I’ve gone through the I-hate-the-church-today phase. I’ve read the relevant articles, listened to angry Christian musicians and preachers and talked with fellow radicals over drinks about how far the church has strayed. I can talk the talk. I can judge very intelligently and be cruel. I can say how I love the pot-smoking-hippie-crowd who doesn’t judge me and loves me with open arms and why-can’t-Christians-be-like-that. I have smoked cigarettes and thought how cool I was over a long island iced teas and how I really am free, unlike those other tight-blankety-blank-blank Christians.
I’m over that phase. I think that it is an important phase to go through in your Christian life though. You need to know what you believe and how you do it and how, although the church is flawed, to love and embrace it fully. It is so much more of a challenge to love it than criticize it. To love something so wholly unholy at times- that is God’s design for us. It is EASY, painfully easy, to criticize and hate and think you are somehow different, that what the Bible says you somehow have a better idea of what it is saying than the church teaching staff… I have been very arrogant in my criticism.
Perhaps it’s my inability to be relevant and keep up with the negative talk and popular literature that has made me soft, or maybe it’s Summit and his problems that has made me see another view but any way you look at it, I have changed. I love the church. I think when people have problems with the church, at least when I did, it was when I began to look at the church like I should have looked only at God. The church isn’t perfect, that is the point. How so many people come together, under one roof, full of imperfections and problems and flaws that are horrible and scary, and have the uniting factor of reliance on God is beautiful.
Right now I’m not going to church. I’m not not going because I’m angry at anything or anyone. In fact, I’m in love with the church. I’m not not going because some huge hypocrite is now attending. I think I AM that hypocrite.
I am not going because the only reason that I would go right now is because of guilt. And guilt is not from God. No one should ever attend church because of guilt. I am healing right now and hearing from him more clearly and unencumbered than ever before. I am having beautiful fellowship with other believers and thinking thoughts that God has placed in my mind. I breathe deep when I go outside and know he is with me. When I feel like a mortal failure in life because I am living with my parents and will be 30 next year, I feel an insane peace. I am doing the right thing, I am going through a trial and sometimes the only thing that is keeping me sane is the pure and simple knowledge that I am in HIS will. Not mine. I’m so far from perfect that I barely need mention this fact because its a theme on my blog. But I am loved and forgiven. I don’t need to be anything to impress anyone. Church is about fellowship with other believers and I have had more of that in the last 4 weeks not going to church than I have had in the last six months attending.
I’m not pointing fingers- Dave Ramsey Study- but this semester has been a period of breaking. Of brokenness. I think everyone should take do the study, but not when you are already in pieces on the floor drowning in your own tears. I had barely come to terms with Summit’s disability and my community group changed- with my endorsement I need to say- to do the study. But there is no fellowship with the study, you are just doing and learning things you need to hear, but during the study I fell apart more and more without the fellowship that comes with praying together and exploring what the bible has to say on a weekly basis. And the study met at my house almost every week which I was perfectly happy about until I started to fall apart at the seams from other pressure. I was also doing a high school bible study that was more of me giving- and I loved every minute of it. It wasn’t until April that I began to loose steam fast. Or realized my Titanic of a life has sprung a leak. I was so busy doing, doing and doing that I had not just been in a long while. My relationship with God suffered. My relationship with Ben suffered. Every spare moment of my life seemed to be an outpouring, but I had just a trickle coming in. I finally stopped having the bible study at my house and then stopped attending. I cried out in relief when our high school group ended in mid-April. Because I was done, finished. In my own ashes.
During this time we decided to move to the ‘ment. So, again, I was pouring out energy and strength that were not mine to get this task done.
And here I am. I am a broken person, on the floor in my pink Bermuda shirt, a place I’ve never been in my life, a crime of which I avoid like the plague. (You may not have the same passionate feelings I have about wearing a shirt of something or somewhere I’ve never been. It’s a pet-peeve of mine.) And I’m sipping leftover Pomegranate wine and sitting here at my desk with spiders in the eves, wondering to myself, “what the h— has happened to my life?” and I have no answers. Or, I should say, I have every answer, I just don’t want to think about it. This is real life. Being broken. The times that are good in life are also memory erasing. You forget the grime and grit of the war times when you are happy. It’s like when you ask a new mom about the birth of her child and looks at you with a dreamy smile and says it was all worth it. On the other side of it, however, you feel you are insane and nothing like this has ever happened to anyone and you see the ‘perfect’ people out there and you are like, “God, what the f? What did I ever do?” and you know it’s wrong to compare but you still do even though you know in that mysterious place in your heart that he who began a good work will be faithful to complete it, all the while having excruciating growing pains. I am joyful right now, not happy, and I feel God’s presence more now than I ever have before in my life.
So that is why I’m not going to church right now people. You can stop asking. (Insert smiley face here to make this last sentence seem less abrasive here while attempting also to convince people that this is about me, not them and that what I’m going through is a necessary part of growing. Man. Those smiley faces are powerful!)