I recently had a birthday and I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the whole of my life; I won’t bore you with the story. But I have been musing over the failures, and successes and mostly the dreams; some come true and others elusive or smashed entirely. At the center of all, I have almost always found a relationship with God – the good bad and ugly. The damage done in the COG to my faith was, and sometimes still is challenging. In spite of all the other perverted stuff Berg indulged himself in, I think the spiritual damage can be the worst, as it cuts the definitive help line. I think though, in spite of it all, I am for the most part a stronger, more decisive and steady Christian today, thought I may never know what might have been. (I make no excuses for Berg – just, I made it in spite of him. He will have to face the music for himself.)

I think what I have been brooding over is Just what did it take to clear up my image of God and even want to re-develop a relationship with the godhead in Christ? I was fortunate to know Christ as savior before the COG and so I had some memory to reflect on that wasn’t soiled. This journey, as I’d imagine it has for many of us, has taken so many twist and turns, lessons learned, layer after layer , but each, for me has come with an Ah Ha? and finally a realizing that I will not get it all in this lifetime. A few times I stormed off and told God he could, for all I care, drop me dead or leave me alone. (He did neither – but I think he gets a good laugh at times- and by the way I use “HE” as simplification and habit. I’m probably one of the first to emphasize that God uses feminine images to relate to us as well as masculine for the sake of our limitations, not his/hers, some might say. NT and OT demonstrate that God is neither male nor female. That's sort of our problem. )

Anyway, that aside, I think getting past my childhood simplistic images, my adopted child abandonment issues, my hippy gooey pacifist image and my Berg judgmental pervert image of God has, if nothing else helped me to understand the barrage of different theologies as outcroppings of a plethora of inadequate understanding. With that has come a realization that we humans will never have all our theological ducks in a preverbal row. But the journey has been worth the work to continue growing, seeking and learning, laughing and musing. I’ve been the prodigal returning from the unclean filth of the pigs; and I’ve been the blind older brother observing only his own rights being violated. Every time I have found that it is because Jesus never gave up on me, and never will that I inevitably lay it all down, climb into my fathers arm and reply once more, “be it unto me according as you have said”. Somehow that seems so dreadfully unsophisticated and once again simplistic. It’s been a long journey but I’m finding my way back home.

How have some of the rest of you dealt with the spiritual side of all this? I know for some it's been a difficult task at best, and some have not chosen to attempt it at all. Kids born in the COG I'd imagin have the most damaged perception of God. What a sick legacy the COG still has.