One of the things that I had noticed over the past several years at my former church was that there were more and more people whose eyes somehow looked different. Especially the pastor's eyes.

I still can't quite put my finger on how to explain it, but for some in the congregation they had a somewhat downcast vacant look, or perhaps it could be said a far away look that I could never quite pinpoint until now. Now I understand that perhaps it was from the mediations that they had been put through. More than that, perhaps it was from realizing that what they believed was all a fallacy. Surely the leadership wouldn't allow for this thing that they had been put through to actually happen in a church. Surely the leadership would be one of protection and not enabling the abuse. This was something that only happened to someone else or in some kind of weird movie. This all couldn't truly be true, somehow it just had to be something that they were imagining. They had to be the bad ones, they had to be the ones thinking wrong. But then one day they woke up and realized that it was all true, and that they weren't the bad ones, just the ones caught in a thing that couldn't possibly be.

As weird as it sounds, it was like one of those horror movies that you see with the people who have had something stolen from some alien being and they are left with a shell.

Some who are close to me will remember me mentioning the look of the lost that I wondered about during those past couple of years. Oh how I wish that I had pressed further to comfort those with those vacant eyes.

The pastor's look frightened me most of all because his look was one not only of one of the lost, but there was something else, almost tumultuously tossing and yet not readable in his eyes. Eyes that I had done small groups with, eyes that I had talked about thoughts with, eyes that had suddenly changed from those I had once known. Now I know it was he who was the cause of those vacant stares that seemed to be gathering in number in those pews. Maybe that is why he became one of the vacant stare people too, for if he could see what he was truly doing, surely he wouldn't have been able to cope.

I feel sad for them, and for that old creaking church.