Notes from reading book, "Spiritual Abuse"

Notes from beginning the book, "Spiritual Abuse"

• Author speaks of a profound experience with God, we are God met them in a place of emotional abandonment, and gave deep purpose to his life. I resonate with this.
• Author speaks of the early days in the 1960s and 70s, attending disorganized and exuberant church services. Many drug users and people living wild lives found new direction and purpose through Jesus. This resonates very much with myself, this was the childhood of my parents. This was the environment in which I was raised for my early years.
• Author speaks of his first pastor, who was at first a rock ‘n’ roll womanizing man, who got married, but continued his Waze. When his marriage was close to divorce due to adultery, his wife found Christ. She began changing, praying for him, submitting, and being kind. Suddenly, he read a Bible and also became converted.
• He had a number of miraculous experiences, in which he experienced the power of God. He became a very passionate preacher, who is able to share this transformation with many people from a similar background.
• A small church was formed, and the author was swept up into it.
• Thoughts: I can see where the story is heading. I think that once that Pastor became established as an authority, he eventually lost his humility and found new pressures. I see age, he return to old habits of narcissism. This is where the spiritual abuse component of the book will come in. This mirror is the story of my own father.
• And I think with the author would like to convey, by spending so much time on the early portion of the story, is how profoundly good these early times worse. It was not a façade. This was genuine heart transformation. These were genuine lives which were shifted from a focus on confusion, death, and chaos, headed towards an early grave due to an overdose, shifted over to peaceful and joyful family man and woman who became productive members of society, and live peaceful and joyful lives. Not just one, but thousands. This is what is truly confusing about spiritual abuse. Some of the very best people, who are able to bring about the deepest relationships with God, end up having some of the most remarkable falls. And really, towards the end, it becomes evident that they are not even Christian anymore. They had become animated by something very non-Christian. And so followers are like trying toReconcile what they experienced as a man of God and the movement of God, with what is before then. A narcissist, and evil person, maybe even a messenger of Satan? This is the paradoxical pull of spiritual abuse.
• this also makes me think of the scripture, “do not appoint a new believer become to seated and forming to the snare of the devil (which is pride)” 

This book does not end as expected. The man later became a pastor himself. He speaks passionately of "reconciling" with his aging father. This, to him, meant putting up with verbal abuse and joining his father in sports that he enjoyed, even though it "made him feel like a three-year old, being chided."

He saw this as "restoring the generational blessings" of being under his father.

Although he did not apply it as extremely as his pastor did, I don't think that he has really come very far in unlearning the destructive, authoritarian doctrines that he speaks about in the beginning of this book.

As the saying goes, "How far does the apple really fall from the tree?" In this case, he did not seem to fall very far from his spiritual father.