BOB BARIL COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32)

I have to say “right off the bat” that I am not a homosexual, nor do I have homosexual tendencies. I know that a title like “Coming Out of the Closet” will bring that to mind for many people. But I can imagine how difficult it must be for gay people To “come out of the closet”. They risk total rejection and revulsion. They risk the loss of family, friends, maybe even employment. They risk being tarred with a stereotypical brush, and worst of all, being told that God wants nothing to do with them. (Homosexuality is a complicated subject, and a topic for ANOTHER day.) I relate because I am about to share matters in this piece which CAN potentially bring me the rejection of some people. It CAN mean the loss of some family, some friends, and maybe ruin me professionally. So, I do not post this lightly. I originally considered writing this post in two or three installments, as it will be very long. But, for context and continuity, I’m going to do it as one. (I AM going to post a very short “Readers Digest Condensed Version” of this shortly after I post the long one, just because some people will never want to read the long one.)

I was off all day yesterday, which was unusual. I DO have almost every Thursday off from VIP Answering Service, but on such off days, usually I work a few hours at BJs doing promotional work. BJs had nothing for me on Wednesday, and I decided to just make Thursday a day off. I took a long walk...what I call a “prayer walk” in the morning, On this walk as I prayed and thought, I decided to put out a frank e-mail in the spirit of networking stating my employment and financial needs, and soliciting help of from anyone who knows of any desirable employment. I took a few classes at the Employment and Training Center in Marlboro over the Fall. Most of the classes were really not job training; well, one was; MOST of them were motivational classes about learning to sell yourself to employers, how to ace an interview, how to get an interview, etc. One of the most valuable classes I took was about “networking”. The teacher explained that most jobs do not come through Craigslist, nor through online postings, nor even employment agencies. Over 50% of all jobs that people get, they get through networking. That is, someone knows someone who knows someone who opens a door for you to have an interview and the next thing you know, you have a job.

My friend Jim Spence years ago told me he loved having me on the Board of his nonprofit organization because I “network well”. I do. I had decided to put out a networking blog piece and e-mail stating my needs and asking if anyone knew of any employment positions available that would be suitable for me, AND asking that each person pass this along to friends and family. I had planned to clean our apartment for the afternoon. It was not going to be a “perfect” cleaning, but would be the best cleaning some rooms have gotten in three months. Mary Ann and I are both very busy and usually just too tired to clean the apartment. Something like cleaning an apartment is the best thing in the world for me...it’s physical exercise, it’s mindless, and in the end it gives a great feeling of accomplishment.

Mary Ann very much does not want to be mentioned on this blog or in my e-mails. It’s something she feels very strongly about that is nonnegotiable. I hate to do this, but there is no way I can tell my story without putting A LOT out on the table. This may well hurt and disappoint, her. She may well view this as a broken promise and as totally disrespectful to her. As much as that scares me, I feel compelled to to it. To my surprise, Mary Ann came home early yesterday. I will admit, I was disappointed. I wanted to have that time to myself cleaning. She then stated that we have to talk. She asked me some questions that are very difficult for me. I did not know how to answer. I kept saying “I don’t know”. She did not like my responses.

Mary Ann was not being a jerk. She is very concerned about our financial and living situation. Many people do know know the rental of the apartment in Webster has been provided as a benefit for us by the Southern New England District of the Assemblies of God. This arrangement is coming to an end soon. I had thought it was ending in April, and she believes it is ending in March. Whoever is right, it IS ending soon. The problem is, unless I get a much better job or a very lucrative part-time job in addition to the answering service job, there is absolutely no way we can afford to live at the Webster apartment. Even THEN, it’s going to be dicey. Frankly right now, I am behind in several key bills. We’re just not “making it”. In counseling and one-on-one I have been accused of “not caring” and being in total denial. Mary Ann has said over and over, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand...”. And, I was reminded of the message of the film, :”Courageous” which says the MAN has to be the “provider” and “protector”. (I guess I always thought God was supposed to be the provider and protector.)

And THEN there IS the matter of the Southern New England District. I sat through meetings with the officials looking at me saying, “His wife worked three jobs at times and he keeps her at am arm’s length”. I looked like the laziest, most irresponsible guy. One official told me, “Once the church closed, Mary Ann stayed in touch with us and did EVERYTHING we asked of her. You did NOTHING. You had to be FORCED to do ANYTHING.” And, I did. These were not my finest hours.

That part is strictly the introduction. We have not gotten into the closet at all, yet. Are you ready to go into the closet? Get your flashlights ready, and take a deep breath:

Many of you know I had very different parents and that I got some very interesting sets of genes from them. My father was very extroverted, very confident, and very authoritarian. He was a leader. He was an outstanding public speaker. My mother was a reader and loved history and current events. She read and read and read. I don’t know ANYONE who read as much as she did. She was a diligent person, but she was not at all a leader. The LAST thing she wanted to do was to be a leader. And, she did not have a lot of energy. During the years she worked 40 hours a week, she would literally just come home and collapse. She always talked about how tired she was, how she had no energy, and she was frequently very depressed. I get my public speaking and sometimes impressive outward persona from my father, but internally I am my mother. I also have struggled all through life about feeling like a misfit, but THAT is also possibly the subject for another day.

I had several jobs at Draper Mills in Canton during my school years. I got them from “networking”; my mother was the Draper Mills payroll clerk. They were some tough factory jobs. I did not LIKE them, but I did them. Well, one job I DID like. One summer the janitor had a heart attack. I spent the whole summer as the substitute janitor. I loved that job because I went through the whole mill every day. I was by myself walking through the mill, servicing the bathrooms, etc. During the summer of 1978, however, I had a traumatic work experience at Draper’s. I was hired to work in the “needle room”. I know most of you don’t understand textile mills, and it’s really too much to explain what the needle room does. But I worked with a guy named Ed Keefer. I wrote a whole piece on the blog about that job with Ed Keefer a few years ago. Ed was a slight guy around fifty with glasses, but his appearance was very deceiving. Ed is one of the cruelest individuals I have ever met. He yelled and screamed at me every day. He actually pounded his hand and yelled and yelled about how stupid I was. He told me he’d once worked with a mentally retarded guy who was as stupid as I was. And he HATED working with that guy. But now, I was as stupid as that retarded guy. He had an excuse and I had no excuse. Day after day, he yelled, pounded tables and yelled about how stupid I was; he yelled and insulted me. It was horrible. I was not one to tell my parents anything like this, but finally after weeks of it, I told them and to my shock they told me to quit. My father was doing some major wall and cement work at home that summer and he would use me doing manual labor there, and that’s what happened. But this experience at Draper’s badly scarred me. It deeply shook my confidence and self-esteem.

Just a short time later, I had another bad job experience. During school that Fall, I took a job at the Maranatha retirement center in the kitchen area. The manager of Maranatha at the time was an ex-miliatry officer and Assemblies of God minister named Brother Durham. He was very military and very serious. One evening, he corrected me about something I did. It was NOT being corrected that I minded. It was how he did it. He was demeaning, and he called me “boy”. I know how the Black people must have felt. “Boy”...and being demeaned. I didn’t care that this guy had been a military officer nor that he was the guy in charge. I was twenty-four and had a Bachelor’s degree. NOBODY was going to call me “boy”. I left that job shortly thereafter, and there was another scar.

In the Fall of 1979 in Sharon, Massachusetts I took a job a new K-Mart. The job was setting up the entire store. There were huge cartons of merchandise all over the floor, AND there were metal shelving units in pieces all over the place. We had to assemble the shelving units, then unpack the merchandise. In some cases, we had to put merchandise together. I was working in hardware, and I had to put some work benches together, for instance. They gave us booklets with black & white photos. There were exact photos of what your shelf was supposed to look like. You had to put it together and pack it EXACTLY like the photo. If you think that is easy, well, honestly, it’s NOT. It’s too bad that show “Undercover Boss” was not on the air then. If you’ve seen it, they have things happen like the head of Pizza Hut is working at one of their restaurants and can’t work the cash register correctly, or can’t make the pizza correctly. He’ll get corrected and told he DOESN’T have what it takes to work at Pizza Hut....later they discover he is the CEO! That show would have helped me.

There was a young woman named Donna that my boss loved. Honestly, she was a lot like my wife Mary Ann,except that she had dark brown hair. She put her shelves together flawlessly. She stacked and displayed the stuff EXACTLY as it looked in the black & white photo. She made it look SO easy!. I tried and tried and tried, and my shelf looked like it was done by a third grader. My boss was furious.

“You’re not even trying, ARE YOU??!!” he accused.

Honestly, I was.

I didn’t stay at that job too long. Once again, I left with extremely low self-esteem. I believed I was more than a misfit. I was stupid. I was incapable. Something was seriously wrong with me. I kept these feelings all bottled up inside. I applied for a lot of jobs in those days and I went on a lot of interviews, but I never came across very well. I’d get the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” treatment form the interviewer and that would be it.

David C. Milley who pastored Christian Life Center, Walpole for many years was a complicated guy. He says he was the easiest person in the world to work for, and he really wasn’t. But a big gift of Dave’s was that he saw what people COULD be and he believed in some people that no one else believed in. When he hired me as a full time Assistant Pastor, I did not hold any ministerial credentials and a lot of people thought I was afraid of my own shadow and would never succeed. I actually developed a lot as a minister and as a person there. I became a Licensed Assemblies of God minister in 1981 and an Ordained minister in 1985. In 1987, I assumed the pastorate of First Assembly of God of Framingham. I so enjoyed those days. Mary Ann and I got married in 1982. We had three kids during the 1980s. I developed into a very good pulpit preacher and a very good teacher. I was never good at the business end, but I DID get enough experience that I really got better at it. I was also never much for counseling but many times God showed me what to say and do when I had no idea.

The church was small, but I DID “network” well. I remember that one Sunday on his vacation Pastor Sam Hollo and his wife Esther came to our Sunday morning service. (Sam and I were in a pastors’ prayer group together.) After the service, Sam complimented the sermon and the service. He said, “Bob, you are the BEST preacher in MetroWest. I tell everybody that. I’m SERIOUS.”

Sam has an earned doctorate and was pastoring Westgate Church in Weston, a large, successful church. That compliment meant a lot. I got a lot of other such compliments. Many times I wrote guest columns for the local newspaper. Despite all my deficiencies, I realized I had an amazing gift for discussing very serious issues in a light hearted way, but in a way that people could and would remember. In speaking, I’d have crowds laughing one minute and crying the next. I still have people who contact me and tell me something I said from the pulpit or in a class or even one-on-one to them totally changed their life for the better.

About that business of Mary Ann working three jobs and me not caring: she DID work three jobs at one time for a year or two in the 1990s:  During that time I did all the snow shoveling and all the yard work. I also did 90% of the cooking and laundry. I did all the leaf raking in the fall. If a tree limb fell in the back yard, I’d be out there with a saw cutting it up and hauling it away. I was painting the porch and staining the deck in the summers. My kids say they seldom remember me just laying around. They remember me much more as a workaholic. When my parents died and I received an inheritance, I had Mary Ann take a full year off of all employment.  The next year, she worked only minimal part time hours. THAT year I sold $13,000 worth of stock to make up for the money she would have made. I took her to Cape Cod, bought her a one year old mini van and paid $20,000 cash for it. I paid for us to have a wonderful vacation to Alaska in 2002.

Yes, sadly, the church declined. I did everything I could in my own strength to make it work and keep it opened. I failed. In early 2010, the District closed the church. They graciously allowed us to live in the parsonage for one more year. I was confused and I was furious. Honestly, it took until Sept. 2010 for me to really BELIEVE and GRASP that the church was closed and I would never pastor it again. Mary Ann very much wanted me to become a Pharmacist’s Assistant at CVS. Honestly, I am terrified of cash registers. Terrified. I prayed for a job where I would not have to work a cash register, that would not be too physically taxing, and where I would not be reviled for being “stupid”. The owner of VIP Answering Service and I have a mutual friend, so that was “networking”. I liked the idea that on this job I was sitting, talking, and helping people. Sure sometimes I make mistakes...we take HUNDREDS of calls. We all make mistakes and get corrected, but we aren’t treated like we are stupid or unappreciated. Never. It’s just that you really are never going to get rich doing this job. It’s a great supplement, but I DO need to find something with more hours and more pay.

We moved into Webster in March of 2011. Didn’t I know that this day was coming...that I would have to move out or have a much better job? Yeah, I did. I’m also still depressed and constantly exhausted. I feel really good that I shave and shower each day, go to work at the answering service and sometimes work at BJs. I feel like that’s been the best I could do. Maybe I am wrong about that.

I have applied for some chaplain positions with the State. As a matter of fact, today I got a letter from a friend about a chaplain position that is available, and I’m dropping an application in the mail today. I have also applied for some other jobs. I DO belong to some of those “job search” things on-line. Daily I get e-mails about applying to be a manager at CVS or a salesperson at a beauty supply place, stuff like that. These just don’t interest me and they don’t usually pay well.

It is true that in 2-3 months we have to begin paying for our apartment. If we cannot, we have to figure out where we will live, and likely what we will do with our furniture. AND one of the other reasons this has not been on my front burner is that usually every week there’s some bill I have that I can’t pay and I literally have to pray the money in. That actually happened THIS week with car insurance.

SO, that’s it. I let you in my closet, and I came out.

If you know of any possible positions I might qualify for, please let me know.
If you have any ideas at all, please let me know. Thank you.