"Worldly" (her favorite word) - 6/27/2011

As I was relaxing in the pool, I was thinking about where to start. Eleven years of my (nearly) twenty-one of life were spent in the cult. It's hard, so I decided to pick some and then when it's ALL finished, I'll go back and put everything back into chronological order. So, what I will write tonight is about living in the two bedroom apartment in Mesa, Arizona. I was 15-16 years old, out of school and working as much as I could to stay out of the house. I hated it there.
Maybe it was because I was a rebellious teenager who hated her mom and wanted nothing more than to piss her off every chance I could. Or, maybe it was because I liked to spend money a lot, so I got as much as I could. Well, I was kinda a rebellious teenager at the time, so maybe the first choice isn't completely untrue. But, because of the fact that I couldn't actually keep the money that I worked for, that definitely wasn't the reason why I worked so much. I hated my life. I slept in my mom's closet, had to give all of my hard earned money to Carol, and had zero contact with the outside world. That was, of course, except for my job. That was the only way that I could be around anyone other than the people who were in Carol's cult.

I was a perfect student. I never went to the principal's office, and never had a grade lower than a C (and there was only one of those!). I loved school; I felt accepted there. Isn't that sad? Among all of the high school cliques and judgments, I felt accepted. Why? Because I excelled in something. With Carol, nothing you did was good enough, because you had to work for what God gave you. In one of her sermons she said "You get from God what you give to God." Doesn't the Bible say that you will not get into heaven by your works, but by your fruit? But, of course, anything that I was good at 'in the flesh' had to be taken away. I was told that my 'book smarts' was a demon of intellectualism that needed to be taken out of me by repentance and much prayer. So, at the ripe age of fifteen, I was convinced that dropping out of high school was the right thing to do. I was told that school is worldly. I think worldly was Carol's favorite word; because no matter what I did, where I went, or who I was with, it was worldly. She even said that she wished that we (the Storehouse) had our own grocery store, so that we wouldn't have to be exposed to the 'worldly' ones to buy our things.