Not All of Life Should Be a Stage

This post is about my experience with church. If you don’t want to read about church, hit the Next Blog button because I don’t give a fudge nut. That’s right. You heard me. Fudge nut.

No one wants to listen to my woes so I am going to write them down in blogger. Take that! You have to read what no one else wants to discuss with me right now. Except J. He always listens and understands. I love him! Plus he was in the same boat as I was.

I told him one day, “You can keep going to church but I’m done. I’m not going back.”

It seemed a miserable waste of time to throw a whole Sunday out the window due to tradition and guilt. I had thrown enough of them out and had gotten nothing in return except people telling me how I should act. It was either a social club or a place people went out of repetitiveness and wouldn’t stop going to because they wouldn’t know what to do without it. It was like a building full of OCD people. They just couldn’t break the cycle without spazzing out. So the cycle continued.

I got off the merry-go-round. I started sleeping in on Sundays and doing yard work. I would clean my house and do laundry. I had enough of church and I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel remorse. I had even given it the ol’ “college try” and attended a whole smattering of church but I always walked away feeling that it was a ritual without much behind it.

The leadership in the churches I was at would sit in the foyer and talk while the pastor was preaching. They wouldn’t say hi unless I had my husband at my side. It was all rite and ritual and I was not getting anything else from any other of the 20 places I visited.

I figured God had moved on. Church was meaningless. The people who went were concerned merely with appearances and nothing else. If I was in bed while they were at church, they couldn’t judge my appearance.

I felt liberated. Home Depot and Jack in the Box became my Sunday ritual. I was happy. I wouldn’t even go to church on Christmas or Easter. I would go when I went home, but more of a family function than for church.

I shall skip a few years and then fast forward a few months. I ended up at a Sunday service. The pastor spoke about church being a safe place where it didn’t matter who we were before we walked through the doors. We were all the same inside. I felt like he was talking directly to me. I bawled. Seriously, I cried so much. I am not a person given to crying often. (Remember, I’m tough!)

So at this point I felt like maybe something was different in that building than the others. I was curious. So I would occasionally go back and check things out there. And it was a bit weird to me because people there would have their hands in the air while everyone was singing. That is so not allowed in church! People seemed to cry a lot. You should not cry in church unless you stub your toe or something. It is distracting! What is up with this crazy bunch of people? And why are so many of them wearing jeans? It’s okay if a few people wear jeans, but not this many.

I was out of my element. I was out of my comfort zone. I was way beyond what I knew church felt like. But there was this part that seemed to be literally ALIVE there. So I kept coming and at one point with more regularity.

I started to learn that this wasn’t about playing church. It wasn’t about saying the right thing or even doing the right thing. It wasn’t about smokers, drinkers, hookers, rich people, poor people, perverts, white hairs, black hairs, or anything. It was about really finding a relationship with God. It was truly about having a heart that could feel and understand God for the first time ever. They didn’t want me to follow a rule book. They could care less how I went about things. It wasn’t about saying fudge nut or fuck for that matter.

It was about letting God really take a hold of my life and change it.

And there is a huge difference between letting a church change you from the outside in or them letting God change you from the inside out. And that is what I have learned. When a church tries to force change so that they don’t have to deal with someone’s issues or ugliness, they play God. And people can figure out how to act and look so they aren’t offensive. And they can be as ugly as sin on the inside still and function in a church their whole life. How else does a church end up with child molesters? They push a “face” onto a person and the person wears that face but hides what’s underneath.

And this is my problem now. I have finally gotten to a place where there is no one looking over my shoulder and evaluating my relationship with God based on my actions, words or deeds. There is no one measuring up my effectiveness in my work with the teens based on what I look like. And I am terrified of going back to a building where people gather every Sunday to pay compliments to each other, slap “faces” over what’s really underneath and play church.

I am good at playing church and I never, ever want to do it again.