The doctors and biopsies say lymphoma…a completely treatable cancer with a good chance of survival.  My Dad, however, has special insight above and beyond the medical professionals and contrary to the obvious symptoms. He has heard from God that he will live until the day Jesus returns.  He is unkillable.  He will not pursue treatment.  In fact, he will not even say he has cancer, lymphoma or any word that could describe the cause of his rapidly declining health. Because, as any good Christian knows, words are life and death.

I am not a good Christian.  Well, I am not what my father considers a good Christian.  In fact, I am, an instrument of Satan who Dad has to stand against in faith.

This was what Dad told me as we were pulling into Walgreens to pick up the antibiotic his oncologist had just prescribed.  You see, my Dad can’t claim that he has cancer or treat it.  He can, however, undergo surgery to have drains installed to syphon off the liters of fluid that are accumulating in his body. Now, one of the drain incisions has become infected and to add more drama to the situation, the drains are no longer working, Dad’s body is filling with fluid, and he can’t get it out.

The satanic attack my Dad is accusing me of waging on him is in the form of making certain he understands the words the heavily accented oncologist was saying.  This is the same oncologist who had pleaded “Mr. Brinker, if you do not treat the lymphoma, you will die from it.”  To which Dad responded by “rebuking” him for speaking death over him saying “I do not receive that.”

Dad’s reality is that he does not have cancer and anyone who says anything different is tempting him to unbelief.  In that Walgreen’s parking lot, I try to appeal to Dad’s hyper religiosity through the biblical story of Abraham that, in a way, mirrors the current situation and demonstrates God’s goodness and faithfulness even though Abraham flubbed things up. If God kept His promise to Abraham despite the mistakes Abraham made, what would prevent God from doing the same for Dad? My Dad is having none of it and wants to tell me about an event that he, for some reason, feels will support his decisions.

“There was a prophet,” he says, “who prophesied that everyone in the building would be healed except one person.  In fact, that is exactly what happened.  The one person who was not healed was a woman, who said she was already believing for her healing.”  He pauses for dramatic effect, “because of her false faith, she wasn’t able to receive her healing.”

My jaw drops…Could there be a better story in existence to argue for my experience?  I pause, look at this gem of a tale from various angles to discern why this story would be a defense for him; swish it around in my brain for a minute then spit out, “Dad, how are you any different that that woman?”

A few weeks later, Dad was back in the hospital, where he would spend an entire month.  The infection from those drains was nearly septic and required a very painful, intense surgery to keep him alive.  Prior to the surgery, he sat in the hospital for weeks, engaged in an old-fashioned Mexican standoff, refusing to allow the medical professionals to take the action needed to save his life. He told them he was standing in faith against the infection as the concern for his situation went up the entire hospital’s chain of command to include a psychiatric evaluation ensuring he was of sound mind to decline a life saving operation.  Finally, he was given the option of going home on hospice or moving forward with the surgery.  His faith suddenly extended into the gifted hands of the surgeon.

With the infection removed; the cancer untreated and his body barely functioning, Dad insisted on being released from the hospital. Six months of treating symptoms had gotten him to this point.  He had nearly died of an infection caused by his poor choices, which he claimed were the leading of “Holy Spirit.”  The amazing medical staff at St. Mary’s Hospital had saved his life multiple times, while he accused them of operating from a place of fear, while he, Ron the spiritual, had been the “only one in the room not giving place to fear.”

After being home for 12 days and surviving on ice chips and popsicles for over half of that time, my Dad was healed. Well, that was the story that went out on the “grapevine” (my husband accurately renamed this gossipy, rumor mill the “poison ivy vine”) after a group of men arrived and laid hands on Dad in prayer.  It was a curious thing to learn this amazing turn of events since I have been with Dad through multiple “healings” these past six months and even though I squint hard each time, I don’t see anything but a further decent towards the end of his life.

After this particular healing announcement, I was especially fed up and sent Mom the following text to comfort her and offer reassurance that she and I are not the delusional ones in this situation:

“I think what frustrates me is that when you hear of biblical miracles, lame men walk; the dead come back to life; blind see; leprosy disappears…all see it and all are amazed. There’s no room for debate or argument…people would argue that Jesus shouldn’t have healed on the sabbath, but no one denied the healing happened. Some questioned why folks were not well to begin with…but, again, no one questioned the miracle.

I have never experienced a miracle. I have been told by Harold (more about him later), Dad and others that what I’m seeing/experiencing is a miracle…but with every one of them, it’s either completely delusional or, at best a stretch of the imagination. 

A ‘healed’ body doesn’t produce bloody vomit or stool. A healed body functions as a body should function… (and yes, these symptoms were all present post said healing)

I feel disgusted by the delusion. 

Do I believe miracles happen? Yes! Do I think a person has to squint to see the proof of a miracle? Absolutely not.

Do I want dad to die? No. Do I want this religious gaslighting to end? Yes.

And, you’re right. The truth keeps coming out and always will…but this craziness is truly unbelievable.”

Gaslighting.  Actually, I really hate that word.  I prefer to say, “manipulation of reality.”  Sometimes I just don’t want to type that all out. I hate the word itself because it’s thrown out so casually that it has lost a lot of its umph.

Regardless of the words to describe it, I have been experiencing the phenomena for most of my life, most painfully, concerning religion.

I promised to explain who Harold is.  Actually, he died.  So, I should say who Harold “was.”  He was the pastor/cult leader of the church I grew up in.

He thought, like my dad, that he had a greater revelation than anyone else; was one of the only people who saw the world clearly and controlled the realities of those around him.  He told everyone in the small, church assembly of about 50 folk which ones of us were in favor with God and which ones of us weren’t.  He “discerned spirits” (saw into a person) and on any given day, a person could be “dark” or “light” based on what Harold discerned.

Harold had pushed men out of the group for my entire childhood.  He would name husbands pariah and would then become the voice of both God and head of household to the women who stayed behind.

A woman who questioned or spoke against Harold was accused of giving place to a “Jezebel Spirit” (I believe this could be considered the spiritual term for a bitch).  This discernment effectively controlled all the women in the cult making them small and fearful of being branded in such a loathsome way.

God was very fickle, weak, unsteady and confusing during the years Harold was His voice for me and others in the church. 

Eventually, I met the real God and not the god who was actually just Harold’s thoughts, desires and fears expressed to the congregation as God.  My relationship with God apart from Harold, allowed me to step back and watch what was happening in the church/cult from a different place. I now thought for myself.  I would hear something, would thoughtfully consider it, would compare it to what the Bible said and, if it didn’t line up, I’d toss it.  I had a new reality that wasn’t in alignment with the one Harold was selling but instead lined up with both what the Bible said and with that gut instinct, the God-given knowing within a person that settles when all is well but is completely dysregulated when a person is trying to align with a reality that just isn’t real.

The “real” reality was Harold was showing up to church meetings drunk or hungover and telling folks that he was in a “spiritually altered state” (A state that was to be aspired to). Sometimes he simply wouldn’t make it to the meeting because of these “altered states.”  He would have been better off staying home because his drunken exploits resulted in multiple DUIs.

I stepped away from Harold’s cult church at this time.  I had tried to stick with it for the sake of relationships within the church but knew in my gut I had to separate myself and my three young children. It was a strange season to feel in my deepest being that what Harold and his supporters were peddling wasn’t God…But, to feel so affected by their influence as to question which of us was right and which of us wasn’t. There was no way both could be true. 

When Harold prematurely passed, bitter and mostly alone, a couple years later, there was a sense of great relief. His death was validation that, I, was in fact, not the crazy one.  He had died having never received so many things he claimed were promised him.  He hadn’t struck it rich in investing as had been foretold; The Y2K prepping the church had done hadn’t been necessary; Harold had never become the great minister to the world; His enemies had not died as had been foretold.  Instead, Harold died. 

The repulsion I had felt; the deep sense of wrongness; the dread of running into Harold around town; the nightmares featuring him were all my body’s accurate responses to an unsafe person.

This same sense of wrongness was what accompanied the announcement of Dad’s healing.  How could what I was seeing in my Dad be the power of God?  His “healed” body was unable to eat, vomiting blood, hydrating on mostly ice chips and exhibiting all signs of dying; however, Dad and his posse was crowing about how this healing event was a turning point and it was only up from here…It wasn’t.

Dad asked for “comfort care” 9 days after being “healed.”  At this point, he hadn’t eaten anything solid for nearly a week and not much more than a Cookout milkshake and Wendy’s frosty for the two weeks prior to that.  He was vomiting blood. His bowels were no longer moving.  He couldn’t move himself and any time someone helped him move it was excruciating, making him cry out in pain. He described his pain as 10 out of 10, which was unheard of for my tough cookie Dad. As he waited for the hospice nurse to arrive with morphine, he kept repeating “Please come. Please come.” 

A couple days later, Dad slipped into an unresponsive state and with that decline came comfort not just for Dad, but also for us “unbelievers” who couldn’t get on board with his religious delusions.

According to Dad, what his family, the doctors and the tests saw in real time was not reality.  I walked with him through it all, trying to gently guide him out of delusion and into a “real” reality where a gentle, kind God wouldn’t be at all disappointed in him if he said he had cancer and accepted the offered help. I was to him, however, a person who was overtaken by fear; an instrument of Satan.

But, it wasn’t over…Not yet.  Because, though Harold was dead and Dad was unresponsive, the religious abuse and cultish ways still exist.  Five days after hospice arrived for Dad, some old cult members weaseled their way in with a revelation that was above and beyond the rest of us weak-faithed-folk.  They pretended to come and empathize with those of us who had rightly taken Dad’s claims of divine guidance as religious hoopla. These zealots had their own claims of divine guidance they didn’t share with the family but that became obvious as they proceeded to lay hands on my unresponsive Dad for him to receive healing. They did this within the hearing of family members who thought they had finally escaped the crazy making of this religious gaslighting. 

These religious abusers did not stop and consider the accusation that accompanied their actions; the accusation that the family was causing Dad to die. There was an eerie parallel to their actions and my husband voiced it concisely “if they are right, then we’re wrong and Harold was right.”  These people, like Harold and Dad consider themselves to have a greater knowledge of God and His ways than others and trample us “unbelievers” in the pursuit of receiving the glory that would come to them if their revelations proved true.

Where does this leave the rest of us…us not so good Christians, who can’t live in the reality in which these more spiritual folk exist?  It leaves us longing for dad’s final breath for more that just the peace he will experience in death.  For myself, I long for his death to drive a final nail into the coffin of this religious abuse that I have lived under in one way or another my entire life.  I want it to be the necessary validation that these people who say they have insider information on God are, in fact, misinformed.  I hope that they will take a step back and consider that maybe they, like Harold and Dad, are not hearing the voice of God but creating a reality that they want to exist to the devastation of those who are living in what is actually true.

Postscript: Out of respect to my dad, I waited for him to pass before sharing this story.  I was willing to live in two realities for the sake of relationship with him until he was gone.  Now, however, I refuse to do so anymore. This religious mind game must stop.  It is destroying both the people who are living in the religious delusion and those of us who are labeled as being less spiritual or even evil because we can’t come on board with what their God has supposedly revealed to them.