Finding (and losing) Rebekah

At the end of my post titled, “A Tour of the Fringes,” I promised to tell about a woman raised in an abusive church environment, whom I met a year after I left the Geftakys assemblies. In what follows, I will not use her actual name, in order to protect her privacy.

It was the winter of 2004, very early in January. While I had been a member of a Geftakys assembly, my life had been occupied with going to a lot of meetings, such as Sunday morning worship and Sunday afternoon “stated ministry.” Now that I was no longer involved, I found myself with quite a bit more time on my hands. I had been going to the YMCA to work out, but while I was involved with the Geftakys group, I had to sneak in my midweek workout session, as it caused me to be late for their Thursday night “prayer meetings”. But now I didn't care. Instead of being busy all day on Sunday with meetings and “ministries,” I started going to the Y on Sunday afternoons. The gym opened on Sundays at 1 pm, and I found that if I got there right at opening time, I could usually count on having most of the gym to myself for at least a half hour. It was a good way to relax – trying to bench press 270 pounds six times or do some other challenging thing while listening to audio books such as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Life of Pi, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and several of the John Grisham titles. (One warning: don't ever try to lift anything heavy while listening to a reading of Mark Twain. Laughter can be dangerous in such a situation.)

I occasionally saw other people coming in early on Sunday afternoon to work out. Most of them were gnarly adult men around my age or older. But one day I noticed a youthful, attractive woman with a pleasant smile. I had arrived late that day, and she was just finishing her workout. Involvement in the Geftakys assemblies had pretty well trashed my romantic prospects, and in the time immediately following my departure, I was strongly feeling the damage and wondering what to do about it. Until the day I saw this woman, the Y hadn't really presented itself well as a place for finding romance. But I resolved to be there right at opening time the next Sunday.

I saw her again over the next few Sundays, but I was scared by the prospect of trying to initiate a conversation. In fact, I could never get up enough nerve even to say “Hello.” But one day, I came in right at opening time, and I was the only one in the gym, aside from the staff. She came about fifteen minutes later, and as I saw her I smiled, then quickly looked away. We both went through our workouts, and she finished before I did, so she prepared to leave. As she was leaving, she stopped next to me and said in a pleasant alto voice, “Have a good day.” Surprised, I said, “Thanks!” And I did have a very good “rest of the day.”

When she came the next Sunday, I greeted her and said, “Thanks for wishing a good day for me last week.” She asked, “Do you come here regularly on Sundays?” I told her that I did. “Well, have a good workout,” she said. “You too!” I replied. The Y was definitely becoming an interesting place to hang out. I started looking forward with great interest to Sunday afternoons. When I next saw her, she said, “I don't know if we've ever introduced ourselves to each other. I'm Rebekah.” She held out her hand, and as I told her my name, we shook hands. She asked me what I did for work, and I told her that I was an engineer. She was working as a physical trainer, but she really wanted to launch a career as a singer/songwriter. I asked her what style of music she was interested in, and she told me about some female folk artists who had really impressed her, women such as Eva Cassidy. I told her that I had not heard of some of the women she named, but that I would try to check them out.

The next Sunday I saw her again and we exchanged greetings, then got down to our workouts. But when she was finished, she came to me and gave me a CD on which she had copied a selection of songs from some of her favorite artists, including Eva Cassidy. “I thought I'd bring this to you as a little gift,” she said. “Let me know what you think about it.” I looked at her for a long moment. I was frankly more than curious. It was one thing to be friendly toward someone, but this was beginning to look a bit more serious. Yet I hardly knew her. “Um, I was thinking...” I began, suddenly tongue-tied. “Yes?” she said, encouragingly. “Um, thanks for the CD. I'd, um, like to get to know you a little better, if that's okay. And I was wondering...if you might want to get together some time, say at Starbuck's, so we could swap stories.” “I'd like that very much,” she said. “In fact, I've been thinking the same thing for a while.” We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to call each other during the week to set a date.

I began thinking. She was manifestly a physically attractive woman, and she seemed to have a pleasant, easy, quiet personality. But I did not yet know her well enough. And one thing I had acquired during my life was my Christianity. Even though certain charlatans had made a bad use of my faith, I had no intention of abandoning it. I was mindful of the passage in 2 Corinthians warning Christians against unequal yokes. Even though I wanted very much for our acquaintance to lead to something more, I knew that this was a situation that demanded caution. Therefore when we called each other during the week to set up our “date”, I said at the end, “Oh, and by the way, I wanted to tell you something about me. I'm a Christian.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then her voice, which had been friendly and open before, came back cold and guarded. “Oh? That's interesting. Are you very involved...in church and things like that?” I told her that I was just going on Sunday mornings. Her tone surprised me. “Well, maybe we should postpone getting together after all,” she said, mentioning that she was going to have to take a trip out of town over the next week. “Could we get together after you get back?” I asked. “Let's see about it,” was her reluctant reply. We said goodbye to each other and hung up.

Needless to say, that conversation was a disappointment. But it also got me thinking. During the height of my commitment to the abusive Geftakys group, I was led to believe that anyone who rejected church or Christianity did so because “the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving,” as it says in 2 Corinthians 4:4, and that such people were “deceived by the prince of darkness.” So it was that when I used to go on Sunday noon “door-to-door witnessing” outreach to neighborhood homes, all dressed up in my Sunday best, I believed that people who refused to talk to me or who slammed the door in my face or who asked me to leave did so because they “hated the light of the Gospel.” I still believe that this world is antagonistic toward the Gospel; yet since I have become a homeowner, I also have come to understand perfectly the antipathy which homeowners feel toward strangers showing up on their doorsteps trying to get them to join or sign up for something. Now I had left the Geftakys group, seeing that it was a cult, and seeing that many who had been taught by that group to believe in a twisted version of God were now rejecting belief in general. These two insights began to give me a clue as to what was going on with Rebekah.

That Sunday, I wondered if she would show up at the gym at all, and was relieved when she did. But her “Hello” was curt, almost formal. When she finished her workout, I came to her timidly and said, “Can I walk you out?” “Okay,” she said slowly. We walked toward the front door.

“Could I ask you a, um, personal question?” I said. “This may seem silly, but I've been curious for the last few days. How is it that you were named Rebekah? Do you spell it the Hebrew way?”

“Well, it is spelled R-E-B-E-K-A-H. And my parents are Christians, and when I was growing up we were involved in a church whose members used to give Bible names to their children. Well, that is, I said we were in a church. It was really a cult. I refused to go to their meetings when I was a teenager, and my dad disowned me.” (By the way, she told me that the cult to which her family belonged was one of the Plymouth Brethren sects, the one started by the Asian man I mentioned in “A Tour of the Fringes,” the cult which sues people to death. I'm sure you'll understand if I don't mention them by name.)

“Oh,” I said, slowly. “I'm really sorry about what happened to you. But I was suspecting after our phone conversation that something like this might be what was going on. Don't get me wrong, but your name gave me a clue. You see, I too used to be involved in an abusive, cultic church. I've been out for a while, but I'm still trying to sort things out. And that's one reason I'd still like to get together with you, if that's okay...if I'm not a scary person in your eyes...” She reluctantly agreed, and we set a date for the following Sunday afternoon at a local Starbuck's.

I showed up early at the Starbuck's. The weather was now quite warm, and it was pleasant to sit outside in shorts and T-shirt, picking away on my guitar and watching people in co-ed pairs lounging around, talking. At least today, I would get to enjoy being part of such a pair. Rebekah came about ten minutes later, and I waved to her. She looked especially attractive. When she had gotten her drink and I had gotten mine, I said, “It looks like we both have quite a story to tell each other. Do you want to go first, or would you rather I did?” “Why don't you go first,” she said. Her manner was pleasant, yet guarded.

I told her about my upbringing, my conversion to Christianity, my Army tour, and my stumbling into an abusive church. I tried to make it clear that I was no longer associated with that abusive group, that I thought they were kooks, and that I was now trying myself to sort my life out. I told her that I was going to a Lutheran church, because I believed that I ought to go to church and because so far, the Lutherans were the easiest on my nerves. I tried to show her that I understood where she was coming from. I talked a lot, and she merely listened, as the sun slowly went down and the streetlights came on. I asked her if she wanted to tell her story, but by that time it was after dark and the night was becoming a bit chilly. She declined, saying instead that she really needed to go. I walked her to her car and held out my hand, thanking her for letting me tell her my story. She reluctantly shook hands. The guardedness never left her.

We had only one other conversation of any note after that Sunday. Rebekah called me up to talk about things; I think she still liked me, but was struggling with ambivalence. We talked about her musical aspirations (she was discouraged, seeing how difficult it is to make it as a folk singer/songwriter), and I talked to her about church. She told me that she was like I was at the beginning of her exodus from the cult her family was in: she saw that it was a cult, and left it in order to try to find a church that is “true and faithful.” Her experiences in dealing with church people were very negative. I told her again that I found the Lutherans to be very easy on the nerves, and asked her if she had ever checked out a Lutheran church. “If you really want to know, I think most people in church are d___'s, and they scare the h___ out of me,” she said. I knew not to press the subject any further. She told me that her mom had also left her cultic church, and was so angry and bitter that she refused to have any religious belief. But her dad stubbornly remains involved in the cult, even hosting regular weekly meetings in their home. I don't know if our phone conversation helped her in any way.

I saw her only a few times after that. Eventually, she stopped coming to the Y on Sundays. I don't know if she ever made it as a singer. Meanwhile, I was left alone again, like the Will Smith character in the movie I Am Legend – solo, but not by choice. Or then again, maybe like a character in a Jackson Browne song.