What do you say to a woman who spent her entire life doing right according to the Bible and the Church and what everyone says is the righteous life, and it all turns out for shit? What do you say to her after she spent her youth saving her virginity for marriage, while her mother poisoned every relationship she ever had, including with her friendships, and isolated her, using her as a personal servant and even taking her money she brought home from a job so that she couldn’t buy anything for herself? Now she’s old and never-married, never had sex, never had a life, and her mentally twisted and evil mother is dying, naturally taking this golden opportunity to lay a final blast of guilt and blame on her loyal and righteous Christian child before finally saying ‘goodbye’? What do you say to the child of an extreme narcissist who manipulated, controlled and ultimately destroyed her life so that now she is somewhere between middle-aged and elderly herself and yet has never lived at all? Do you tell her that God will bless her? Bless her when? Bless her how? What possible blessing could make up for the curse that has been her life, now effectively over?
What do you say to a man who spent his youth doing right according to the Bible and the Church, not having sex until marriage, only to find himself married to a manipulative, controlling and unloving woman who denies him sex at every turn simply because she sees how badly it hurts him? What do you say to a man who didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs with his friends because it was ‘wrong’ and now his life is a nightmare of manipulation and failure, while his wild partying friends are all doing well and living high, many of them rich and successful with reasonably happy marriages and families? What do you say to him after his own parents manipulated and controlled him, wrecking his life and sending him down a path he never had the slightest interest in or ability for? Do you tell him he obviously married a woman just like his mother? Do you tell him that God will bless him one day, far from today, in some way that we can’t even imagine because things look so black now that it is hard to see any hope of light? What do you tell a man whose entire life looks like one big curse?
What do you say to a man born into slavery, who never did a thing wrong to deserve such a fate, raised in slavery, praying all his life to be free, growing old as a slave and dying as a slave, never free to live and never truly alive? Do you tell him that God will reward him in some weird and useless way that is of no value to anyone? Do you promise him seven vestal virgins when he reaches Heaven?
What do you say to the people who grew up in homes where they were instructed to follow what is right according to the Church, only to spend their entire lives never living, who look back to realize that they were never blessed in any form or fashion? Do you tell them that they’ll just have to wait until they’re dead to see if God is going to do anything good for them? Do you promise them golden crowns in a heavenly world after they have turned to dust? Do you tell them to just keep waiting?
What do you say to a man filled with despair who opens the Bible and sees where it says that God created us all out of dust and then just left us here and went away? Do you tell him that we are to sit here and wait, knowing that for several thousand years no one has seen or heard any sign of God, but surely he’s coming back one day so we should continue to just sit here and wait our lives away staring at the Heavens?
What do you say to the man who has lost his faith? What do you say to the man with no hope?
