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.

The God I Believed In

In the world of Christianity, especially the small world of Bible Belt southern Christians, there are two worlds. Churched and Unchurched. Now, people will tell you that Unchurched people can be "saved" that ever ambiguous term that Christianity clings to with all its soul, but most will agree that it is highly impossible for someone to be "saved" and not going to Church.

For the first year of my Christian life, I was Unchurched. I was in college, making friends, partying, going to classes, the normal thing, but there was a difference. I made friends easier, I was nice, I truly enjoyed being around people and they truly enjoyed being around me. I started helping out at our Catholic ministry on campus (all protestant services were off campus) with my roommate, I loved the people I met, the Catholic priest that ran the ministry was very unorthodox to say the least and he welcomed me as well. In a sense, it was very like the thing you would think God wants from us, to get along with everyone, to really enjoy being with people, anyone from classmates and roommates to the homeless people we ministered to. I don't know how many times I got asked out by homeless people because I was as open in talking to them as I was to my friends. When I left school that year (financial and personal home crisis abounding) I came home a depressed woman. I missed the freedom and ease of being there. I was going to church but getting nothing because my goal was no longer just gathering information. I wanted to be impactful.

I wanted people to feel at ease around me. I wanted people to not feel judged. That first part of my salvation was a breath of fresh air from God, the part that made me love being a Christian because I could be there for anyone and I didn't judge anything. I didn't know how. I didn't have those tools in my Christian arsenal.

We decided to leave the church we were going to, which I was glad of and started going to another church. This church was so welcoming and they were different. The pastor didn't scream and yell, he had insight into the Bible and went deeper than face value. He taught us how to read the Bible. He told us he wanted us to be able to discern truth from fiction. These were learned men teaching us "the Word". I had a few disagreements (I have never been anti-gay, although I did learn Church speak so that my fellow parishioners wouldn't realize that and, eventually, couldn't separate what I should believe as a Christian from what I actually believed).

Somewhere in there, while I was trying to learn, I became Churched. It was more than showing up on Sundays and Wednesdays, teaching a class, being there, basically, whenever the doors opened. Yes, I went to church. But I became Churched. I learned how to hate while saying that I was doing something in love. I learned how to judge others, the standard being me and my understanding of God's word (which, also, was in accord with the rest of what my church believed). I learned how to use the Bible against people. I learned how to use the Bible to help me. I was discerning and I used that against people, getting my way because I was learning the tricks of the trade. Being a Christian could be powerful.

There were still a few things in there, things I learned outside of my church. My church taught me that just because someone didn't believe what I believed didn't mean they weren't Christians. This stayed with me and made me much more tolerable to others than I should have been. I believed God could interact with me personally (my church believed God only spoke through the Bible) and my prayers, although I see it now as being a bit self focused, my prayers were answered. I will say always answered because I do not remember any prayer that was worth something going unanswered. In my life, I have gotten everything I've prayed for. I have been sustained financially even though I'm bad with finances. My health is good, I am in love with my husband and he is smarter than me (in many ways) and funny. I don't hate my dad anymore and I have love and patience in my heart for my mom and the rest of my family.

But I was very judgemental. As I look back now, I didn't even realize how easy it was to appear humble even as I made myself the standard. I worked hard to be this way or that way, according to God's Word (the Bible) and God's standard. You should too. You either did things the way I thought they should be done, or it was "on you" when you had to suffer the consequences of your own bad decision making. I would tell people who they should or shouldn't be with, I would tell people what they should or shouldn't do. I even told people what God would or wouldn' t do. I would make sweeping proclamations against anyone and anything that tried to step on the God I believed in.

I promise you, that God was very different from the God I started out with.

Salvation

The road to salvation is paved with as many good intentions as the road to hell.

Basically, if you answer yes to a series of questions asked to you by a pastor, you are saved. With less than one year of church under my belt, I was answering yes because I knew that's what I was supposed to do. My mother, at that point, was gentle. She was in love with Jesus. It made her more loving herself, more understanding, more patient. She was, in deed and action, the best her that I'd ever seen. Even dad saw it, and at the time, he didn't see much past what he wanted to see. Jesus was powerful and we witnessed that power.

My home had not been the best place to grow up. I held resentment for many years because of that environment. Jesus Christ came in and changed my home environment. In that first year alone, we had a peace I had never experienced, a home that I was ready to go back to. I didn't have to stay late after school coming up with reasons to delay my journey. I could go home.

To say anything more would be telling the stories of those who should reveal their secrets themselves. But I want you to understand that when I say that Jesus changed everything, I mean everything.

As much as I wanted those changes to happen in me, something was off and it stayed off for a long time. I went to college, I studied more, I read stories that had some of the same accounts as the Bible and when I read them, instead of thinking that every society had their stories, I read them as validating what I was told in the Bible.

I began to have a personal relationship with God, who I had been taught for the past two years, when I was 19. It was during the summer after my first year. I'd gone to visit Cleveland, the home of the guy I was dating, for a few weeks before returning home. When I got home, I realized that all the resources I thought I had for school, I really didn't. So I spent a lot of time praying to the God I only knew of in word. One night, I finally broke down before God and said that I had nothing to offer and no reason to get what I prayed for, but that I knew none of that mattered if God wanted to bless me. I fell asleep in my tears and woke up the next day to answered prayer. God wanted to bless me and had. My gratefulness knew no bounds. That was the first time God communicated with me on a level that was nothing short of miraculous. It was the first time I actually felt the peace of God that so many people had spoken of. It filled me and became me and suddenly, I truly did not think as I once did or see as I once saw.

That's when I started to believe God could do anything and He wanted me along for the ride.

Church

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to go to church. Oh, we did the occasional Easter, me and my sister dressed in finery and lacy socks with black patent leather shoes, the boys uncomfortable in suits and clip on ties with shoes they would outgrow before the day was over.

When we moved, the summer after 6th grade, we moved to a house. Across the street from that house was a church. We never visited that church. I wanted to, longed to. On the times I actually woke up early on Sunday, I would sit and watch all the people go in. I was doing two forbidden things. Sitting in the living room and longing for church when it was not welcomed in our house.

I don't know if church began to grow in my mind from there. As I grew older and treasured my sleep, I was glad that we didn't do anything like that. When I could hide in bed reading on a Sunday afternoon instead of sweating it out in a service that didn't end until 3pm, I was grateful for our stance.

When I was 17, something happened. I don't know what happened, but suddenly, we were going to church. We went to the church that my dad's family had gone to for so long. Initially, we were welcomed with open arms. I approached church the same way I approached school. Learn as much as possible. Know more than anybody else. After all, this Bible was simply a book and what did I know better than anyone at my school? Books. So, in Sunday School, I knew every answer, read every assignment. Nothing was esoteric. Everything had a right or wrong answer. We played Bible Jeopardy and no one wanted to play against me, except the foolish people who had once dominated or the older people who thought they knew. They didn't know me. I won. I always won. Mothers wanted their daughters to look up to me. Mothers wanted their sons to marry me. I was a paragon and I was a fraud.

The day I was baptized, dressed in the white clothes, a towel over my hair, making a public statement that I had accepted Jesus into my heart, I was fervently praying that I had, in fact, accepted Christ into my heart. I took my dunking with grace, eyes closed, breath held, praying that when I came up, I would be different.

I was not. Everyone cheered and I went on perpetuating the fraud. And the more of a fraud I was, the more I saw it in others around me. We knew what we were doing. We were pretenders. We didn't know what else to do. We understood the Bible, we understood what had to happen, we just didn't know how it would happen to us. We holed up in our enclave of intellectual belief, hoping that one day, the love of Christ would grow in our hearts and we set to work convincing ourselves that, in fact, it had.

It would be two years before I actually understood what it meant to be saved.

Hello God, Do You Remember Me?

Sometimes, I wonder what God remembers about our first moment of understanding him. Not that typical religious moment, or the moment when people first know one of his names, but that one moment of clarity when we who choose to believe in him first do, before the dogma and the tradition ruin what little of God we come to understand.

I think back to my first encounter with God. My first understanding of an encounter with God. I had to have been like 4 or 5 years old and my mama was reading to me from the big blue Bible Stories book, that book you see advertised in dentists' and doctors' offices all over the US. She was reading to me about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son, but I thought it said "oldest one" and so I wondered when God was going to ask my mama to sacrifice me to him. I think I lived in fear and trepidation for like two days, always looking skyward, wondering if he asked if she would and if she did, would he provide a ram for me? In the end, I just kind of said, "You better not ask my mama to sacrifice me!" and God and I had a tentatively good relationship. It wasn't bogged down with doing right, although I believe some of that former fear took up residence with God.

It's hard to explain, but I will try, for my own sake, to do so. There are many voices in my head. those of you who know me know this to be true. I don't know how many of you have had me ask you about something you said only to have it be a made up dialogue I've concocted. Well, in there amongst all the voices is God, sitting back, speaking every now and then, nudging every now and then and, for a long time, I enjoyed him there. But after a while, as life grew more hectic and I grew less free, I forgot he was there and moved through life with only that still, small voice speaking only occasionally.

As I grew, though, the thought and idea of God never left me. People say that we all have a "God shaped hole" in our hearts and our search for truth is a search for him. Maybe that's true. But the enjoyment of God in my head lead me to read more about God (god, gods, Allah, Zeus, Thor, Krishna, etc.) and that's when the idea of religion crept in.