Honestly, Sandie

In the months leading up to June 13, 2023, I listened to a lot of worship music while trying to make sense of things I did not have language for yet. That was complicated, because after the phone call, church music did not feel simple anymore. It hurt. It reminded me of rooms where people misunderstood us, misunderstood me, misunderstood what was happening, and still made decisions like they knew the whole story.

“Come Again” was one of the songs that kept finding me. Not because it explained everything. Not because it made me feel better. It sat beside the ache. It carried the tension of wanting God while feeling shattered by the people who kept saying His name. It gave language to the part of me still open to God, even while the building, the leadership, and the system no longer felt safe.

The line that wrecked me was the one about it not being a building God wants to fill. That was the whole thing. I had spent years helping build a church while slowly realizing God was building something in me that did not fit their blueprint.

June 13 did not come out of nowhere. By then, the air had already changed.

There had been an office meeting in the months before the call. One of those meetings where you walk in thinking you are going to get clarity, and somehow leave with more confusion than you brought in. Easter came up. I had not been there, and it was said like a charge. Like I had missed the big game. Like an important player had been missing from the Super Bowl. The weight of it landed exactly how it was meant to land: I was supposed to have been there.

Then, in the same meeting, the story softened. Not months later. Not the next day. The same meeting.

“We weren’t upset that you missed Easter. We were worried that we had done something to hurt your feelings and that is why you weren’t here for Easter.”

That sentence still makes my brain stop. This is when I saw through something I had always missed before. I think I had seen and heard many “spins” just like this one but I was one who would excuse them, defend them, protect them and now, I was not able to leave that at the table. 

Because if you were worried you had hurt me, why did it feel like I was being corrected? If the concern was my heart, why did the conversation feel like my absence was the problem? If you thought something had happened between us, why not ask me like a person instead of turning it into a leadership issue?

That was the pattern. A hard statement would land. Then the language around it would soften. The impact stayed the same, but the explanation came dressed for church. Concern. Wisdom. Honor. Covering. Unity. All the words that can sound beautiful while still avoiding the actual wound.

Then came June 13.

It was about 2 p.m. in my bedroom office. Alex was working from home when his phone rang. Normal day. Normal room. Normal work-from-home rhythm. The call came from another leader in the same church world we had helped carry for years. Same mission. Same Sundays. Same machine. Different column of responsibility. Alex led people in sound and tech. I led people in video and social media. This person led another lane connected to the same umbrella, under the same vision, for the same purpose.

So he answered like it was normal. A service question. A team update. A Sunday problem. Something about equipment, schedules, volunteers, rooms, sound, whatever needed attention that week. That is what calls like that were supposed to be.

But the conversation shifted before the sentence landed.

The voice was familiar, but the tone was too. But, the pacing was off. The pauses were too careful. The room got quiet in that strange way a room gets quiet when your body realizes something before your mind catches up. This was not a teammate calling to talk. This was someone delivering a decision.

Then the line came.

“We have decided to have you step down from leading the tech and sound team.”

Except he was not stepping down. He was being pushed.

A step down includes conversation. A step down includes dignity. A step down includes context, questions, care, and the basic decency of sitting across from someone before removing them from something they carried for years. This was not that. This was a closed-door decision wrapped in soft church language and delivered over the phone by someone who had served beside us, not by the pastor who had called us family.

Alex asked the right question.

“Who is we?”

The answer was leadership.

Leadership had decided.

Not leadership had concerns and wanted to meet. Not leadership wanted to sit down. Not leadership wanted to understand what was happening. Not leadership wanted to ask him questions before making a decision that would land inside our family, our friendships, our church life, and the people we had helped build.

Leadership had decided.

Then came the spiritual packaging. They had consulted wisdom, and it had been decided.

That phrase still tells the story. “Consulted wisdom” sounds holy until it becomes a curtain. It hides the people in the room. It hides the process. It protects the decision-makers from the discomfort of facing the person they wounded. It turns avoidance into discernment. It turns control into leadership. It turns a push into something you are supposed to receive quietly because God language got sprinkled over the top.

Alex could tell the person on the call was not free to talk. There were pauses. Careful breaths. Delayed answers. The kind of silence where you can feel someone waiting for permission before saying the next sentence. It did not feel like a conversation between people who had served together, closely – over years. It felt coached. It felt scripted. It felt decided before he ever picked up the phone.

He was not invited into a conversation. He was informed of an outcome.

The call lasted maybe two minutes.

Two minutes to remove someone from something he had carried for years. Two minutes to move him from trusted to questionable. Two minutes to turn service into suspicion. Two minutes to say the words and leave him standing there with the wreckage.

Then that was it.

No pastor called. No one asked to sit down. No one checked on him. No one checked on me. No one asked what this cost our family. No one said, “This is a big deal. How are you holding up?” Just the call. Then silence.

And that silence became its own answer.

Alex reached out to the lead pastor by text and asked the obvious question: “That’s it? No phone call from my pastor? Not even a text?” He got a response, which is its own little detail, because texting worked just fine there. Texting was not suddenly too impersonal. Texting was not impossible. Texting was not beneath the weight of the moment. It worked when Alex was the one asking why his pastor had not called him.

The response was basically this: if Alex wanted to hang out or do things together, that was great, but he did not want Alex around other people influencing the team.

That sentence tells on itself.

He could hang out in private. He could exist nearby. He could be relational enough behind the scenes. He could still be treated like a person as long as there were no people around for him to influence. But that did not even hold together, because he was not removed from every area of influence. Not youth. Not executive leadership. Not every room where people were present. And no direct conversation about WHY this call had been made. 

One team. One call. One push. One silence.

That is the phone-call story. But three years later, I am also looking at the part people rarely understand from the outside.

Leaving does not only disconnect you from a building. It disconnects you from a whole rhythm of life. These were people we saw multiple days a week. People we served beside, ate with, planned with, prayed with, laughed with, cried with, raised kids around, built memories with, and expected to keep knowing. Then, after everything changed, the story somehow became that we were the ones who ended the relationships because we were the ones no longer in the room.

That part has always felt twisted.

When people stay inside the environment, they often cannot see the trauma of being pushed out of it. They look at the distance and call it our choice. They look at the silence and call it natural. They look at the broken friendships and say, “Well, you left. What did you expect?” They do not account for the grief of losing an entire family system while the people inside it keep gathering like nothing happened.

It felt like a divorce. Not from my husband. From a family I had learned to depend on. From people I shared life with. From the place that held our big moments and little ones. From the weekly rhythm that made us feel known. And including people from that world in my life after that became painful in a way I still have a hard time explaining, because every interaction reminded me of everything I did not have anymore.

That does not mean I stopped loving everyone. That is the part people miss. Sometimes distance is not punishment. Sometimes distance is the only way to stop reopening a wound that nobody wants to acknowledge. Sometimes the people who remain want access to the old relationship without ever asking what happened to destroy the trust that held it together.

And that is what hurt most.

People did not want to know what happened.

I was never that person. When people left, I wondered. I wanted to understand. I wanted to sit across from them and hear the story. But when you are still inside, the people outside do not always feel safe enough to tell you. Trust is gone. Vulnerability feels expensive. Explaining means starting over inside a relationship that may not be strong enough to hold the truth.

Now I understand that from the other side.

I also know the moment something in me finally crossed the line.

It was in that office meeting, sitting across the table from someone I had trusted as a pastor, trying to resolve conflict and understand why things kept getting handled through assumption instead of conversation. I asked why he would not just call me or send a text to clarify things when he was uncertain.

His answer was, “I don’t talk to chicks.”

Then came the shrug.

Nonchalant. Casual. Like he had not just handed me a sentence that explained years of imbalance in five words.

That was the moment.

Not because one sentence created the entire wound, but because one sentence finally named the room. It showed me what I had been trying not to see. It showed me how easy it was for my voice to be minimized, my questions to be softened into drama, and my presence to be valued until it became inconvenient.

So when people wonder why June 13 still matters, this is why.

It was never just about a role. Roles change. Teams change. Seasons end. We had been corrected before, redirected before, humbled before. We had stayed through hard things because we believed there was still relationship, still trust, still care, still family. This was different.

This was a decision made about him without him. This was leadership language used to avoid leadership presence. This was “we” without faces. This was “wisdom” without transparency. This was “step down” when the real message was, “You no longer get a say.”

Then we were expected to carry the spiritual weight of that decision without the dignity of a conversation.

That is the part I keep coming back to three years later. What does forgiveness look like when there was never a conversation? What does repair look like when no one ever came close enough to name the wound? What do you do with a story when the people who made the decision moved on like it was another Tuesday, but your family had to live inside the aftermath?

I know all the church words. Forgive. Release it. Do not carry offense. Do not become bitter. Move forward. Trust God. Let it go. I believe in forgiveness, but forgiveness cannot require me to lie. It cannot require me to call that process honorable. It cannot require me to make the story smaller so the people who handled it poorly can feel comfortable. It cannot require me to pretend silence was peace, avoidance was wisdom, or dismissal was care.

It hurt that he was dismissed without a real conversation. It hurt that decisions were made about us instead of with us. It hurt that people who had called us family did not come close when the grief got real. It hurt that I waited for someone to check on me, and no one did.

I was not looking for a stage. I was not asking people to pick a side. I was looking for one person to recognize that this was a big deal. One person to ask, “What happened?” One person to say, “How are you holding up?” One person brave enough to sit in the uncomfortable middle instead of watching from a safe distance.

Because people were watching.

I could see it. People from that world watched my TikToks. Saved my posts. Kept tabs from a distance. Close enough to observe. Not close enough to ask. Close enough to notice my words. Not close enough to care for the heart behind them.

I know they saw the word deconstruction in the descriptions of my posts. That word scares people who have been taught to confuse faith with the building they were handed. Deconstruction gets treated like demolition, like someone took a match to their faith and walked away from God. That was not what happened to me.

I was not destroying my faith.

I was renovating it.

There was a house near us that caught fire, and for months I watched the rebuild while driving my kids to school. First came the fire. Then the damage. Then the crews came in and removed what could not stay. They did not tear the whole house down. They removed what burned. They pulled out what was unsafe. They worked on the foundation where it needed repair. Some parts stayed. Some parts had to go. Some parts had to be rebuilt before the house could be lived in again.

That is what deconstruction looked like for me. Not losing God. Not abandoning faith. Not destroying the foundation. I was removing the bricks that were never supposed to be there to begin with.

And that is why “Come Again” hurt so much and helped so much at the same time.

Because for a long time after that call, worship music felt like touching a bruise. It reminded me of the rooms. The language. The misunderstanding. The feeling of being seen as a problem instead of a person. The pain of giving everything I knew how to give and still ending up on the wrong side of leadership.

The song kept finding me, and the reason is clear to me now.

It was not the building God wanted to fill.

It was my heart.

That was the whole damn thing.

I had spent years helping build a church while slowly realizing God was building something in me that did not fit their vision. They wanted the building full of people. God wanted my heart. They wanted submission to the system. God wanted the empty space. They wanted me planted in their version of obedience. God was making room for something they could not control.

Church people love to talk about foundation until someone starts inspecting the one they built. Then questions become dangerous. Grief becomes offense. Discernment becomes dishonor. Renovation becomes rebellion. The person trying to heal gets treated like the problem because their healing exposes what was unhealthy in the room.

My foundation was not gone. My faith no longer fit their preferred blueprint. They wanted the kind of building they understood. Quiet. Useful. Submitted. Available. Polished. Present. Serving. Smiling. Not making anyone uncomfortable.

I could not be that anymore.

I had heard too much by then.

The sentences told the story. The rules changed depending on who needed protection. Hard conversations were avoided when avoidance protected power. Concern turned into correction before anyone asked a real question. People talked around the hard thing, softened it in the same breath, and still never sat down to tell the truth.

June 13 was not the day we left.

It was not the day something in me started leaving.

It was the day I knew that the door to leave had started not only to open but had begun to fall off its hinges.

It was the day I stopped confusing spiritual authority with spiritual safety. It was the day I began to understand that forgiveness and truth are not enemies. I can forgive without pretending. I can heal without rewriting the story. I can move forward without calling what happened okay.

I did not lose my foundation.
I found it.
And I stopped letting anyone else decide what God was allowed to build in me.