It's Sunday! What do you do one Sundays? Go to church? Sleep in? Go to the park for a run? I often sleep, but sometimes, I join a friend at her church for a service or, my favorite, teaching the little ones. It's kindof like babysitting for the parents upstairs in service; Sunday school for the kids age 3 and up. However, since I moved back to my hometown, I've skipped out on church. Bad me, bad!
I'll admit, I'm "religiously challenged", if you can even call it that. When I was young, I went to church, Sunday school, enjoyed the church life, but stuff happened and I began questioning if there really was a God. I came to the conclusion that if there was one, then He had a morbid sense of humor with having people go through such trials and tribulations. What did I go through? Long story short, let's just say that my family has a lot of medical issues. I've been lucky to stay just out of harm's reach, not even breaking a bone, ever. But I have had stitches. Funny right? Well, recently I've began questioning again. It's either because of my super religious friend or the random guy I talk to at Starbucks, but the question "Do I believe?" has popped up again. I've been on the fence for so long that I've decided that there is something out there, whether it's God or not, I just don't know. It could be aliens! Yeah, I went there. Aliens! But that's for another post on another day.
For years I didn't want to have anything to do with church people. My best friend (who I've known since 7th grade) knew this and never pushed me to go to church with her. The high school I went to was the worst. They had a "believe what we believe or you're going to hell" mentality. I'm doomed, awesome! Imagine me sitting in bible class, my teacher saying how other religions are wrong and we're right then something else that enforced the narrow-minded perception I was getting from the school's staff. I sat in the back row against the wall and it was very hard to not start beating my head against it. How could people be that ignorant and stupid? My frustration with them came to a head my senior year, I skipped chapel. I showed up after and went to classes, but I didn't want to sit through someone talking about something I couldn't care about. Yeah, stupid, bad me. I like to consider myself to be open-minded. I don't care what religion you are, if you're gay, what skin color you have, or where you're from. If you're a good person, I like you. Just don't try to shove what you believe down my throat and we'll be fine. Now I feel like I'm about to go off on a rant. But the point is, everyone has their own beliefs. Whether you're right or wrong, we'll find out someday. If you believe in a heaven and hell, but I think that we just fade away upon death, well, we'll never know who's right until we die ourselves.
That's it! We don't know who's right and who's wrong. Christians could be right or maybe it's the Buddhists who have it down. Religion is "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods... a particular system of faith and worship." It's your system of belief, your faith. That's all we really have, our faith. Be it in God, or what have you.
I know, I've hit a touchy topic. Some of you reading are probably shaking your head thinking I'm crazy or you're agreeing with me. I don't expect you to agree with everything I think, I believe. To each their own. You believe what you believe and I believe what I believe. As I mentioned earlier, I don't care who you are, if you are a good person, we can be friends.
So here are the questions that I ask you: What do you think? Is there something, or some one, that gave you that extra push you needed to believe? If you haven't had one, what would be that "ah-ha" moment? If you believe in God, what is the one thing that you would share with someone else (a lesson of a sermon, personal experience, ...)? What does "redemption" and "salvation" mean to you?
No comments:
Post a Comment