Enough

Sometimes things go terribly not the way you planned. Like today. I got to work early because a repairman was coming to fix the printer. He came. Then a few hours later when the paper smelled and looked like roasted marshmallows in the historic house built circa 1820 where our museum offices are located. In the meantime not much of what I had on my to do list was finished - it could have been if the printer had worked...Then the staffing fell apart for the weekend. Again, not my fault but my problem. Enough of these little things built up that by 2:30 I left work - no explanations - just "if you need me I'll come back." Granted, I am the director and I did work on both of my days off this week and now that the weekend staffing changed I'll put in at least a 20 hour one....so the dog and I went to the river where there were a large number of barges herded together at the bank chaperoned by one big river boat. But it was enough of a breather to somewhat calm my exasperation for a few minutes. Water does that - still waters....He leads me beside the still waters....

These are slight challenges compared to the pressure that builds in an abusive marriage over many decades sometimes. At some point someone just has had enough.

For the fictitious pastor's ex-wife in my novel, enough was when the last child graduated from high school and the still waters were at William's house, Terry's refuge from all of the church hurt that made everything that much more confusing because she couldn't untwist the lies about God enough to get a peek at His truth...pain does that.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

Popcorn and Parmesan Cheese with Butter & Dillweed

A recipe to temporarily forestall loneliness and other sadness is fresh popped popcorn covered with real melted butter, dill weed, salt, and Parmesan cheese...it only works until the bowl is licked clean of the butter.

Only once did emotional discomfort stop me from eating altogether. It was when the last lie shattered everything and my heart broke like a shattered plate into a million little pieces on the floor. Thank God for the friend who forced me, a week or so later, to eat some cheese. The crisis had been faced but at that particular time, no solution seemed evident...

Terry Soldan, the fictitious ex-wife of Pastor Ed, had a similar experience. Her friend was William, whose reputation as a gourmet chef was as well known as his wonderful garden. You can read about their unusual relationship in the novel, Pastor's Ex-Wife - now available for sale as a Kindle e-book.

Is it really necessary to be right?

A long-time Christian moved to a new town and for about a year attended a small church without becoming a member while making relationship and contributing to the life of the congregation. Largely because of the demands of a new but necessary job, she missed several Sundays in a row. Her friends told her that the pastor's wife wondered whether this woman had "fallen out of fellowship" and that the pastor was going to visit her to find out. No one called. No one bothered to ask her before the judgments, based on arrogant assumptions, flew like gossip throughout the congregation. The woman came to me extremely wounded asking advice about how to respond. Her first instinct was never to return to the church.

Unfortunately, I have encountered this situation far too many times - sometimes being the focus of the accusations (more than once).

It was this type of spiritual pride that Terry Soldan, the fictitious ex-wife of a pastor in my novel, Pastor's Ex-Wife (available on Amazon for the Kindle, btw), banked on when she left Pastor Ed and ran to her childhood bachelor friend's home. She correctly predicted that Ed and his board of elders and every other member of his congregation would immediately assume that she and William were having an affair and that, therefore, Ed had biblical grounds for a divorce. In addition, Terry would be ex-communicated, anathema, unless she confessed her sin and repented.

Some readers have asked whether it is really plausible for Terry to live in William's house without being sexually involved with him. Other readers will understand that it makes a great deal of sense because they will have lived Terry's life and resonate with her woundedness sharing her understandings.... Unfortunately for the church, William's genuine commitment and hospitality to his traumatized friend brought Terry more normalcy and healing than anything else.

Is it really so necessary to be right? Isn't our own righteousness nothing more than a used tampon according to Isaiah? It doesn't take too long for that to stink.

Loneliness among friends

This is the end of Thanksgiving weekend for 2011 - a time that often finds us surrounded by family retelling the shared stories that make up the fabric of our lives. I did see some family on Thursday at a nursing home where a man, my former father-in-law, whom I have loved for 35 years or more, is fading away - all his concentration was spent trying to move his food from his plate to his mouth...he missed all the stories and we missed the ones he relentlessly tells every year. Most likely I unwittingly started a new story when I made a serious mistake while knitting a Christmas stocking for my son's intended...Of course this happened when I was surrounded by the other women with whom I have spent hours knitting, chatting, and chasing children over the years...it's a tradition among us (we're four generations into it) to knit Christmas stockings for the new members of the family. Windy knit the same exact pattern for each of her grandchildren. Grandmommy continued the tradition - varying the pattern a bit - so each of my children has a stocking she created. Since I have never been able to discipline myself to repeat a recipe or a design without some variation, I changed everything - knitting in the design instead of embroidering it, etc. But every stocking still needs a heel turned, a foot added, and a toe. What did I do in such a public setting to inspire a new story? I knit the heel but forgot to turn it before I picked up all the stitches on the double pointed needles all the while ignoring the little voice inside that kept saying something just did not feel right. "So, you are knitting a tube sock stocking!" was the conclusion of my sister in law who was knitting on the seat next to me. Rather than try to fix my mistake while I was still embarrassed by it - even though it was pretty funny...I put the whole thing back in the bag and ate another piece of pie. Soon I returned home which took over an hour of driving and when I got here it was a lonely finish to a melancholic but meaningful day. I've spent quite a few holidays without family since my marriage failed but I have only been shunned by one or two individuals. Terry Soldan in Pastor's Ex-Wife faced the same loneliness among friends but she was overtly shunned even by her own children. Hopefully the humor I wove throughout that novel makes a good contrast to the pain it paints.

God is blurry

The biggest loss that Terry Soldan suffered when she left her abusive husband, Pastor Ed, after decades of marriage was the rift her decision created between her and her two adult children. She did not explain the details of her reasoning to them - she did not have the luxury of an opportunity prior to leaving Ed. After she left, like many of the people in the congregation she had helped to lead for so many years, her children took Ed's side without even investigating hers. Ed successfully branded himself as God's man of faith and power who had been dealt a huge injustice by his unrepentant rebellious wife. His ego became inflated by a standard but not careful interpretation of a verse in Malachi that says that God hates divorce. Most people stop there. When you read the verse in its context it sharpens the meaning a lot and divorce appears to be a natural consequence of actions suffered within a marriage especially by a wife. Knowing ahead of time that this would be the message served up week after week from Ed's pulpit against her actions, Terry realized that her choice to walk away would be ever so costly. How much pain did that indicate was her daily marital dose?
Sadly, Terry is a fictional construct of the stories of many women in pain whose decisions cause even more pain - sometimes because of misplaced accusations that come against them; sometimes because of their own desperate but negative actions. Usually God is blurry and His image superimposed on the pain at the point of the deepest crisis. Let God arise for every Terry who needs His wisdom and courage!


You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

Then with my outside voice I said.....

One very honest friend vented about a difficult person she had dealt with during the day by detailing what she said - "I told her to take her pretty little skinny self and blankety blank blank...."

It surprised me to hear the diatribe because this friend never does or says anything mean or even remotely harsh to or about anyone.

Then she paused...."Then," she continued, "with my outside voice I....." said something much nicer indeed.

I laughed, delighted at the truth she had revealed through this clever device of humor.

We all have inside voices and sometimes they need to speak louder.

For Terry Soldan, the ex-wife of the abusive Pastor Ed, her inside voice was gagged for the entire time she was married to him mostly because she had a warped understanding of how a Christian wife is supposed to behave towards her husband. His power over her snapped and she broke free when that inside voice insisted that the outside voice stop pretending.

That caused the identity crisis that ended up being a crisis of faith and a leap of faith that took a whole lot of courage and caused a whole lot of pain.

Hopefully the readers of Pastor's Ex-Wife will find the humor as refreshing as I found my friend's.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

Have you been hurt by a church?

I was driving this afternoon listening to the radio not finding the store I was looking for when I heard Rickie Lee Jones interviewed on the Studio 360 program and enjoyed hearing her sing a few songs from her newest album. Two of the songs have titles that refer to biblical language so the interviewer asked if she was moving towards Christianity. While she said that she "likes Jesus" and likes what He said "but he didn't say very much" according to her, she does not "like" most Christians nor does she respect any "fundamentalist" religion where the adherents are expected to do a specific series of things just for believing in the guy who started it.

Lots of people are caught in this dilemma. They "like" Jesus but find a mismatch between what He seems to stand for and what His people represent. So they avoid Him along with the religion that has grown up around His various followers making little distinction between them. Probably this is a clue that should be interpreted to mean that they (the people who "like" but do not follow Jesus) have been severely wounded by the church in the name of Jesus - like what happened to our fictitious protagonist, Terry, when her ex-husband, Pastor Ed, accused her of all manner of theological anathema as a way to mask his own abusive behavior and the congregation, who idolized their member of the clergy as many have elevated a saint or pope in other religious contexts, bought the lie and rejected Terry who was actually the innocent used to be ingenue victim.

She, licking her own wounds while coming to grips with how long she had been the prisoner of an ego maniacal misogynist, could have ended up with Rickie Lee Jones' confession. However, largely due to her role as the Anonymous Church Critic for the local newspaper, she began to appreciate the many stripes of the American Protestant church and to become a discriminating consumer of what is demanded of the members of their congregations from the mostly men who occupy their various pulpits on Sunday mornings.

Have you suffered hurt at the hands of Christians, clergy, or the church? Perhaps, like many who have read the novel, Pastor's Ex-Wife, it will begin to lance the wound in your heart and start you laughing down a path towards and authentic faith that comes from gut-wrenching honesty met by NO pat-answers.....Besides, the book could also make a great mind-movie until someone decides to buy the movie rights to it from me and turn it into a block-buster. (I am not kidding, by the way.)


You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

TAPF - Planning to write Pastor's Ex-Wife

When I taught elementary school students writing I helped them begin every project by filling out a form to identify a few standard parameters. It asked for the Topic, Audience, Purpose, and Format. You can't write a successful piece without knowing these from the beginning unless you are just journaling - Virginia Wolff style using stream of conscious free writing. I do that but I usually do not share that stuff with anyone kind of like my painter daughter keeps her sketchbooks very private.

I did not use the actual form but I did think through the parameters from the very beginning. The only thing that really shifted away from my original plan while I was writing Pastor's Ex-Wife was the format.

Originally I planned to write just a short story to get the idea to stop dominating my imagination because I did not want to summon the personal courage to actually work on it. Read the earlier blogs to see more of what I mean...

So here is how I would have filled out that simple 4th grade writing planner.
Topic:  the clergy abuse scandal/issue from the American Protestant side through the perspective of a wife of an abusive pastor
Audience: people who have been wounded by the American Protestant church and who are conflicted about their faith as a result - especially women who have been victimized or sexually violated by pastors
Purpose: expose the problem of clergy spouse and sexual abuse, show how it manifests in a variety of church and denominational contexts, help victims delineate between abusers who, like all humans, are deceitfully wicked, and God, who is good but who gets redefined through the lens of every authority figure
Format: fiction - this is the biggest problem for getting the book noticed by a publisher, since it does not fit nicely into any of the publishing categories not being a Christian book nor a romance nor any other readily definable anything except perhaps contemporary women's fiction. But I believe that the format, a novel,  is also the best way to reach the intended audience and fulfill its purpose effectively.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.     

Boxes and other symbols

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to structure the Pastor's Ex-Wife before I wrote the main part of the book. As I explained in an earlier blog, I spent a day merging two very different ideas for writing projects in a simple story basically to get the project out of my mind, not wanting to write a book that would require this much courage, chicken that I tend to be. The result turned out to be the first and last chapters in which Terry and William, in costume, of course, return to Ed's church so that Terry can use her observations in the next week's syndicated "Anonymous Church Critique" article. As William says, the purpose is to "close the door" on a very bad season of Terry's life as the abused wife of a pastor.

When I realized that the main part of the novel had to show the series of events that combined to provide Terry with the resolve, resiliency, and courage she needed to face and finish her past, next I had to structure the chapters.

Each chapter is written around a central metaphor. One metaphor is a door, another a box....Each chapter portrays a different church building peopled with another church's congregation and led by a third church's pastor. Each chapter contains a story based on something that actually happened in the inner city music classroom where I taught for real and each chapter moves the linear time-line forward while making sure that there is both flashback and foreshadowing in the pages. 

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.     

Job's Erstwhile Comforters

I spoke this evening with a friend who has known me since before I was married. That makes our relationship stretch back to more than 35 years when we attended the same church - a good one, for the most part - then- although it was led by a bully pastor who ended up disgracing himself without room to recover from his demise since he killed himself. But as my friend and I reminisced over the various shared griefs and triumphs that make up the fabric of our relationship, I realized anew that we Christians have a terrible penchant for abusing each other in the name of love. In my friend's case, she had what many in her circle of friends considered too many children too close together beginning when she and her husband were too young and, probably even more problematic for most of them, she was a strong woman who contributed what many consider the man's role in the marriage. The critics' solution was to equate their criticism of my friend with God's. Unfortunately, like Job's erstwhile "comforters" they forgot to get God's opinion before presuming to articulate it. It reminds me of what happened in the story, Pastor's Ex-Wife, to Terry when the members of the congregation she had served for decades decided to agree with the authoritative but abusively twisted opinion of Pastor Ed. So she was discarded as a heretic, anathema. Unfortunately, I have suffered that treatment and witnessed it being served to numerous victims from more than one pastor endorsed by many more ignorant bystanders who unknowingly bought into the unfounded opinions of the same just because it was the opinion of the pastor.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.    

Unique Horror/Common Terror

 Terry's story includes an anecdote about how her pastor ex-husband, Ed, became enraged when their teenage daughter dyed her hair. One pastor's ex-wife real-life friend of mine emailed me after reading this chapter to ask how I knew that this had happened to HER. I did not know it had happened to her but I find it remarkable that abusers share so many petty triggers to rage. I first discovered this when I worked in a shelter for battered women and their children in eastern Illinois in the early 1980s. Every victim of domestic violence told her personally horrific story upon arriving (usually late in the evening or the middle of the night, her children in disarray, distress, and pajamas) but each of us had already heard most of the details from slightly different angles hundreds of times. There is a community of victims each of whom is convinced that hers is a unique tale and situation. And so it is. Unique horror experienced behind closed doors generally without witnesses - perhaps including violence - but a common terror. Shame and fear combine to strengthen the silence. It takes a brave woman or a desperate one who, like Terry, has used up all her resilience over decades, to change the status quo.


You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.   

No Stretch to find Diversity

Multiculturalism is a big theme in education these days but when I was teaching in an inner city elementary school we did not have to stretch to find diversity. My students spoke 13 different languages and came from more countries. So, as you can imagine, the classroom anecdotes in the Pastor's Ex-Wife are totally based on what happened when I taught music and reading. The identities of the kids have been changed but the stories are all true.


You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.     

A Sane Man in a Mad World

In his book of essays, "Orthodoxy", G.K. Chesterton wrote: ...new novels die so quickly, and ...old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the center is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world...."

For women married to men who are religious bullies like the Pastor Ed to whom the fictional Terry Soldan was married, the very real torment is about sanity. It takes a faithful friend to look such a wounded woman in the eyes and declare that yes, she is sane. This healing word contradicts every message that her God-fraudulent husband has sent over the course of the whole premarital, nuptial, and marital unbliss. It probably also counters the default self-doubt, Christians must die (to themselves) thinking that has kept her in the marriage boistered by bunches of somewhat mis-applied but well-intended Bible verses that she has beaten herself with after being bloodied by the ones her husband levied against her first.

For women who are married to abusive clergymen, the "mad world" that Chesterton referenced is the church itself and the sane man is the God-less William who offers sanctuary, not asylum, to his childhood friend so she can heal.

Again, while the novel is not autobiographical, and while it most certainly is a fictional construct, I promise that I understand both G.K. Chesterton's allusions and Terry's choices.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.   

Distortions of a God-fraud

How do you suppose innocent, educated, truly Christian women like the fictitious pastor's ex-wife, Terry Soldan, get themselves stuck in relationships and marriages to pastors like Ed? Probably, as is true for Terry, there is a distortion in their understanding of God's goodness combined with the suppression of some deep part of themselves (their soul, perhaps?) which could have identified the abuser for the God-fraud he was but that soul-part was hidden and relegated to silence. Why? For Terry it had a lot to do with the unaddressed abuse she suffered as a little girl in the house next door to William. But while William does recognize how seriously damaged Terry had been as a child, since a child himself, he had been unable to help her then, Terry, the adult, remained clueless. It took the desperation of many years of marriage to break her to the point at which she could no longer could remain resilient - when she left Ed and had to begin forming an identity anew in the sanctuary of William's house. That was where and when she began to untangle the lies that had nearly completely enclosed her as a fly wrapped in Ed's spider gossamer while paralyzed and stuck anesthetized to the fibers of his web. Too many women share Terry's story.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

Please share your story

It does not have to be dark or funny or finished or resolved but if it is your story it is an important one. A big purpose of this project of blogging the back story of "Pastor's Ex-Wife" is to collect the stories of many women who have suffered too. Anonymous is ok. Identifying yourself is ok. What's your story?

I have to be gone on business from tomorrow, March 24 - March 29th, so look for my next post on March 30th. In the mean time, think about telling a piece of your story as a comment here. Since I set the blog to require comments to be monitored they will not post until I get back either.

Of course, you can purchase "Pastor's Ex-Wife" by Lesley Barker (that's me) on Amazon as a kindle e-book. Don't have a kindle? That's ok. If you have a computer or a smart phone you can download a kindle ap for either device.

Thanks for reading.

Public School Pathos, Levity, and Dimension

In my real life, I found myself the single parent of seven children - six were still minors when that season of my life began and suddenly, I needed to return to the work world because a significant amount of money was essential to keep everyone fed and clothed not counting the cost of the braces, broken arms, and the musical instruments everyone required.  (Thank God for plastic)

As a stop gap measure while I was focused on getting a corporate job somewhere in the our home town which was major urban area, I checked the possibility of subbing at the local public elementary school where the three youngest children attended. It was their second year in the school system. I had spent the past 17 years as a home-school educator and actually had served six families other than my own with specialty classes and as their surrogate home-school teacher.

I spoke to the principal - who became one of the models for William's character in Pastor's Ex-Wife. Three days later I had a full time contract with the district and a regular paycheck, insurance, and retirement benefits with a schedule that allowed me to be at home when the kids were.

I started teaching music and reading at this school where 90% of the students (including my three) qualified for free and reduced lunch. 60% of the students were African Americans bussed in from the area of our city where Domino's Pizza did not deliver because it was so violent. 30% of the students were new immigrants, speaking a total of 13 languages other than English newly arrived in our country from an assortment of war-torn mostly third world nations. 10% were middle class white Americans who lived within walking distance from the school.

I taught in that district for four years. In all I was assigned to three schools and William's school did relocate to a fourth school so that our building could have air conditioning installed.

Each chapter in Pastor's Ex-Wife contains an anecdote from the music classroom which adds levity, pathos, and a new dimension to the symbolic metaphor that serves as the chapter's driver.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.

Three Kinds of Culture Shock

As if taking on the clergy abuse scandal from the American Protestant side wasn't controversial enough, Pastor's Ex-Wife also concerns the issue of race relations in our country's inner cities and churches especially. That theme unfolds via two intertwining avenues.

Terry and William masquerade as people of color when they visit a different church each week so that Terry can write her syndicated anonymous church critique. Many people have heard the saying that the most segregated hour in America today is Sunday morning at church which is sad but too often true - usually not because the congregation is determined to keep it so but mostly, in my opinion, because there have been too few natural ways for people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds to become friends.

The second place that Terry encounters diversity and has to learn to function across cultural divides is in her classroom at the inner city public school where William is the principal. He is her mentor, having participated in the same predominantly African American school district where more than 90% of the students qualify to receive free or reduced lunches for a career spanning three decades.

In fact, you could view the entire novel as one woman's culture shock as she finds herself in three new cultural milieus: a secular community that is free from the petty judgments that so many closed (we know the truth better than anyone else and God will get them for not being as informed and convicted as we are) Christian communities express; an inner city community stressed by all the socio-economic inequities you can possibly list exacerbated by an influx of new immigrants from underdeveloped war-torn countries; and a household made up of men who know who they are and understand how to befriend each other in spite of their differences.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.

Taboo, Anathema, and Reason to Shun Sinners

I did not always believe in God. In fact, I took pride in the fact that I did not believe in Him but that I knew about religion and thought it was only necessary for people who could not exist independently. However, I had read the Bible so I knew that if there was a God and if that God was the God revealed in the Bible, not to believe in Him carried eternal consequences so I had to find out if He was real. That is a different story, though, but it happened and for more than 35 years I have walked in His light with Him, knowing Him personally.

That other personal story convinced me that God is neither shocked nor infuriated by my authentic doubts, fears, and questions. Whenever one of my children struggled with issues of faith, I always suggested that they should ask all of the tough questions because they will find Him faithful to satisfy them with the answers eventually. In fact, one day God just might speak to them from the middle of a tornado like he spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. If that happens, He just might turn the tables and ask them impossible questions like whether they know how to release the thunder, store the snow, capture leviathan, or make the hinds go into labor.

Terry, the pastor's ex-wife, had to detach her understanding of God from her battered wife's view of her ex-husband, Ed, whose abusive weapon had always been a biblical "club" wielded against her in the name of God. Her flight from Pastor Ed was her first step towards experiencing a good God but it took a series of new sufferings to prompt her to demand answers from God to a series of new and personally threatening questions.

The novel depicts this fictional character in a familiar struggle between light and darkness, faith and failure,  confidence and depression. It is a book about healing, authentic faith, honesty, courage, and restoration...it doesn't fully happen - does it ever fully happen to any of us who continue to live and breathe on this earth?


The problem, as far as promoting the book goes, is that Terry's process avoids the cliches and the pat Christianese answers. Stepping away from a marriage - especially to a pastor- and ignoring the demands of the church's elders is taboo, anathema, and reason to shun the sinner. At least that is the opinion and experience and expectation of many American Christians and churches. But that response rarely helps and usually adds to the devastation.

So by making Terry's choices these anathemas, I risk offending many Christians. I also risk being labeled as a rebel - if the shoe fits....hmmm.... But hopefully her story offers hope through a courageous pursuit of God in spite of how much His reputation has been twisted.

Nevertheless, I did not want the story to offend Jesus Christ, my Lord, even if it horrified some church people. That's where my friend Gail helped. She is a very conservative Christian woman who attends church, teaches Sunday School, and gives lavishly to Christian causes and ministries. She is also one of my very few very good friends who walked with me through my non-fiction divorce without dismissing me as morbidly unrepentant and therefore too sullied by stubbornness and sin to stay her friend. She allowed me to read each chapter of Pastor's Ex-Wife aloud. I figured that if Gail assessed that the story overstepped boundaries and disrespected God, she would say so and I could rework it.

I had forgotten about Gail's own abuse history. She became so involved with the characters, so concerned for Terry, and so angry at Terry's adult children who took her ex-husband's side, that she pushed me to keep writing so she could find out what would happen next....Thank you, Gail....



You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.

Typically and Predictably

It took a day to write the first draft of each chapter after planning it out using the rubric I set myself. While I wanted to have Terry speak with an authentic voice, I did not want to trespass by having her emote from places that were under or even un-healed in me. I wanted to be faithful to the friend who started the whole thing. And, I wanted to write a story about a person betrayed by the church who was struggling to differentiate between the church and its God without minimizing the struggle for and against faith in Him that Terry had to suffer. I also wanted to have someone take the responsibility to push me through the book so that I could produce the first draft in a timely manner. So, I involved that same friend and her new husband. Thank God for email- that nearly instant means of transmitting text across long distances and deep oceans. My friend and her husband dutifully read each chapter as it was drafted. More than once her follow-up phone call started with "How did you know about __________? I never told anyone that had happened to me." It goes to show how typically and predictably abusers act.

Now what?

Remember that none of this would have happened if:
1) I did not NEED stories to survive;
2) My friend had not made me promise to pray about writing her story of fleeing from an abusive pastor;
3) I did not care about keeping my word; and
4) If I had not decided to write a short story on a day when there did not seem much else better to do.

But all of this had happened and now I was convinced that here was an important story.

Now what?

Should I create a story board or a file folder for each character and plot the whole story out before I started writing or should I wing it?

No matter what anybody tells you, writing is as individual as dreaming or planting a garden - there are some things everyone has to do but then there are also the successful ecclectic Virginia Wolfs and e.e. cummings among us who manage to break the rules and still achieve fame.

I don't have any trouble breaking rules here and there. I am pretty organized AND/but I am not a linear thinker really.

So, how should I develop the story, keep track of all the details, move it forward, communicate this huge social issue in a way that would make an impact like Oprah Winfrey did today when 200 men stood up together on her show to break free of the shame and baggage they have carried after having been the childhood victims of sexual abuse including a pair of twins whose abuser was a priest? How would I insert humor, add dialogue, use metaphors and similes, and make the writing compelling? How would I make the story appeal to all the women whose hearts have been scarred and whose lives diminished because they have not been able to push into a new season with freedom and courage and at the same time not write something maudlin and depressing?

I created a basic time-line of events that would culminate in the first chapter which is really the end of the story so there is no need to start reading at the back of the book to find out what happens. The story is about how Terry gained the courage to be in the first chapter at all.

Next I made myself a basic plan sheet for each chapter. Each chapter concerned one of the main events in the timeline but also revolved around its own metaphor. So I had a basic plot outlined from the beginning of the writing process but I only worked one chapter at a time.

But there were more issues to weave into the story....like what really happens every day in an inner city public elementary school and how racial and ethnic issues effect us everyday no matter what we look like and where we come from....and of course, the story had to make us laugh too...

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.