Alone

12 Replies

From your earliest recollection you remember the church.

You remember the preacher, the piano player, the deacons, and your Sunday School teacher.

You remember the youth group and all the fun activities.

You remember getting saved and baptized.

You remember being in church every time the doors were open.

You remember everything in your life revolved around the church.

You remember praying and reading your Bible.

You remember the missionaries and the stories they told about heathens on the other side of the world.

You remember revival meetings and getting right with God.

You remember…

Most of all you remember the people.

These were the people that loved you. You thought to yourself, my church family loves me almost as much as God does.

You remember hearing sermons about God’s love and the love Christians were supposed to have for one another.

Church family, like blood family, loves you no matter what.

But then IT happened.

You know, IT.

You got older. You grew up. With adult eyes, you began to see the church, God, Jesus, and the Bible differently.

You had questions, questions that no one had an answer for.

Perhaps you began to see that your church family wasn’t perfect.

Perhaps the things that Mom and Dad whispered about in the bedroom became known to you.

Perhaps you found out that things were not as they seemed.

Uncertainty and doubt crept in.

Perhaps you decided to try the world for awhile. Lots of church kids did, you told yourself.

Perhaps you came to the place where you no longer believed what you had believed your entire life.

And so you left.

You had an IT moment, that moment in time when things changed forever.

You thought, surely, Mom and Dad will still love me.

You thought, surely, Sissy and Bubby and Granny will still love me.

And above all, you thought your church family would love you no matter what.

But, they didn’t.

For all their talk of love, their love was conditioned on being one of them, believing the right things.

Once you left, the love stopped.

Now, they are praying for you.

Now, they plead with you to return to Jesus.

Now, they question if you really ever got saved.

They say they still love you but deep down you know they don’t.

You know their love for you requires you to be like them.

You can’t be like them any more…

Such loss.

Time marches on.

The church is still where it has always been.

The same families are there, loving Jesus and speaking of their great love for others.

But, you are forgotten.

A sheep gone astray.

Every once in awhile someone asks your Mom and Dad how you are doing?

They sigh, perhaps tears well up in their eyes…

Oh how they wish you would come home.

To be a family sitting together in the church again.

You can’t go back.

You no longer believe.

All that you really want now is their love.

You want them to love you just-as-you-are.

Can they do this?

Will they do this?

Or is Jesus more important than you?

Does the church come first?

Is chapter and verse more important than flesh and blood?

You want to be told they love you.

You want to be held and told it is going to be all right.

But, here you sit tonight…

Alone…

 

12 thoughts on “Alone”

  2. John Arthur

    Hi Bruce,

    Yes, their love is conditional on you BELIEVING the right things, BELIEVING what they believe. They cannot tolerate much diversity and if you step beyond their narrow boundaries, they reject you.

    Never mind that Jesus loved outcasts and accepted them where they were at. When you differ from them they make you an unacceptable outcast, no longer to be loved. Anyway, that is how I have experienced the church.

    Many thanks for this post.

    Shalom,
    John Arthur

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  3. Obiron

    I have read that religions have a tribal aspect to them. That is, you are part of the tribe or you are not. You are in, or you are out.

    This has started making a lot of sense to me lately since we are only 10 thousand years past the time when being part of a tribe made it possible to survive and reproduce. It was possible to live outside of a tribe, but nearly impossible to pass along your genes.

    At this point in civilization the tribe is not necessary, but we still have a deeply rooted desire to belong. Religions fill this need. To participate you have to be a practicing member of the tribe, say the right words, follow the right rituals, and hold to the right thoughts. If you don’t, the tribal social instinct kicks in and you are excluded.

    This observation regarding tribes might be wrong, but it seems to explain some of the really odd social behaviors we practice.

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  4. sgl

    i never had to go thru that, since fortunately i was never that heavy a churchgoer. i stopped attending church in late high school. then in college a whole new set of friends anyway. but i can certainly see how alienating it would be to lose so much. best wishes for finding your ‘tribe’ bruce.

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  7. Clare45

    It is entirely the church that is to blame for this. They encourage you to depend on them entirely and isolate you from other churches, religions and secular activities, so that makes it very difficult to adjust to the “outside” world. It is all part of their grand marketing scheme. Not so much following the “love thy neighbour” command of Jesus or the good Samaritan story. Having moved countries twice in my life, I am quite good at getting new jobs,making new friends and starting over each time. It can be done! Have you thought of moving to a more accepting town?

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    1. Chikirin

      Good point about isolating from other churches. Even as a kid I wondered why churches have nothing whatsoever to do with neighboring churches on the same block.

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      1. Aram McLean

        It’s so true. And so dumb. The small town we moved to when I was 12 had a number of different denominations about the place, at least 30 different Protestant churches. And almost all of them were barely filling the first row of pews on Sunday (I happened to go to a bunch of these different churches and therefore have first hand knowledge of this as my Mom kept changing churches, looking for the ‘right’ one, ie the one that most agreed with the interpretation she most liked). What always got me was the waste of building space. They did, basically, believe the same things after all, didn’t they? Couldn’t you turn at least half of these empty sanctuaries into homeless shelters or ball hockey gyms, or something? Oh no, cause every tribe needs their little quirks and differences to make them feel superior to the church down the street. Needless to say, I’m not a churchgoer anymore.

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