UNITED STATES
Faith Street
It took me years to realize that my relationship with my pastor was not romantic — it was sexual abuse.
by Marie Jensen
I was fifteen years old, lying next to my youth pastor during an overnight leadership team retreat. He was the only adult chaperone, and the rest of my peers slept soundly around me. We were talking in hushed tones about my body image issues, and he asked what part of my body I was most self-conscious about.
I told him: my stomach.
He told me he was going to touch my stomach so I would realize how beautiful it was.
His hands quickly drifted.
The next day he took me back to his apartment — I don’t know where his wife was that day — and kissed me for the first time. I remember it vividly — what I was wearing, what he was wearing, where we were standing. We were still standing, though moments later I would be on my back on his couch, his hands on the buttons of my denim shorts.
But when he kissed me the first time, he kissed me, and then pulled back, my face still firmly in his hands. “Kiss me back!” he said, exasperated.
I’d never been kissed. I didn’t know how.
And so it went for everything we did — everything he did to me. I still have to correct my language after twenty years. It wasn’t a consensual affair, though I certainly felt like it was whenever I’d watch him sweeping my long hairs off his bed when he was done. It felt like an affair when he’d cry after and tell me how this was wrong but he loved me so much and we only had to wait a few more years and he would leave his wife.
It felt like I had power when he said he’d kill himself if anyone found out.
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