Unasked Questions

“One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we were afraid to ask.” ~Thomas Merton

Most all of my life as a Christian I have had questions and have been afraid to ask them. Several years back I decided “NO MORE”! My life had to work if I was going to stick around. No longer was I going to “go along to get along”. If there was a way to live this life with God, I was going to find it. Otherwise… I don’t know what the otherwise would have been. I never got there.

Getting to the place of “giving up” was the best thing for me. I read this post by Stacey Robbins over at the Free Believers website and thought it described my journey so well. Take a few minutes and ponder her words. I respect her honesty.

I threw it all away

I read this post tonight at the Free Believers Network. One of the paragraphs spoke so directly to the path I’ve been traversing.

"I visited an atheist's website the other day and was astounded by what I found. This guy believed exactly the way I did. He just got fed up with the god that Christianity had served him and he finally made the decision to throw it all away. I have found that for a Free Believer, the quickest way to recover from organized religious thinking is to become an atheist of sorts. You have to literally divorce your mind from the god you were raised with if you ever want to know the one true God. Most of us spend a lifetime trying to fix our broken image of Him, when in reality, we need to throw it all away and start from scratch."

I threw out my religion because it wasn't working. So much about it not only seemed fake and hyped, it also left me empty inside. My life received no fulfillment from religion. The system I participated in wasn’t producing what it promised. So I wiped the slate clean and started over. I opened the door to God inviting him to show me what was real and what wasn’t.

Over two years later, I have no regrets for taking the path I’ve taken. Life has returned to my soul. Emotion and hope have returned. I’m not an atheist, not by a long shot. My life is certainly different and definitely on more solid ground than ever. I recognize that I’m a spiritual being living a human life. The spiritual separate from the natural. I accept both but I don’t live trying to reconcile one with the other in this natural world.

My spiritual life is settled. It was settled 2,000 years ago with no help from me. The life I life in this world I live by the faith of Jesus.

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20

So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore

This is the book that gave me permission to stop going to church. It started the revolution in my mind toward everything “God“. I began to realize it was okay to question everything that I had always considered “right“. Of course, I already strongly felt there was something desperately wrong with the institutional system of Christianity. Reading this book gave me hope that there was a way to live and give God His rightful place, which is simply Him living His life in me.

You can read it here online for free. Download it or read it online.

The authors of the book are Wayne Jacobsen and Dave Coleman, former pastors.

Shifting Paradigms

For the past 33 months, I’ve been replacing or putting aside some foundational paradigms that have defined “my religion” for many years. Why? Because when I needed my religion to work, it didn’t. Having experienced extremely hurtful personal problems and reaching out to God with no recognizable response, I was left with an impression that God didn't care and was far off. Expecting the church people to help my husband and me through our difficult valley I was met with disappointment and a feeling of being shunned… at least that was my perception. After many months of disillusionment and finally leaving the church our family had been a part of for 12 years, I came to realize that my expectations and beliefs about God and his followers were both misappropriated and wrong. I plan to define some of these changes in future writings.

The Random House Dictionary defines “paradigm” as “the generally accepted perspective of a particular discipline at a given time”. “Shift” means “to put (something) aside and replace it by another or others; change or exchange: to shift ideas.” This is what I am doing. The process has brought great freedom to my spirit.