Our family’s journey to healing, restoration and transformation.

Yesterday, my two daughters spoke profoundly from wisdom and love:

Anjali: with tears streaming down her face said, “I love them. I’m not giving up on them.

Priya said: “The experience wasn’t all bad. They learned some good things, and now they have to heal from it.”

And they are right.

It was deeply encouraging to hear them speak those words.

Though Priya was reflecting on someone else’s story, the truth she named belongs to us too.

This is why we fight to heal.

This is why she fought like a warrior to walk across a graduation stage she never believed she’d reach.

And she did it.

This is why Anjali fights like a warrior to hold and build relationships with truth and love.

She keeps doing it.

And together we will keep fighting and keep rising.

With love. With encouragement.

With the right tools and treatment.

With the community we’ve built on the pillars of compassion, commitment, and care.

In the Adventist system, we did learn some good things:

Community. Rhythm. Reverence. Servolution.

And now, we are healing. And calling for a Loveolution, centred not on control or conformity, but on the sifted pattern of divinity. In true alignment with divine love.

There are wounds Adventist families carry that don’t show up in the stories we’re taught to tell at church.

Others from other systems and denominations carry it too, but I cannot tell their story, I can only tell ours.

There is pain, soul-deep, body-held pain that has no place in the sanitized testimonies we were expected to give.

And yet that pain is real.

My family has struggled under the weight of harm inside the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

What we endured wasn’t always obvious. It wasn’t always shouted.

But it pressed into us quietly, steadily, almost lethally.

Shame disguised as righteousness.

Control disguised as care.

Silence that wrecks the nervous system with louder fear than any hellfire sermon.

Depression and anxiety have become unacknowledged companions for many of us who’ve lived through spiritual abuse in this church.

They are not signs of weak faith.

They are the body’s honest response to harm long ignored.

They are the echo of invisible wounds buried under doctrine, drowned in hymns, dismissed by leaders more concerned with order than healing.

And the deeper truth is:

Most of us don’t even realize how deeply we’ve been hurt.

We have been mentally and emotionally wounded by a church culture that trained us to spiritualize our suffering.

To “count it all joy” while our voices were dismissed.

To see obedience as holiness, even when it demanded silence in the face of harm.

To confuse submission with faith, even when it meant betraying our own discernment.

The culture of silencing in the Adventist Church is not a mistake.

It is deliberate.

It is systematic.

It is designed to protect the image of the institution even at the cost of our safety, our sanity, and our children’s well-being.

And when the harm becomes too visible to ignore, the Church begins its performance:

Public statements. Managed apologies. Carefully timed “listening sessions.”

A show of repentance when it becomes politically or publicly expedient—

while behind the scenes, the truth is buried, the wounded are dismissed, and the real path to healing is suppressed.

Because healing requires more than apology.

It requires consistent accountability.

It requires truth-telling.

It requires reparation and return, not just to God, but to the people who were harmed in God’s name.

This abusive-avoidance is not the way of Yeshua M’shīkhā.

The empire’s Jesus upholds abusive power.

The real Yeshua flips tables, washes feet, and walks beside the wounded.

He does not demand silence in exchange for belonging.

He does not dress control in the language of care.

He loves in truth.

He heals through justice.

Honouring Jesus by His real Aramaic name has freed me.

It has helped me to lead our family to peel back the layers of colonized religion to find the sacred root beneath the rot.

It has helped us see our pain clearly—and know that our pain was neither caused or blessed by God.

We are unlearning the trauma response that called suffering “holy.”

We are reclaiming the dignity that was stripped from us in the name of obedience.

We are telling the truth—not just about what happened to us, but about how the Seventh-day Adventist Church allowed it to happen.

As Mom, I am holding space for both grief and gratitude in our home.

We are not pretending it didn’t hurt.

And we are not pretending we didn’t grow.

We are doing the sacred work of healing—together.

We are not walking away from God.

We are walking with the One who never walked away from us.

To the One who is Love.

To the One who is Justice.

To the One who sees us and says:

“Come. Let us heal together.”

To those who have lived this:

You are not imagining it.

You are not overreacting.

You are not alone.

Your story matters.

And your healing is holy.

To those who still live with the abuse as normalized behaviour—

while being taught that it is the real and full and best truth—

my heart hurts for you.

I pray for your healing.

And I will keep fighting for your freedom too.

Even now many plan to take their children to Campmeeting insisting that it is holy and sacred ground, while ignoring the unveiling of known harm that lies within.

We have spoken up and will keep doing what we can, as our family holds space for healing, and the grief and gratitude therein.

With love and solidarity,

Saran Lewis