"Tears-pouring-down-my-face, couldn't-talk-couldn't-breathe kind of laughing. Screaming laughing. So hard that I was sobbing because I couldn't get it together."
"I could feel hot, salty tears coming down my face. I sat and cried silently... I was scrunching myself up against the wall as far as I could. All of a sudden, someone from behind us taps on the guy’s shoulder..."
In churches across America, a quiet but consequential conversation is unfolding. It often begins with a question—sometimes whispered, sometimes posted publicly on social media....
"Once intimacy begins to wane, it can become hard to get back on track. One of the keys to reconnecting is understanding that intimacy is a multifaceted thing. In fact, there are five different types of intimacy, and only when we keep all five functioning can we have marriages that feel profoundly connected."
Though I wanted to be able to be strong enough and “spiritual” enough to combat the darkness and depression, I could not. It had very little to do with what “I” did to make it go away.
“A piece of cloth was stuffed in my mouth. I was kicking and hitting out and trying to scream. When I managed to push the gag out, I screamed: ‘It's my wedding day!' That was when I got the first blow. One of the men told me to ‘cooperate or you will die.’”
"The Manipulators used words and phrases that I had heard before. They seemed biblical and very right, but they were not. I had been groomed for this."
“These are our people. It's our tribe," Brian Welch says. “Jesus…he didn’t tell people to go into tribes and say ‘hey, don’t use your tribal language anymore, because we’ve gotta do it this way…’”
