Leap of Faith

My name is Stan and this is my story about love and rejection. Sometimes we get so caught up in "our" lives that the truth becomes a fog. It is all so easy to let people that we feel are competent to take control of jobs we really don't have time for. And with that comes a price. We choose to trust them and what they say. And we rationalize that it is for the greater good of the congregation that we are an Elder at. After all with so many decisions to make who has time to contemplate? And after all the one we elected with this these task may someday become a member themselves. Never mind that there is a woman in the congregation who is interested in me! I did have some intial interest in her but was quickly persuaded that I didn't need her and she didn't need me. So I brushed her off. I figured she would figure it out all on her own. Little did I know that she would not make it there with the sisters without me. She trusted me whole hearted but not the sisters. She didn't trust them. They were all married and could of giving a rats ass if she was or not. They just were trying to make points with God. To her on many occasions they reminded her of robots. She (Valerie we will call her) on the other hand had a lot of feeling and they weren't for the sister's they were for me. And although Valerie doesn't 100% believe our dogma she does believe that I do come from a place of truth. And so doesn't her cousin Harriet. That is one thing that they have in common. Anyways to make along story short Valerie may have made that leap of faith if I hadn't decided to move after my good buddy Peter and his wife Harriet decided to part ways after 20 years. I figured I had taken the congregation as far as I could and that it was time to move on. The sisters and Harriet would take Valerie under their collective wings and she would become the equivalent of a nun if she wanted to or not. Amen to that, So despite the fact Valerie had recently lost her father I took off to find my own Paradise(and no it was not near a dashboard) Time marched on and I stayed busy with my new move. From what I hear Valerie kept busy buying clothes and going on trips. I guess time changes a lot of things. The sisters would now only call on Valerie occasionally, actually expecting her to reach out to them. Valerie wouldn't. One day through the grapevine I heard that my old congregation had burned to the ground. Alls I can conclude is that Valerie started seeing us the same way we had been viewing her as a liability and not an asset. In the ashes was as clear as day light was a ring inscribed with 2 John 1-6. All about love gone wrong.