NO. NO. NO. YOU LYING SNAKE. You do NOT get to use the church to launder the consequences of your sins into fake persecution for the sake of Christ. None of your adversity - and certainly none of your baseless lawsuit - had ANYTHING to do with Jesus.

You’re flying toward hell.

You want to talk about your conversion? Fine. You want to publicly repent? Great! You want to talk about your relationship with god? I’m skeptical, but okay.

But if you want to get behind a pulpit and lie to a congregation about *why* you’ve had a rough couple years? Fuck you.

If you actually have any sense of god or even an iota of ethics from any religious or philosophical tradition you won’t go out of your way to lie *in a church* about having suffered for the sake of the church. Are you completely out of your mind?

The thing is, it wouldn’t matter if everything said about you the last two decades was a lie. The fact is you don’t have a reputation as being hard to work with *because of your faith*. You haven’t been credibly accused of sexual harassment *because of your faith*. Don’t lie now.

Men of faith can fail. In fact they must fail. It’s impossible not to fail. The righteous man responds to failure with humility, honesty, and repentance. The pompous evildoer wraps himself in the clothes of victimhood and wails in public. That is not Christ. That is not faith.

Was Paul thrown in jail because he was harassing women? No. Was Stephen martyred because others were jealous of his popularity? No. They were persecuted because they preached the gospel. How dare you have the fucking audacity to pretend you are of their kind. You are NOT.

You want to wash your hands of your reputation? Repent. Exemplify how those who earnestly seek god can fall down yet die to their flesh, their ego, the karma binding them to this world, and rise without shame to confess their sin and honor god in their weakness. Do NOT lie.

Lying about why your last few years have been hard is proof you lack faith. It is proof you do not love god, you only want to use god to hide your shame. If you understood even the smallest fraction of god’s power and majesty, you would never even consider using church like this.