The Way Finder

For Those Who Found Their Way Here: Why We Chose Truth Over Silence

Perhaps you arrived here wondering why we chose to speak. Why break years of silence? Why risk the accusation of causing division in a community that preached unity above all else?

Let me tell you about a particular kind of darkness: the kind that wears light as a disguise.

There exists a form of violence so sophisticated it leaves no visible wounds. It happens when someone discovers that our deepest reverence can be weaponized, that the sacred itself can become a shield for exploitation. When Scripture meant to protect and guide becomes twisted into a tool of control, when questioning leadership gets reframed as questioning God Himself, something fundamental breaks in the architecture of faith.

Spiritual abuse is peculiar in its cruelty. It doesn't merely take from you; it makes you complicit in your own diminishment. It wraps exploitation in prophecy, calculation in care, manipulation in the very language of love. You find yourself questioning not the abuser, but your own perception. Surely someone who speaks so fluently of God couldn't be systematically destroying souls?

But here's what I've learned through years of wrestling with this darkness: Truth has its own frequency. Even when buried under layers of religious performance, even when silenced by accusations of divisiveness, truth continues its quiet insistence. It whispers in the dissonance between words and actions, in the strange hollowness where love should be, in the systematic patterns that emerge when you finally dare to look.

I need you to understand something: We didn't want to be here. Speaking these truths feels like tearing fabric that's been woven into our very identity. Some of us carry years of scar tissue from this particular form of violence, the kind that uses God's name as both weapon and shield.

Yet silence, I've learned, is its own form of blasphemy. There's a moment when you realize that your quiet endurance has become enabling, that every day you don't speak becomes permission for the harm to continue. When we know truth and refuse to voice it, we become architects of future wounds.

The philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote something that haunts me: "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." This crystallizes why we speak. Not from hatred, though anger at injustice is its own form of holy fire, but from love. Love for those still trapped. Love for truth that refuses to be perverted. Love for the divine that deserves better than being made into a tool of exploitation.

Our testimonies aren't attacks. They are an unveiling. This is the moment when we stop participating in the careful choreography that keeps darkness hidden. Together, we're choosing the disruption of truth over the violence of false peace.

Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is refuse to let darkness continue masquerading as light. Sometimes testimony is the only gift we have left to give: our scars transformed into warnings, our survival into someone else's roadmap toward freedom.

If you're here because something in your own story resonates, if you've felt that peculiar dissonance between proclaimed love and lived reality, trust that instinct. That unease you feel might be the Holy Spirit doing what the Holy Spirit actually does: leading you into truth, especially when that truth is costly.

We didn't choose this moment of speaking. It chose us. Years of accumulated silence finally reached critical mass, and we discovered that some truths simply refuse to remain buried. They rise, insistent and holy, demanding their day in the light.

This is why I shared my story. This is why we spoke. Not to destroy, but to prevent further destruction. Not to divide, but to reveal the division already there, hidden under performed unity and careful religious theater.

Truth doesn't need elaborate justification. It simply needs to be spoken. And sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is stop protecting those who never protected us, stop silencing ourselves for the comfort of those who profit from our silence.

The scars we carry have become our credentials. Our survival has become our testimony. And perhaps our willingness to finally speak will become someone else's permission to name what they've been too frightened to acknowledge.

In the end, this is about a simple but revolutionary act: choosing truth over comfort, clarity over confusion, genuine love over its sophisticated counterfeit.

Truth is its own authority. It doesn't need to shout. It just needs to be told.

And so we tell it.

Jim L