Each month, I send two newsletters. The first is a story about someone following their heart’s values away from the world they know. The second is a reflection on that story. Today’s newsletter is a story. To read the reflection in a few weeks, make sure you’re signed up for a paid subscription.
People telling their stories for Off the Map have the option to use a pseudonym and change other aspects of their story to protect their real-world identities. Sam has done that. The content of this story is from a questionnaire Sam replied to and a Zoom interview I conducted with her, along with a few of my own memories and experiences thrown in.
The last time I talked to Sam, we were not friends. We were in junior high together for a year. You’ll probably nod—ah, junior high girls—and sigh. Yeah, it was like that. One day all the girls in our class got along. The next day, we didn’t. However, years have passed, and that experience Sam and I shared briefly at a small Christian school has kept us in touch even though we weren’t on good terms when we knew each other. The bond of shared beliefs and shared religious community is not like anything else I’ve encountered.
Sam and I were both missionary kids when we met. Like many people I knew in that community, her family had a long history of service in the church. Her grandparents had been church leaders in their denomination. Before arriving on the mission field, where we met, her parents had been pastors for their large denomination. It was an entire legacy.
Sam told me, “I was born into my particular conservative charismatic Pentecostal denomination. That felt like a stronger identity than my actual extended family of origin (many of whom were Catholic or otherwise not "saved," so aside from trying to get them saved, we held them at arm’s length). Other pastors and missionaries took on the role of aunts and uncles and cousins.”
Sam told me about the first time she remembers realizing that her extended “family” was a closed circle, one with an inside and an outside. She loved, LOVED her second-grade teacher, Miss Tomasino. And what do you do when you love someone in those circumstances? You go to church together. So she asked her mom about bringing her teacher to church (or maybe going to her teacher’s church, she’s not entirely sure). That’s when she encountered it, the subtle dance around differences that really matter that no one talks about openly. The teacher went to a black baptist church, and “My mom made it very clear that we do not go to baptist churches.” Miss Tomasino was Christian, but not the right kind.
“You had to be protestant, next step was evangelical, and then charismatic, but the ultimate was Pentecostal (but not so Pentecostal that you were legalistic about the things my parents were not legalistic about).”
When you’re writing a story, this is the point where the main character enters a debate based on the conflict or dissonance they’ve encountered. What do they do with the thing they’ve seen that disrupts reality as they know it? What do they do with the discomfort? When the main character is in second grade, there’s not much of a choice to make. “The thing is,” Sam wrote, “that identity never fit. It always felt like polyester dress pants you had outgrown but still tried to squeeze into, sucking in so you could get them buttoned.” Like most of us, Sam carried that dissonance in her heart. It would be 25 years before she found relief.
When Sam and I met in junior high, I had similar feelings of not fitting, but neither of us had words or voice to express them. There was, of course, the feeling of not fitting that everyone has in junior high. Add to that the pressure of trying to look cool in the early 90s when the school dress code required girls to wear skirts or dresses every day. And, like Sam pointed out, the quiet judging at home of other missions organizations and denominations that we must have carried into the classrooms with us. Sam and I were both protestant and evangelical, but my family was definitely not charismatic. I remember my parents complaining about the worldly Lutherans who drank beer, danced, and sometimes skipped church on Sundays to do fun things. I am sure my family was legalistic about different things from Sam’s family, but that wasn’t the topic of our junior high insecurity or ire. What came out were conflicts about boys and hair and clothes… and, honestly, just un-labeled animosity. I’m not sure we even named our strongest dislikes. We were junior high girls. We didn’t need to
.
Our paths parted after that. I returned to the States for good. According to Sam, high school was even worse for her than junior high had been. A lot worse. High school was when interpersonal animosity took on higher stakes and a moral costume. Her freshman year, Sam started “drinking and sneaking out and partying and stuff.” Her sophomore year, she tried to commit suicide twice. She kept drinking and going out to clubs. She was the “bad girl.” In a small missionary school, everyone knew it. “You do all that, in this tiny little bubble of (Christian school), and you get parents saying, ‘You’re not allowed to hang out with Sam.’ Which leads to youth leaders saying, ‘Don’t spend time with Sam, she’s not healthy.’
“I understand parents’ fear reaction, but there wasn’t one adult that was able to connect with me and say, ‘I see you. I see that you’re hurting. I see that you maybe feel lost or don’t feel understood.’ In my mind I just couldn’t be the Christian. I couldn’t do those things that everyone wanted me to do without it being completely fake.
“I remember my senior year… [the school counselor] was doing a girls’ discipleship group. I was really trying, my senior year. Like, ‘Screw it all, I’ll try to be good, I’ll try to do these things that you want me to do.’ So I go to my very first discipleship group, and one of the other girls was just like, “well, I just hope that I’m never like Sam.’ And the adults in the room… they don’t correct her or anything. I never went back.”
Sam went on to college where she could shed some of the ill-fitting identity. However, since her parents would only pay for a college run by their church denomination, her freedom to be herself was limited. At college, “I didn’t identify as a missionary kid… I was always kind of fringy… I was not a school spirit kind of person. I didn’t party a lot… but I would disappear. I would just drive for a few days. That was it.”
Sam met Jack, the man who would eventually become her husband at college. He was a 8 years older than she was. The college had kicked Jack out a few years earlier. He had been on drugs, but the school couldn’t prove it, so they had expelled him for skipping chapel services. He came back sober. Sam was his guardian angel. “I took it upon myself… to keep him clean.” She invited him to everything—parties, shopping with her friends. They bonded over their knowledge of what there was to see and do in a nearby city, outside of the college town, “All the guys there were looking for a pastor’s wife, and I knew that wasn’t me.” She had met someone fringy like her, and eventually they ended up getting together and getting married.
Sam had studied psychology and found work in her field, eventually going back to school to get her master’s degree in social work.
Jack had also grown up in church ministry. And, while he didn’t start out in church work at the beginning of their marriage, he eventually gravitated back at the urging of family members, finding a niche for himself in logistics work for aid organizations.
They had kids. Ten years went by. Sam and Jack’s marriage drifted, as many do, but they were struggling to work it out. “We had always been best friends, but it wasn’t a healthy marriage,” Sam told me, “I had begged him to go to marriage counseling. I went to marriage counseling on my own. I went to a marriage conference on my own. I went to marriage classes on my own… Finally, when I said I wanted to separate, he said he would go to marriage counseling, but it was like too little too late.”
Sam was feeling unsettled in other ways as well. She had begun doing research work for her state’s institute of health, interviewing women who had substance abuse disorders and who had an open case with children’s services. Many had already lost their kids. “I’d go into these homes that you would think are completely unlivable, and these women would tell me their stories.” She heard story after heartbreaking story of incest, drugs, abuse and neglect. Many of the women didn’t even know what domestic violence was, they just lived their lives and told her about what had happened to them.
While she was on the research project, Sam also attended a missions conference for her denomination. She would duck out of the conference to do her research work then come back when she was done. The dissonance between what she saw while doing her research and what she saw at the conference left her deeply unsettled. “I remember pulling into the (church) parking lot and BMWs and Lexus[es] with ‘China’ and ‘Africa’ as personalized license plates because people had done missionary work there. And I am crawling out of my skin. [I thought,] ‘You don’t even notice the person a block away from you. Are you kidding me right now?’”
For Sam, the final straw was a sermon preached by a church leader, his last before his retirement. He used it to preach against Big Government, against the very services that Sam saw helping these people that the church didn’t seem to care about. The congregation gave him a standing ovation. Sam walked out.
After 25 years, the sense of unease that had started in second grade had boiled to a crisis. She didn’t feel like she could go from hearing people talk about heating their homes with propane from their stoves to a cozy pew in “this place where I’m supposed to be a good Christian.” She couldn’t go back.
Sam pushed her husband to leave the church as a family, but he risked losing his job if they left. Their already unhappy marriage buckled under the pressure. Sam told Jack she was leaving him.
Sam took her grief and rage to bed with another man. That man was the pastor of a large, well-known church where she was on staff. It didn’t take long for that situation to blow up. When it all came out, her worst fears of not being accepted came to life. Her parents stopped talking to her for two months. Church had been their only social support, and no one from church reached out. The affair made it to the local prime time news.
Despite all of it, Jack stood by her as a friend. “He was the only one who would talk to me,” she said. She started attending a new church, and when a board member from a previous church started texting nasty things about her to the pastor of the new church, Jack “reamed him out.” His loyalty and kindness moved Sam.
The divorce was almost final, but Sam gave things one more try with Jack. “I thought, if I’m really going to look my kids in the face some day and say I tried everything to make it work, then I need to try this one more time.” She invited him to dinner, and they began a long process of reconciliation. For her, it was different. “At that point, it was my choice. I didn’t feel trapped into it. I told him, ‘I’m not making any promises.’”
Ten years later, they’re in a completely different marriage, but still together. “He has never once, since we got back together, thrown any of [what happened] in my face. And that is the way it has worked out.” Sam feels free to speak up for what she wants, because she is living more authentically “out of my own holistic health and truth.” They trust one another.
Sam still operates on the fringes, but she feels more true to herself. “I actually go to a really great church… super affirming, super social justice kind of place. Says and does all the right things. I think because I’m so not ready, I haven’t engaged yet. I go and I sit in the balcony in a dark corner by myself and then I sneak out. I’ve been doing that for five years.”
Sam says she is in a better place, but still longs for the acceptance church promised but never provided for her. She recalls going to a party recently for a friend who finished her degree and seeing all the support from her friend’s church community. People were saying so many positive things, “speaking life,” praying. “This is what we miss out on. This is what we need. But I don’t know how to engage with that in an authentic way because that is loaded with so many other things that I don’t believe in or that I don’t want to participate in. How do you find the equivalent outside of a church that you no longer believe in?”
After my conversation with Sam—the first since our tumultuous time together in junior high—I felt a peace that I didn’t quite understand. I went out on my deck and just sat with the feeling for over an hour. The unnamed peace replaced unnamed animosity from decades in the past. Something in my chest and stomach settled. My breathing—something I often have to settle consciously—found a peaceful rhythm on its own. I’ve been thinking about those moments in the weeks since—what is it about the time we had together that was satisfying in my core?
I think it is this… Sam’s is one of the first freedom stories I’ve heard from a life that intersects with that time in my life. Her story helps me make sense a part of my experience that I hadn’t even thought to make sense of. I had told myself a story about hormones and puberty and junior high. It didn’t even occur to me to question that story. Then I heard the rest of Sam’s story. Suddenly, I have new words, new narratives for making sense of the things I felt but didn’t understand. I can see glimmers of the bigger picture of what was going on around us, things that we could not possibly understand as junior high girls. Cultural expectations that didn’t fit, but that we wore anyway.
I am profoundly grateful to Sam for sharing her story with me. I hope there are parts that helped you make sense of your own circumstances. Please, drop a thank you or some encouragement for Sam in the comments. It is not easy to put a story like this out into the world.
Oooof, so much truth in this story - feeling every detail of it! Sam, you are a rock star for your vulnerability, your authenticity, and your stubborn persistence in allowing yourself to be who you are. THANK YOU, so much, for sharing your story with us.