my church was weird, it was one of the first megachurches right, like maybe even the very first one - I went to their flagship private k-12 school, first on a sponsorship via my dad’s volunteer work on the church and then later through charity/work study.
big reason I got through was because a thing this church would do would be to groom charismatic, bright seeming kids that really liked the source material and they’d slowly groom them into starting their own franchise of the church. one of my old friends ended up doing this exact thing and several others now work within the church.
so i had this weird ability to memorize large chunks of the bible very easily and recall it much much later. this was seen as some weird “sign” because the elder guy who started the church was a weird biblical savant that literally memorized the entire thing (i tested him once, he really did) and kept it loaded in his head. my ability to do this got a tooooooon of attention and I think is why I was able to go there for so long.
anyway so part of this grooming was to send you to these church camps where theyd immerse you deeper and deeper in the cult. they were real big on “gifts” and this particular camp’s theme was “gifts of the spirit” and everyone had a BIG hype on what mine was gonna be. I really wanted tongues but some counselor thought I could do prophesy. this sounds insane but they literally think like this, like it’s a harry potter sorting hat or some shit.
so the big night comes where everyone gathers quietly and goes slowly in groups to be prayed on and “receive” their gift. much of it was a lot of kids speaking in tongues and shaking and crying.
when it got to my turn, I eagerly awaited - nothin. nothing at all. i looked around and everyone was looking at me thtat wasnt speaking in tongues, and I did what every other kid there was probably doing and made some stuff up. (I later learned this is a well known effect that’s often used in hypnosis performances). it’s a little funnier though, i didnt know precisely what to say, so being a weird autistic kid I had a made up language I’d invented several years prior, and I said something like “is this real?” in that language.
well, everyone thought that shit was the greatest crap they ever heard. people even started repeating it like it meant something. i was a little nervous by that point, figuring someone would catch me and realize i just made it up.
then, I asked the most senior pastor there what he thought it meant. He gave me something I don’t remember, and then I said something like “eat shit” and he went on some big huge thing about what it meant for me in my life, and that’s when I think I really knew. I don’t know why it took me a really long time after to come out of it completely but that was really the moment.
