deciding to leave

Leaving is always the most difficult part. It can feel scary, lonely, and confusing - but you are not alone. Others have stood where you have and felt what you feel, and more will stand where you are in the future.

Here are a few things to consider when leaving Dwell Community Church. Feel free to reach out with your own advice or recommendations or to share your experience. Rest assured that many people have stood at this same precipice, so you are not alone.

Reach out to family and friends outside the church

Before you take the actual step to leave the group, reach out to any family and friends that you have outside the church. Even if it has been a long time since you have spoken to them, that's okay. Despite what Xenos-Dwell may tell you, these people likely love and care about you very much. Be vulnerable with your family and friends outside the church, and trust that they will help and support you through the process of leaving. These people can and will understand what you have been through. When I left Xenos-Dwell many years ago I was very afraid to tell my new friends about my experiences and how I was suffering. Years later, these very people have reached out to say that they wish I had been more open so that they could have helped more. Remember, you can and will be loved and cared for deeply outside of Xenos-Dwell.

And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?

Mary Oliver

for more resources and support visit our friends at

LeavingDwell.com

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke