Yep, that is deep Sonja, I need to process a bit more as well … wow. Your last sentence has really got me thinking.

Wow. Thank you so much for these links. I’m pretty sure I have a Guru.

Sad indeed. However, thank God that we’re living in an era in which we can talk about this stuff openly. These are things that have gone on for generations and generations, breaking people and leaving them broken on the side of the road. Now, though, we can experience these things and write about, talk about it, come to terms with what was going on, and maybe, just maybe, we can find ways to address it all.

I know my church experiences broke me down in regards to church but at the same time pushed me deeper and deeper, because if God is real than those experiences aren’t reflective of God, they are reflective of the great battle that rages.

Thanks for posting this and thanks for continuing to sort through it all so that we can share in your thoughts.

Sonja,

I left a bad situation a little over a year ago. I am still processing. I was there for almost 6 years. I had a lot of friends there. They were really my family. Now I have one friend IRL and she lives almost 2 hours away. If it weren’t for her and my online community, I would have buried myself in shame.

Just wanted to send a cyber hug!

i hate the thought of bullying – having been bullied and then turning into a bit of a bully myself [ok a huge big angry one]. And i am sorry for your experience sonja but glad you’ve found some reference to help piece together what happened.

I wonder what helps move us from the status of victims, the oprressed, the bullied into something more whole, healed where we can also see and desire the humanity of our oppressors – without turning us into bullies ourselves [our own value of humanity damaged]? or helpless victims?

I ask in part because i’ve just finished reading a very good biography of desmond tutu and this is one of the questions he had to grapple with about apartheid and the effects it had? As he argued for a contextual african theology that did not talk about why would a God allow suffering but why did God allow us as blacks to suffer. It is a powerful account of his coming to understand that God was on the side of the powerless, the oppressed and the persecuted but the answer was not just striking out blindly but becoming that advocate for justice and working for a means to bring restorative justice where the humanity of both the victim and the victimiser can be redeemed rather than a justice of revenge.

Let me clarify. You keep runnin’ over the same story again and again (actions of a bully) crying victim. There’s processing and then there’s a relentless vendetta. I check your blog from time to time to see how your fam is doing and I get told I’m delusional (wearing spectacles) and that you are enlightened beyond me. You’ve taken my honest intent of wanting to maintain some connection with you and turned it into a forum for your grievances against another group of people I also care about. You could have started another blog to “process”, but you didn’t. I think that’s evidence enough that your intent is to get attention and create a divide between the people reading it. And I think it is a fair venue to say such things because you found it fair enough to “process” it here when you know it’s a place for those people to stay connected to you. And when you say, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it” – well, that’s forcing me to make a choice. Do I attempt to see how you’re doing, knowing that I and those I care about will be insulted or do I cease to read your blog? If I cease to read your blog, then who severed the connection? Me, because I didn’t want to endure you insulting me? Or you, because you could have insulted me somewhere else? What’s tough is, I really love your family. I could be upset enough not to check in with you, but then I wouldn’t get to know how the Lightchildren are doing. You guys have reached out to me, cared for my family and taught me a few things about how to reach out to others. You were a major part of my wedding for goodness sake! But I don’t like what you are doing here. And you are a very intelligent person Sonja. You are well aware of what you are doing. And I think your blatant disregard for the people reading it speaks volumes about who is the bully and who is the victim.

I thought I was friends with the author. I have other friends I haven’t seen since my wedding in September and the way I communicate with them is their blogs. I get to see how their families are doing and hear their thoughts on stuff. I’ve left the occasional comment (even when I disagree with them) and they comment back. I speak my mind on their blogs and they’re cool with it. I hope they don’t think I’m stalking them. I hope they haven’t severed our relationship unbeknown to me. They haven’t had any posts that name my other friends as bullies. If they had I would have told them the same thing I told you in an attempt to keep them from destroying relationships (and because it would upset me to see that). I didn’t know you had severed all of your relationships. That truly must have been difficult. Probably more than I can imagine. But I am confused about what you consider a relationship to be. You have referred to your online community as your “peeps”. I thought I was one of those “peeps”, but now I feel reduced to a subscriber of the Sunday newspaper. It’s just weird because I can’t imagine you have been to many of your online peeps/subscribers weddings or had family dinners with them, so I don’t know if they are any more or less of a friend than I am to you, or what you consider our relationship to be, or if we have one or not.

I think the way you describe a blog is a personal description. I know some of my friends have problems with their parents and they won’t put that on their blog because they know their parents read it. So they do consider the audience. Since I thought we were friends and have commented before, I assumed you knew I was part of your audience. I did not know your reader/writer perspective until a recent post. Still, I think it’s a perspective and not the nature of all blogs. The fact that you have provided a comment board allows anyone with internet access editorial privileges. If some guy from Timbuktu disagrees with your perspective on something instead of saying “Sonja, great post”, you are the one that gave him the right to ‘Say It!’ It just seems you want a very controlled environment here. That’s difficult to do when you allow for comments on the world wide web. None of my other friends with blogs have told me I’m stalking them, but if you truly do think I’m stalking you or that our relationship has been severed, let me know and I won’t read your blog.