It might.
If it does, please don’t give in to shame. Especially shame leveled at you by others. As my husband says, probably quoting another source I’ve forgotten, “If anything can be destroyed by the truth, it should be.” If your faith can no longer function after sustaining a blow to its core by the person who planted it in you, who grounded it in you, then it is a faith that also would not have sustained you til the end of time. Faith rooted in the work of a human either dies prematurely, with the corruption of that human’s works, or with the slow death of that human’s influence over you as you realize the limits of his or her power. Do not accept a burden of guilt for letting go of something that was never actually good in trade for the thing itself.
Instead, recognize that letting go of what betrayed your trust and confidence will free you to cling to what truly deserves it.
If you discover your faith is rooted in a human, vs. the God you thought you adhered to, go ahead: dig up the dying or dead roots of that crushed faith. You can’t can’t cultivate anything living in the soil of your soul until you’ve made room. If you’re afraid of throwing anything good out, don’t be. The God that cracks dormant seeds awake in the dark and turns the globe to quicken the sap of deciduous forests and sends the spring rains to water the earth wants clear ground to work in your heart, so that what he does plant–and will plant there if you only ask, even if it’s a second or third or three-hundredth asking–won’t be choked or plucked out when we mistake the weeds sown by simple birds for the sprigs of his intention.
The horrible truth about the person who led you to Christ might wreck your faith; if it does, that is not a bad thing.
And, it might not. If it doesn’t, it should give you one of the best opportunities you will ever have to clear out the brambles and thorns and tangling vines that you likely would have never noticed threatening the seedlings of truth and justice and mercy and love set out in careful rows.
If the horrible truth about the human you trusted so implicitly doesn’t wreck your faith, it will only ground your faith more firmly as and where and how it ought to be.
Let me tell you a little about how my own faith transformed and endured through such betrayal.
My father abused me from a young age. The abuse began in the form of molestation when I was about 18 months old. I remember multiple incidents very clearly, which is not surprising if you consider the fact that I was quite verbal for my age–I had conversations with my father about this early sexual abuse at the time it was happening–and that I retain multiple other memories from that time period as well. I have spoken to other family members who, it turns out, were aware of the molestation at the time but did not understand what it was. They validated my account thoroughly; one person expressed remorse that they did not know enough at the time to do more than threaten to expose my father to his church leadership.
Shockingly, this threat apparently prevented my father from molesting me further for well over a decade. Other sexual infractions that he committed against me much later on were comparatively slight. The majority of my abuse at the hands of my father was psychological: mental, emotional, and spiritual torment was leveraged against me for decades in order to control my thoughts, behavior, and resources to serve his purposes. Physical and financial abuse was also occasionally employed to these ends.
My father was my jailer, my abuser, and in many ways, at least for a time, my god.
My father was also the first one to tell me the story of the Gospel in a way I could understand, appreciate, and accept, again from a young age.
What do we do when we are assaulted by the truth that the man who led us to Christ may well have never known and accepted Jesus to begin with? Or, worse, if he did–that he never allowed the power and goodness and truth and love of Christ to so work in him to preserve him from committing unspeakable sins against the most vulnerable in his care?
What do we do when a spiritual parent uses what gave us life to bring death to others, or to ourselves?
We cling to the life we were given, if what we were given is indeed life-giving, because it did not come from this man or woman, this mere, distorted, destruction-bound human soul–
It came from the Source of Life Himself.
And if what you were given was never in fact life in the first place, know there is a source that exists that is more than willing to share true, everlasting life with you, that will not betray you, that will not wield good for evil, but that will tear down and burn and blacken into NOTHING all that has ever hurt you. All that has ever wounded you. All that has ever torn your heart out and eaten it in front of you.
God of peace, of justice, of righteousness, of truth, of love gives me life and hope and healing. Not my dirt-born father. My infinite-always-was father.
He got through to me when I was surrounded by deep darkness, where no one else was close enough to reach me, even through the morass of evil embodied by my earthly parent. He reached me, and he did not leave me alone there. He sat with me in all the agony and misery and torture and wickedness inflicted on me until it passed. Until he achieved my restoration out of its clutches and showed me his true, deep, abiding goodness in the land of the living.
He is with me still.
Stephanie Gail Eagleson 