This is from my journal of Tuesday, March 30, 1993. I had been at that church two and a half years…
At 2 pm, I had a visitor. A former church member who will go unnamed here wanted to apologize for his being so critical of me in my first year. He couldn’t identify why he was, except a certain resistance to authority.
I forgave him. The pain is that he is a minister of sorts, someone I had a lot of confidence in and did not know he was doing this. He said, “I hear from people in the last month that you have changed.” Why am I offended by that? I said, “I haven’t. I’m the same person I was then.” Which is true.
Reminds me of the pain in (my last church) when people would write and say, ‘We love you now, but for your first year here, we hated your guts. You were in our pastor’s pulpit.’ (The previous pastor had stayed only 3 years and had left for another church before they were ready to release him.) And these would be dear people whom I had valued. They got It off their chest but left me bleeding.