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spirituality
since i can remember, i went to church. i listened & i learned & i based my life around what i learned .. but over the course of the years i found that i wasn't getting anything out of going to church. i'd sit & concentrate & listen really carefully, just in case it was because i wasn't really paying attention .. but still nothing.
a few years ago i started to realise that i wasn't going to church because of what i believed, i was going because i thought i should, i felt obliged. i felt that i had to go because that's what the people around me & the friends that i'd made over the years at church expected me to do. that's not a good reason. if you're going to do something it should be because you love it & you have a real yearning to delve deeper into it. i hadn't felt like that for years.
i thought maybe i was just in the wrong church, with the wrong people, so i looked around for about a year, trying to find a church where i felt comfortable. no church that i went to felt right. no matter where i went i felt like an outsider. it's not that i was expecting the people to be perfect & to suddenly be my long lost best friends, i simply felt like i may as well have been on a different planet to them. so i started doing things just because i wanted to & not doing things because i didn't want to. i stopped pretending to myself that i was going to get anything out of going to church. i stopped going. i don't know what i was looking for exactly but whatever it was, it wasn't there.
eventually i met my wonderful man & after a while we moved in together. in christian circles this is a very bad thing to do & basically means that you're 'back-slidden' & have 'turned away from the lord'. i haven't turned away from anything! i've simply decided that i'd like to make my own mind up about certain rules that have been set over the ages that may or may not apply now & may or may not apply to me.
i know that some of my friends & family are praying for me because they think that somehow i've gone off the track. i appreciate their concern but i don't feel that i've gone off the track. i may never go back to church. i don't get anything out of it & i'm not sure that i ever will. i don't want to sit there with fifty or a hundred other people & be told how i should interpret my life & my spirituality.
i never want to assume to know exactly who or what god is. i mean if god is god then he's not even necessarily a 'he' or even a 'she'. whatever god is, i think he has the whole thing sorted & doesn't want me to feel guilty about deciding to not sit in a big room with other people & be told someone else's opinion of the way things are.
somewhere along the track, since the very beginning of time, things got mixed up & people complicated life to the point where they want to kill other people because they disagree on some finer point of an interpretation of spirituality. god, wherever & whoever he is, has got a handle on things. why do we humans feel we have to categorise, pigeon-hole, label & complicate everything? why do we think that we have to look after what god's got under control? i don't want that & i try to not do that.
i'm not back-slidden. i'm not turning into an evil person. i'm not on the wrong track. i'm just me. the same me that i've been since i was just a little girl. i love being me & i think that god might even be happy with me.
people think that it's about what you can tuch. a church( a building) a bible( a book. it's al about the inner soul. read it not exactly, not live it exatly, by the rules from a book or what people say, or church. see the spirit of it an make your own dicision about it.everbody nows what it good or bad.
greetings from edwin
that's sort of how i feel about church. i used to go for a while when i was a bit younger, and i realised once that it was because i felt people were expecting me to, not because i really wanted to. so i stopped. i've had the 'i'm praying for you' comments too. i just try to remind myself that just as i am comfortable in the way i think of and communicate(?) with god, other people need the structure and security that a church offers to feel right, and for the most part i'm fine with that. it's just the door-knockers who tell me that i'm going to hell that i have a problem with, but they're a whole other rant
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This touches on something our family believes in. To put it simply, the church is simply a building, and is not necessary for a one on one relationship with God. We have gone to so many churches, all filled with hypocrites who sing praises on Sunday and are horrible people the rest of the week. Many churches structure themselves in a judgemental fashion, making it difficult for people to feel comfortable there.
I know how many people disagree, but this is how our family lives. God lives in our hearts, not in some building mankind named a church. It's how we live, not where we go one day a week that counts.