Hell Week - Part II

To understand the situation my husband walked into, you need to understand a few things about the office setup. It is a relatively small space with everyone working very close together. We're not talking about wonderfully appointed spaces with nice, thick doors and lots of insulation. We're talking about thin partition walls and thin doors in a converted mini-mall. People are seated right outside of Derrick's door working (my sister was, in fact. She was Derrick's assistant).

So this is how things went down:

My dh got into Derrick's office and felt immediately attacked. Derrick began to grill him on the fact that he had been talking to Cris Taylor and yet had not come and talked to him personally.

Shockingly, Derrick had somehow obtained copies of my facebook notes, had printed them out, and sort of shoved them in front of my dh, demanding to know if he had seen them and if he approved of them? Flustered, my dh said that he thought that they were inappropriate.

My dh tried to explain to Derrick all of the different ways we were trying to get help. He tried to talk to him about CR and counseling and books. He was trying to show that we were working on forgiveness and growth. All to no avail.

It was made very clear to my husband that I had better "shape up or else."

It also became very clear that Derrick was having a real issue with the concept of "brokenness." He asked my dh, "When do you think you'll be done with counseling?" My dh replied, "Never!" He said that this didn't seem to compute with Derrick at all. The church leadership believes in a version of Christianity in which God "heals" you from your dysfunction, but I'll get to that in a separate post.

He left the office guessing that several other people in the office had to have heard the conversation, including my sister, which embarrassed him even more.

My husband walked into the house extremely agitated, not even able to speak. My heart sank. I walked with him back to our bedroom and sat with him on our settee. What's wrong? I asked him. He started to cry.

"That was a really, really bad meeting," he finally was able to say.

"Why, honey, what happened?"

"He basically told me that we have to leave the church."

"What?"

"Well, he said unless you go and talk to Russell Ann by Friday, we are going to have to leave the church."

I was speechless. I guess I hadn't really expected something so drastic and harsh. I asked him to re-tell me the story and I was aghast. I assured him that we would work it out and that I would talk to Russell Ann.

We had an appointment the next day with our counselor (thank God) and he listened to Frank's story and helped us develop a plan of action for how we were going to deal with all of this. He was emphatic that we should never, ever meet with anyone else by ourselves again. That any meeting that we had must be done together. While this wasn't Derrick's original proposal (meeting as couples), that is the meeting that we set up for that night, Tuesday May 12th, just five days before our 12th wedding anniversary.