Then Something Brown Hit The Flabellum

I feel the need to post a disclaimer at the beginning of the end of this saga. This post is still quite the hot and avoided topic in certain places and if you came by my blog thinking about digging up some dirt on me, you just may well find dirt. But trust me. I’ll do my best to dump it on YOUR head instead of mine. Well, either that or I’m gonna plant a flower bed and sow it with stink weed and stinging nettles as a memorial garden in memory of who you are now instead of who you would be if you were living the way GOD created you to live. If you came here ‘cause you think for some weird reason that I’m a great writer, I hope I don’t disappoint you this time. This post may in fact turn into a rant about self righteousness but I’ll try to hit the brakes and not over correct if my car hits the shoulder. AND, if you’re one of my awesome, weirdo, nerdlet friends who loves me, and THAT’S why you came here to read this one… I dunno what to say. Maybe I love you too and I really feel sorry for you will have to suffice. ;)

Just a few short days after we got engaged, the defecation definitely made impact with the rotary oscillator. If you wanna be particularly dense and wonder what on earth I just said…-- NEVER MIND. After consultation with my mother I have decided to leave that sentence in my brain…-- As for the definition of what I just said? If you can’t figure that one out I can’t help you there either. Maybe you need to spend a few more hours reading Noah or Miriam’s books like I was wont to do whenever I ran out of the 37 books I got from the library every two weeks when I was younger and had already re-read every book I owned 12 times. Hey. Have you ever tried reading a dictionary?? You’d be surprised at how many good laughs you can get out of some words and their stupid meanings!

As I said, before my train derailed and I got on a spur track, a few days after we got engaged the defecation definitely hit the rotary oscillator. People who I had know my whole life and trusted, turned and started acting like rabid hyenas for lack of a better description of their actions. One day I was out with a friend, shopping for a wedding dress. Not because I needed one, mind you. I had had my dress for like, 2 years by then. It was a dress that my cousin’s future MIL had found at Salvation Army for something like 5 bucks. Before you start freaking out, I will tell you something. First of all, shut up. Secondly? They were brand new from a bridal store in town and they were the old line or some dumb thing. Anyways, she got 3 dresses and sent them all to Leah and Leah chose the one she wanted and I got to pick the one I wanted. I was so excited! It was the dress I had always dreamed about wearing. It had real buttons instead of the cheater ones they sew on top of a zipper now days. Oops. I hit another spur. There seems to be lots of spurs in my tracks. I wonder if that is a bad thing? Or maybe more people need to back their trains up more often... like I do.

My friend had decided that even tho’ I HAD my dress, you really only get one chance in your life to have a good reason to go try out wedding dresses. That’s actually a good point if you think about it! Can you imagine if I was trying on a dress NOW? I can’t fit into the one I wore at the wedding and that’s a 12 of all asinine things. And since then I’ve gained like 15 lbs. We were done shopping and I was done with the gaudy weirdos that inhabit these bridal shops these days. They look like they ran into their day job without changing clothes after their stage job got done last night! AND when I asked about a dress with sleeves the woman looked at me like I had asked her if she could please sew twelve rows of sautéed escargots along the bottom hem of the dress I was looking at. So I gave her my half lidded dirty look and after trying 3 dresses on and not liking any of them I left. Sorry. Snooty people like that make me wanna fart and burp and pick my nose and sing ribald sailor anthems at the top of my lungs. Actually, I ain’t sorry for that, never mind.

As we were eating lunch at Chick-Fil-A that fateful day, my phone rang and when I looked at the caller ID I felt that cool feeling you get when you look at your phone and see someone’s number that you think is just so cool, and you haven’t talked to for a long time and you just got engaged and you can’t wait to tell the world about it. So I interrupted my lunch to go talk to this fellow. I don’t remember how the conversation went but suddenly I was thrown for a loop and being grilled about Reece and where he was from and who his parents were and how I met him and why this person has never met him and how can I think he’s so great when I’ve only known him for such a short time and OH MY WORD he used to DRINK?! Okay, nuff said, he’s horrible and terrible and no good and very bad and you must cut off all ties with him at once or your Christianity will be threatened and you will be raising kids and have to listen to them cry because they’re hungry and their daddy drank away all the money so all you have to give your poor starving kids is crackers and water and the world has come to an end because this is the kind of stuff that happens when a Christian marries an unbeliever. And I thought “HUH?!? Whoa. Whoa dude! Hang on here just a MINUTE!!! WHO said he’s an unbeliever, what gives you the right to say ANYthing to me about him when in your own words, you have never met him and have no idea who he is??”

And let me just say here, that I know how flawed and nutso people in this church of ours are. There are people who shoot first and ask questions later. Quite unscriptural reactions, especially when you think about the verses in the Bible that talk about things like there is more rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 just person s that need no repentance, as one example. And at the moment I can’t think of another example, but you get the point. That being said, I didn’t know for sure where on the nutso level this man was, that I was talking to so I very carefully tried to explain the situation. Now as I look back on this I think the reason he went so balmy on me when I said whatever careful explanation I gave him, is because he had already done his research, got answers, twisted the answers he’d been given and came up with a crazy bogus plan of attack against Reece without even knowing a thing about him. I was so bewildered when I hung up the phone I could barely even think. I am SO glad my friend was there when he called, ‘cause as soon as I hung up she started asking me what on earth was going on and I explained the whole story to her, filling her in on his side that obviously she couldn’t hear and then and there she told me that he was wrong. Wrong in the way he was going about the situation, wrong in his accusations and everything else.

Obviously, like people tried to say after this, I was running around all in love and stuff, but it had not affected my head like they were all trying to say. Reece and I both had been praying pretty much non-stop since we met about what we should do with each other and both of us had been praying that we would be shown what to do, and if it was wrong then we would feel that something was wrong. Well, in a subsequent phone call with this man, when I did a three-way with him and a very dear trusted friend, she asked him about that. “Ronda has been praying non-stop that if this is wrong, that God would show her a stop sign and she hasn’t seen any at all!” The response? This man was being used by God as my stop sign. That’s when I thought to myself; “HA!” and from that moment I shut my ears to any other things he tried saying to me and about me and about Reece. I’m not saying I was done being hurt by his campaigning, I’m saying I never again felt a moments doubt that MAYBE he was right about anything he said.

As time went on, they (whoever THEY are) realized I was not going to be swayed with anything they threw at me, so they, in desperation, decided that they would start attacking that aforementioned close friend. I still do not know all the horrible things they said to her but I know a few of them, because I would badger her until she would tell me what was bothering her. These people were at her constantly making her feel that if I married Reece, I was going to burn in hell and it would be her fault because she wasn’t stopping me from marrying him. I feel absolutely sorry for her for what she went through on my behalf. They even stooped as low as saying that all she cared about was making herself look good for the wedding and she was doing nothing to stop me from getting married! So one day she asked me about that. I said, “What do you think I would tell you if you told me not to marry Reece?” She said she didn’t think I’d listen to her. I said you’re absolutely right. And ya know? It’s been over 5 years since all this went on and I would still marry him.

In the midst of these people saying all their balderdash nonsense, Reece and I were both being told by people all across the nation that it was almost funny how perfect we were for each other. Actually, it still is! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Can you imagine if I would have by some terrible misfortune married someone everybody thought was ‘normal’? I would have driven the poor man batty just so he could be as sane as me!! Anyway, I finally got irritated with this man who was bringing up all this stuff and broadcasting it about the earth like bad seeds. So in one of the phone calls from him I confronted him about the fact that he was telling all kinds of people about the story. He assured me that he was keeping our conversations between him & I, so I felt bad for being mad at him and asked him for forgiveness for it and stuff. But then, I was relating that very conversation to a friend of mine that lived in the same town as him and she stopped me cold and informed me that he had talked to HER about it in the church basement. And someone else called who had been told the story at her house. And another person called me to ask me “If I really knew this man I was marrying.” As soon as I heard that last question I jumped on it and said, “Where’d you get THAT from?” As I had started suspecting, when the man said he was keeping our conversations between us, he was lying through his teeth. By the way… how else is a person supposed to lie but through their teeth?

And lastly on that subject, I decided there was no further need for me to bother with anything he said when he told me flat out when I asked him WHY he didn’t talk to Reece about the things he was saying. He felt no need to talk to Reece. Well. Therefore Reece has no need to talk to him. That’s the most UN-Christian way of going about something that I ever heard of in my life. Oh. Remember I said he was campaigning? And that he was keeping our conversations between me & him? He called someone out in WA to have them have a chat with Reece when they were down for Christmas services the Christmas before we got married. Sorry, no dice. The last conversation I had with him after he had flat out told me that MY Christianity would be under question if I went through with my marriage plans, he acted shocked when I said we were busy getting the food figured out. He wondered what we were getting food ready for and I said, “My WEDDING?!” “You mean you’re still going to marry this man KNOWING WHAT YOU KNOW about him? And that he isn’t a Christian?” I said, “I don’t believe that. I believe that he’s a Christian.” That flabbergasted him and I have no idea what was said in the rest of the call because I simply answered every question with the answer he wanted to hear, EXCEPT the part of me getting married.

I guess he must have given up ‘cause I never heard another word from him until Rosie was 2 months old at Leslie’s funeral, and he & his wife came up to us, all excited to see us and “OH REECE!! It’s SO WONDERFUL to see you!” and “RONDA! It’s been SO LONG since we’ve seen you last!” Sorry, well, actually I’m not sorry. My response then and still is, “OH! I’m so sorry! It hasn’t been long enough!” No I didn’t say it but I thought it loud enough they probably heard it. Don’t know - or care if you’re gonna agree with me on this, but I believe there’s a difference in forgiving someone and trusting them. I can forgive him. I can’t trust him. I heard a sermon once… I think it was a sermon anyways. The guy said something to the effect of when someone hurts you it’s kinda like bankruptcy. After you’ve gone bankrupt it’s 7 years before anybody will trust your name again. That’s a bad explanation of what he said, but you get the point.

Glory this has turned into a book all by itself. I’m gonna hafta get married in the next post. And that my dears, is gonna make you cry. If for no other reason than because you’re laughing so hard your intestines feel like short circuiting and going back from whence they came. Whatever that means... But I promise. If you’re anything like the 400+ people that were at our wedding, there is at least ONE thing in that story that’ll crack you up like a windshield that got hit by a rock. Or four.