Honestly, Sandie

DAY 7/10: RAW FILE

Inspired by Lorde – Everybody Wants to Rule the World

We sat down in an office sometime in late April, and if you had asked me walking in whether this was going to be a healing conversation, I think I still would have said yes.

That is the embarrassing part.

How long hope hangs around.

How loyal people stay to things that are already shifting underneath them.

It was me, Alex, the lead pastor, and his son who also happened to be one of our pastors. The room felt strangely casual. Almost too casual. Smiles. Jokes. Familiarity. The kind of energy that makes you wonder if maybe the weirdness was all in your head.

For a minute, I actually relaxed.

Then things got weird.

Fast.

At one point, the lead pastor told me he had heard I was upset about someone being brought into leadership.

Which stopped me immediately.

Because I had never said that.

Not once.

I remember blinking and saying something like, “I never said anything close to that.”

And then came the sentence:

“A friend of yours told me.”

A friend.

That word landed hard.

Because first of all, no.

And second of all, what kind of friend invents something and quietly hands it to leadership?

So I asked who.

He would not say.

Instead, he doubled down.

Said he trusted the source.

Said he could even call them right now.

And honestly, by that point I was so confused I said:

“Okay. Let’s do it.”

Call them.

Right now.

Because surely if somebody was using my name and my words, we should probably clear that up.

He pulled out his phone.

Tapped around.

Paused.

Then suddenly:

“No, I’m not going to call.”

And listen.

I am trying very hard to tell this story without becoming petty.

But even now I remember thinking:

Wait… what?

Then came another accusation.

Apparently someone had also told leadership we thought we should be paid for everything we did.

Again.

Not true.

Had other people told us that over the years?

Absolutely.

When you spend more than a decade pouring endless unpaid hours into something, people say things.

But we had never asked.

Never demanded.

Never even hinted.

And yet somehow, there we were, sitting in an office defending conversations we never had.

Meanwhile Alex stayed calm.

He always stayed calm.

Then Easter came up.

Or rather, me missing Easter.

Because I had gone to help my daughter move.

My actual child.

A real human being I made.

And one of the pastors looked at me and said something I still think about.

Easter, he explained, was the Super Bowl of church.

And I was a key player who was not on the field.

He tapped his fingers on the table while saying it.

Like emphasis.

Like disappointment.

Like a coach talking to somebody who skipped the championship game.

And I remember saying, calmly, that everything I was responsible for had been covered. That leadership knew. My teams knew. People knew I was helping my daughter move. I had missed youth too. Everybody knew.

But he kept circling back.

“You weren’t there for Easter.”

Tap tap tap.

And maybe this sounds small when written down.

But sometimes what hurts is not the sentence.

It is what sits underneath it.

The implication.

That service had somehow become the measuring stick.

That showing up for your family needed defending.

That loyalty was beginning to feel conditional.

I remember sitting there thinking something I was not ready to say out loud yet:

This feels different.

Not in a dramatic way.

In a slippery way.

Like reality itself had become harder to hold.

Because here is what messes with your head when you have loved something for a really long time:

You keep trying to make the pieces fit.

You tell yourself people are stressed.

Miscommunication happens.

Leadership is human.

Grace. Grace. Grace.

You explain things away because the alternative is too painful.

The alternative is asking:

What if this place no longer feels safe to tell the truth in?

We walked out of that office still trying to believe the story could turn.

Still hoping time would smooth things over.

Still believing years meant something.

But if I tell the truth now?

I think something cracked open in me in that room.

I just did not know yet how loud the breaking would become.