I (Ruth) haven’t played Wordle, but I do play strict-mode four-suited spider solitaire. Out of the 4561 games I’ve played, I have won 4542, replaying each game until I solve it. (The longest took me over 8 hrs to win.) Out of the 19 games I did not beat, 18 of them I accidentally hit new game instead of replay. Thankfully, the game has been updated so that it now asks if you want to ruin your current streak when you make that mistake. I have only ever quit one game deliberately. That was the first day of August 2018. In July of that year our supervisor asked Joshua and I to resign from our org because they deemed me too “unhealthy” to be in ministry. They later changed it to an offer for us to request an unpaid leave-of-absence (LOA). This would allow our accounts to remain open for continued contributions to our ministry. However, we would not be able to access those funds until we were approved to return to full-time ministry.
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Joshua and I had met with our director in November about serious issues I had observed within the ministry. He was very pastoral and caring and admitted he himself had observed all of those problems. But in January, I was ordered to counseling for imagining my past abuse onto the org, for imagining problems that weren’t there. The request violated policy, but when I reminded them of the specific policies, they informed me that they didn’t need to follow their own policies, so I refused.
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Joshua and I decided we would neither resign nor request an LOA because it was unjust. At the end of July I wrote and appealed to the boss who had told me he had seen all the problems I had been diagnosed as imagining. I appealed to him to intervene, but on the first of August, I received a reply from him. He told me that he was upholding the decision. He informed me, “my assessment is that you are not being fired, but that you truly don’t want to work within the [***] system of accountability and structure.” In other words, because we had asked them to follow their own system of accountability and structure, they decided to sever our employment, but it wasn’t really they who severed us, but we who had somehow severed ourselves. It was 13 years to the day after we had resigned our previous job to join the ministry full-time. That day, I was working on a difficult game, and I felt utterly powerless and hopeless. I quit the game, telling myself that some battles, it is simply impossible to win.
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On March 24, 2020, I wrote to our former director once more. I had planned to write to him at Christmas, but a friend asked me to wait because he had just lost two close family members. The request hurt because when the org had first made their demand which I eventually refused, I had asked them to wait two months because I was dealing with a serious family crisis. They had refused that request and insisted I must leave my family for a week in the midst of the crisis to immediately meet their demand. Yet I honored my friend’s request, waiting three months to send my draft.
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I wrote, “The question I struggled with this Christmas was how you could sign off on something you had acknowledged to me was untrue. I came to you and explained the problems I had seen within [***]. You told me that you had seen those problems yourself. You knew that I was speaking truth. Then [my supervisor] told me that those very same words were a lie. This is a direct quote from [him]: ‘There is no problem. You need to stop saying there is a problem.’ He then proceeded to diagnose me or label me or whatever word you want to call it, with imagining my past abuse onto [***]. All of the problems I had seen and you had acknowledged were, in [his] assessment, projections from my past onto my present within [***]. [He and his assistant] then assigned me to a counselor they had spoken to about my situation and who said he could get my Dad out of my head so I could see the present accurately.
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“Is it any wonder I refused? … .” I asked him whether he had known when he upheld the decision to sever our employment that at the heart of our severance was that I had been diagnosed with imagining the very problems he had admitted to my husband and I that he had seen.
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He replied the following day,
“I did and continue to agree with [your former supervisor’s] and the Field Team’s decision” — (it is worh noting that a number of the field team had told us privately that they disagreed with the decision) —
“I did and continue to agree with [his] diagnosis”.
He also wrote,
“At that time, I would have only cleared you to continue on with [***] in a Leave of Absence to take the extended time needed to be healthy (which was a concession), but there is no way I would have cleared your family as healthy for return to the field.”
In other words, at the time they offered us the LOA, they had already decided we would never be permitted to return to the field. Once that decision was officially announced, any funds which our supporters had donated to our ministry during the LOA would then be divided between our former field team and the ministry as a whole. The false offer of an LOA with a potential return to ministry within the org would not have benefited us in any way. It would not have helped us have “the extended time needed to be healthy.” We wouldn’t be paid. None of the funds sent to [***] by our support partners for our support would be accessible to us. We wouldn’t have insurance. We would have a false hope which would then fail us. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” However, the offer would have benefited the organization if even a single person donated to our accounts during that time, which was very likely. Who would have donated? The family, friends, and supporters who were closest to us. They would have donated specifically to benefit our ministry because of their connection to us, but the org had already decided that money would never be used for that purpose.
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Multiple people condemned us for not seeking the LOA, but I am so glad I recognized that some battles should be left unfought. Some battles are traps. I did decide not to follow the counsel of multiple people who advised us to request the LOA. I trusted the counsel of others who told me that something was not right, and I trusted my own discernment that the offer was not in good faith. I urged Joshua to refuse the offer. I discerned correctly. Many people assume that the discernment of abuse victims is twisted by abuse, but I would assert that it is the discernment of those who ignore abuse which is twisted by their refusal to see what is actually happening.
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I am proud of myself. I am proud of my ability to solve hard games and to overcome abuse. I like that I am persistent in untangling hard puzzles and in fighting for truth and justice. I am glad I have learned to trust my discernment, to seek and to listen to counsel, and then to make a decision.
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