The God I Believed In Part 2

So, of course, you don't realize all the ways you have become "churched" while you are in the midst of it. My rude awakening came when I moved to California.

I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God told me to go there. There has always been a God voice in my head since the first encounter with Him and the cavalier way he'd asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. As I explained, the God voice has been there amongst all the voices, but now, I was no longer 4 or 5 with only my mom's ideas or my own drifting in and out of my head. I was filled with the words that had been taught me for the past 9 years I'd been engaged in religion. Like I said, God's voice is lost in all of that, but occasionally, He would tell me to do something.

I remember one night, I was working for Americorps. I was doing a reading program at this inner city school. Someone came to the school looking for me because they needed information that I hadn't finished. I had to go back to my office. At that time, I was the only body in my office. I told them I would get them the information tomorrow and planned to go the next day. But The Voice told me to go that night. I walked into my dark office and the radio was on, which put me on alert. I turn off everything when I leave for the day. The person talking was the director of the writing program I eventually applied for and I was accepted. I spent a month in California learning about writing for television and I found a church there that I loved. This church was full of information, like my church at home, but for the first time, when I sat through a service, I didn't have that familiar tightness in my chest. I didn't feel as if this church was about striving or determining things for others. The people that invited me to go with them loved God, but I met them over drinks at a restaurant, then we went to a bar to play pool and continued drinking. They weren't worried about what others were thinking of them and they weren't afraid to talk about God and religion to us or anyone around us.

When I got back to my southern town, I knew I had stared into the beginning of a lesson about God that I am still in the midst of. I knew that nothing was the same. I was no longer satisfied with my church, with what I was being taught. I wasn't instantly better, but the series of events that led to me going back to California gave me what little insight I've been able to offer about myself and how I believed in this series of posts.

Even going to California was one of 5 total times where The Voice said something to me. Only once would I say The Voice ever came close to being a physical voice. Every other time, it was an inclination so strong that I didn't know where it came from and it was for something that had not been a concern until that moment. Living in California was one of those time.

Churched people always tell you that if God tell you to do something, that He will provide for you. If He doesn't provide for you, then maybe you didn't hear God. In California, I was on welfare, sexually harassed at the first job I got, had to go back on welfare, finally got a part time job that paid enough, and got in a car accident. Those are the negatives, the things I remember first when I think about that year in Cali. I did go back to that church that was so restful to me, I made new friends whom I loved, I connected with old friends whom I loved and I solidified my relationship with the man who is now my husband. When I wrecked my car, one of those old friends gave me a car, which got me back home when it was finally time for me to leave. But despite the good, the overwhelming tone of my time in Cali was negative. My mom told me that if it was that bad, God must not have told me to go, I heard wrong, and I needed to pray.

But I know, even in the middle of my confusion, that the only reason I was in California was because of God. He wanted me to know that what I had been told about Him was only half truths, dogmatic beliefs of people who didn't want to know Him, even as they bragged about their comprehensive knowledge of Him. They wanted to be an authority on the Bible and, even as I fought this thought, even as I clung to my churched beliefs, I began to know that what my church family of 9 years knew about God was less than what I'd learned in those 9 months... that my knowledge of God grew in that short time more than it had in the past nine years. I was finally getting back to that God I first believed in.