, and I regret not doing both of those things. But that did not justify what followed.
She came to believe that I had actively tried to harm her (obviously false), and frequently accosted me either in our home or over Facebook message to remind me of how wretched and horrible of a person I was. Personal denigration, and terror of when the next attack would come, became the norm. Disagreement of any kind was deemed “belittling” everything she said, and usually made the abuse worse.
She would go on and on about me “owing” her, though when asked, she refused to specify exactly what she believed I owed to her.
She described terrible things that she could have done to me, but said the fact that she didn’t do those things made her the best friend ever.
She said that what I did was so terrible that the only way we could be “even” was for her to beat me half to death. But since that wasn’t going to happen (because she was so merciful), I would always be in her debt.
Despite making it very clear how much she hated me, she still once called me for emotional support, out of the blue, when she was going through a hard time. I just couldn’t say no to the call, which forced me to drop everything for more than an hour.
She attributed thoughts and motives to me that were entirely divorced from reality. She even described an event that never happened, but she was so certain about it that I wondered if it actually did. (This was long before I learned of the term “gaslighting.”)
Moving out of our apartment and into separate ones didn’t prevent me from still seeing her; we also shared a social community that regularly put us in a building together. I was blamed, in some way, for every interaction between her and our mutual friends that upset her, even though I wasn’t with them at the time, nor did I talk about her to them. One time, she hissed a direct threat of physical violence as we walked past each other.
So, what does this have to do with religion?
Throughout all of this — all the stress, the anguish, the threats, the insults, and every single day of deep, existential worry — never once did I feel any primal urge to reach out to a heavenly guardian for divine intervention. It never once occurred to me to pray. Nor did I experience any sign of a deity reaching out to me in order to offer help, if only I would follow that deity. No guidance, no words of comfort, no sign that any god was so much as watching over me, even if they weren’t going to act directly. Nothing at all.
Ironically, I still would have told you that I believed in the god of the Bible that whole time, even though I wasn’t a devout Christian. It would still be years before I would even begin to ask the questions and arrive at conclusions that made me identify as an atheist (though that’s another story). In fact, all of these realizations about not being contacted by God during this time wouldn’t occur to me until years later either.
When they did occur to me, I wasn’t so much angry at a god that I had no reason to believe exists. I was more stunned and bewildered to realize that everything I had been told about God carrying me through my struggles was flat-out, 100% wrong. I had made it through the scariest, darkest period of my life with no support from anybody but myself and other people.
Any gods out there who want my loyalty will have to give a rock-solid explanation for why they stayed silent for that whole ordeal. And they’ll have to physically appear, face-to-face, to do it. The apologist’s go-to line, of course, is that God doesn’t work that way. But honestly? He’s going to have to.
Christians might ask me what I will do when times get too hard for me to handle. My honest response will be that I’ll figure something out. I may fall short in some way, and maybe lasting consequences will come from it. But if I could make it through the experience that I did, I have a shot against literally anything.
We humans aren’t perfect, and we will let each other down on occasion. But as far as every single one of my life experiences has indicated, we are all we’ve got for help.
In the end, getting out was amazingly, impossibly simple. The ex-roommate sent a message that (among her usual rantings) demanded that I post to social media apologizing for all of the terrible things that I did to her, and thanking her for being the best friend I ever had. For some reason I’ll never know, that ended up being the last straw. After taking in the message, and picturing my actual best friend, the thought came clearly: “No. The best friend I ever had would never tell me to do this.”
Bracing for consequences, I sent a very short reply, to the effect of “I will not. Please do not ask again.” After one more of her rants in response…
She blocked me on Facebook. And she never called again. She discovered that she had lost power over me, so she cut and ran.
It was over. I was free.
