Addiction and abuse were the rarely acknowledged, central themes in the life of the congregation. This realization took a long time for me. And it made me angry. I was prepared to deal with tragedy - they had talked about that in seminary. I had some sense of how to respond when the inevitable, the unavoidable happened.
Sexual abuse is avoidable.
Addiction is avoidable. It was not the tragic that confronted me each morning as I entered my office. It was the more confusing, more complicated, more entangled problems. Problems way past the mere tragic. For this I was totally unprepared.