Resentment and Regret

For many years I would have said that I do not regret having been part of the system for as long as I was, including education. Because I left quietly over a period of years it was easy to forget the bad, or to continue to normalize it even still.

We were told we were bad for having utterly natural, human impulses. I prayed for release from my “addiction” to rock music for years (god never granted that request. I still love rock ’n’ roll). We were shamed for drinking Coca-Cola (caffeine) or eating bacon (unclean meat) or having ear piercings. We were micro-managed, even as adults inside The Organization, over what we wore, as if it was a point of salvation. We were taught to distance ourselves from those around us who weren’t Adventist like us.

And so, yes, while I do hold some fond memories of times inside the Adventist system, and while some of the relationships that I formed during those years are ones I continue to hold as dear, I have begun to resent it all on balance.

Resent, more than regret.

I resent years spent in fear and guilt, and I resent what those years so spent have meant in my adult life. I regret the sacrifices my parents made unnecessarily for me and my siblings to attend Adventist institutions. I resent and in a small way also mourn the loss of friendships that simply never happened because of the wall of Adventism, and so also resent the chocking effect that The System had on even the most causal friendships with those outside the system.

Yes, I live a fulfilling life, and those looking in from outside might very well wonder what I’ve got to be unhappy about. So here it is: I resent that I was ever made to feel guilty over music. I resent Saturdays not spent at the beach, and Friday evenings not spent going to the movies with my friends. I resent options simply not considered as I moved into my college years. There were schools and majors that I summarily dismissed out of hand, and while those choices were increasingly mine, I resent that I’d been indoctrinated with such a narrow view of the world. I resent girls not kissed in high school and women not dated in college. More than that, I resent missing out an entire world full of people I could never consider as true friends, could never have a relationship of any kind with but that it would be filtered through Advensism. I resent that all of those things were spun up into issues of life and death and eternal salvation, and I regret that I bought it all for as long as I did. I look back now and resent years of life lived under the oppressive shadow of an imaginary system.

Thanks to Adventism, I have spent my adult life never quite able to really commit to, and in fact actively resisting the mainstream of whatever group I find myself part of. I think it comes from that deeply ingrained sense of the importance of being “a peculiar people.” We’re not like others and our salvation depends on us being different. So don’t be unequally yoked, don’t commit a ship you know is going to sink.

There was also just the elemental fear of being maligned or ridiculed or misunderstood for being different. One of the earliest lessons learned as a child growing up in the world but not of the world as a Seventh-day Adventist was that it was safer to be on the fringes. Being fringe was already it’s own answer to otherwise awkward questions about, you know, why I couldn’t attend the baseball practice on a Saturday or why I could accept an offer of 7-Up but not Dr. Pepper.

Not to be melodramatic, but growing up Adventist has meant a lifetime of always being different (even if those differences were not obvious); never really fitting in - not in any community or team or company, not in my own skin.

So yes. It was traumatic. I resent it in retrospect. I feel the negative effects of it even today. I should have left much, much sooner.

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