Rumors, Reaffirmation, & Reckoning

Stopping Sexual Abuse Across The Street
(Read Part 1 first if you haven't)

When all the alter-boy abuse scandals started snow-balling I was a just a boy myself - 12 years old, becoming a young man, and growing up next door to an old man who was the bachelor son of a pastor. His nephew lived beside us. There was a cornfield to the left of my parents house with corn so high you couldn’t see over it, and the old man across the lane was who planted and harvested it. I even drove his tractor a couple times, threw slop in his pig-pens, and fed grass to his steers over the barbed wire fence that ran the length of our country lane.

We lived in a village where almost everyone was related to the man across the lane. His neice was my first grade public school teacher. Behind us was a narrow stretch of swampy woods with lots of thick undergrowth and bushes. It made the perfect place to hide when you were in trouble, or for anyone else to hide for that matter. I didn't think about that as a boy. I was actually very fortunate, considering that years later, after I married and moved away, Edgar Stine, my old bachelor neighbor, died of AIDs in prison.

How did Edgar come to be incarcerated? How did he contract an incurable STD, having never married? Because for years and years - the whole time I'd been growing up actually - he and his Roman Catholic friend with a misshapen arm had been sexually abusing children and teens right across the driveway from where I was sleeping.

I didn't escape completely unscathed either. The fact I'd spent time on his side of the asphalt at his coaxing means I was another prospective victim he was grooming. In Yahweh's mercy, he didn't succeed in his goal. He did however steal a portion of my innocence through the sometimes suggestive, other times direct, and often pornographic nature of his comments. A majority of them at that time went over my carefree boyish head. I just thought he was a sick old man who joked about perverted things. Years later, after I've become aware of what is in the world, however, I realize he wasn't joking! Yet how could I, as a young boy, have known who I could trust to expose the inner workings of such a vile, filthy-minded human being?

To this day I ask how everyone (including his relatives who made up the majority of our neighborhood) seemed to have no problem with their children and grandchildren engaging him? That appears to be a pattern which plays out again and again, unfortunately. Blood is thicker than water, and somehow the false premise gets played out in our minds that "Uncle Edgar" as everyone called him, or "cousin Titan", or "grandpa Woody" or the minister of your own Messianic congregation could never do such things, and if they knew of someone doing such things, would immediately "out them". Of course that's what should happen, but this is a fallen world where a majority of sexual abusers are actually people who were trusted by those whom they violated, and in too many instances, were even enabled by those who didn't say anything because they didn't want to be responsible for another name getting added to the sex offender registry. Like if we ignore a problem it just goes away... except it doesn't.

Friends from Florida with a history in law enforcement moved in across the stream from the house where I grew up, and it only took them a couple summers to know there was substantiating evidence against my old neighbor. I don't know how they knew, but they gave us a warning and both unfortunately died a short time later. Still, no one told anyone to keep their kids away from "Uncle Edgar" because the only thing that kept us in our comfort zone was racking it up to rumors. If we believed it, it would become true. As long as we didn't believe it, nothing ever happened. As we've all been informed from blithe facebook memes "rumors are just spread by haters, carried by fools, and believed by idiots." Certainly there couldn't be such evil among us. Surely I must have misheard Edgar or misunderstood him, so for years that's exactly what I convinced myself to believe. The day a couple months after I married and moved away that I learned Edgar had been arrested however, I couldn't believe that lie any longer. Ziad Abdelnour was wrong about rumors.

Until that day we had no "evidence" against Edgar, even though the evidence had been walking in and out of his house for years right in front of us. Someone could have reached out to those boys. But we didn't because, oddly enough, we felt like to have asked questions would have been to betray a trust. That was between them and their parents. To make Edgar trustworthy, we simply had to trust him. The rumors and suspicions couldn't be right, and the kind couple across the stream had to be wrong, tools of the devil that satan was using to divide a little country hamlet called Cleversburg. Oh, is the adversary so sly. The rumors only remained rumors for so long because no one took the necessary time and steps to substantiate them.

So for years I managed to convince myself that the problem with Edgar must just be my imagination. It must be evil thoughts in my own head that just had me misunderstanding and misinterpreting him. Another old bachelor friend we had told me that cheese gives you evil thoughts, and after all, there was nothing I liked more than sharp cheddar cheese. I could eat a whole block of it myself in a setting. Ironically, some of the evil thoughts in my head weren't placed there by any freaking block of cheese, but by the minister's son, Edgar! Even after his arrest I questioned whether the allegations were factual. In spite of what I'd heard come out of his mouth, it was still hard for me to believe, like that makes any sense. Maybe his friend with the misshapen arm was the real one responsible. After all, he was the Roman Catholic. Edgar on the other hand was a minister's boy, the son of a Protestant pastor. Somehow learning what disease Edgar died from was the myth-buster. You can't catch AIDs from thin air. I guess some people could still belive he was framed and just caught AIDs while bandaging up one of those profligate teenagers bleeding toes with his bare fingers. Some people can somehow keep denying a reality that's staring in their face screaming at them. Somehow denying it seems easier, but I finally got to the point that I couldn't deny it any longer.

Alot of youth wish someone had told them the rumors. That's because they were factual, and in spite of an attempt at justice ultimately being meted out by a secular legal system, it wasn't Scriptural justice because there were already too many victims to justify. In short, this means the only semblence of justice is that Edgar is dead, and the direct cause of his death he brought upon himself. True justice however, died somewhere in the middle of our Railroad Lane, run over by a metaphorical freight train many years prior to Edgar ever being arrested.



Ecclesiastes 8:11 says "Because justice against evil languishes, therefore the heart of the sons of men becomes fully comfortable within them to do evil".

Continue to Part 3 of Series >>