Sunday, January 26, 2020

A Small Turning Point In My Church Journey

I've talked about my problems with church a lot on here. It's been a long difficult road and I'm far from finding a church community, but I wanted to share a recent piece that I think has been a definite turning point for me.

I've always felt kind of weird about my alienation from the church, because, come on, it's not like they ran me out of town or told me to my face I wasn't welcome. I've had to deal with much less than a lot of people I know, so why can't I suck it up and just go? Why do I have such strong emotions about this? What did the church even do to me except just "not feel like a home"?

Well, I'd been thinking and praying through this for awhile. I talked with my mom about it and she said she felt like God was going to show me something, like he was going to help me find the core of my hurt, like there was going to be a specific moment that he was going to bring to my mind that I had blocked out or ignored.

And I think he did -- or if it isn't the actual core, it's something extremely close.

I think I was listening to the Good Christian Fun podcast when it came up. I don't remember the words they said that jarred this memory, but I suddenly got a vivid recollection of a teacher in our church speaking to a group and saying, "Your good deeds are like filthy rags to God."

This is a paraphrase of a verse from Isaiah 64, which talks about the sins of the people of the land as the reason why God has abandoned them to their enemies, that evil has become so deeply ingrained in them that even the good they do is pretty crappy. The second half of the chapter asks for God to come back and fix what has gone wrong.

But that was definitely not the context in which this verse was used at me. I was not being told that God had abandoned me to my enemies.

It was used in the context of, "You cannot earn your salvation."

So this may not be how everyone hears and processes that verse in that context, but this is where that goes for me:

"You cannot earn your salvation. Because your good deeds are like filthy rags. And filthy rags are disgusting. And even the good things you do, even when you try you hardest, God thinks you are disgusting. God is super grossed out by you. Like that other verse these teachers like to quote a lot, about God vomiting you out of his mouth. God looks at you and just wants to puke. Good thing Jesus is standing in front of you so God can see him instead of your gross, disgusting, sinful face."

And that sense of disgust, that God was disgusted with me even when I was doing the right thing, began to permeate my sense of self.

None of the people who said these things to me would ever say it as explicitly as it translated to in my mind. None of them would use the words "God thinks you're gross." And they'd probably be horrified that my mind took it to that extreme, they'd probably insist, "That's not what we meant, that's not what we were talking about." In other words, it would be my fault for misinterpreting their words as a child. (I am assuming a little bit here, which I probably shouldn't, but it is based partly on how people have reacted when I have tried to point out possible consequences of certain teachings. The answer is usually, "You should know that's not what we meant.")

Anyway. Now, years later, even as I have recovered that sense of self and that sense of God's true, deep love for me, I still struggle to not feel like other Christians are looking at me in disgust. Because that is how I and my peers were taught to view people and ourselves, as fundamentally pukeworthy. And I'm absolutely positive I'm not the only one who was a good teachable Christian and internalized it.

Things clicked into place a bit after this realization. I think I found The Main Thing that made me so uncomfortable around other Christians and in churches. Now that I've unraveled it down to its core, I'm starting to actually clean out that hurt and fear and anger that I couldn't find before, and then maybe start building it back up. In the meantime, unveiling that hurt has brought up feelings I didn't know I had but have clearly been sitting in my soul for awhile. Turns out when hurt is brought to light, it brings anger, and I've had no idea what all what to do with that, ha, so I'm working through it slowly and trying to let go so that I can move on. But in the meantime it feels like a "darkest before the dawn" moment, so I'm feeling my feelings, evaluating them, and figuring out which ones are good to keep and which ones I need to dismantle.

Maybe someday I'll be able to clean this all out enough that I can talk to members of my former church growing up without feeling waves of panic, or that I can post something like this without mentally bracing for backlash that may or may not come, or that I can walk into a church without my heart rate skyrocketing.

Fingers crossed!

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