Lost.

I'm still getting my sea legs for this blog. I was all excited about it and I started blogging and it was all good and passionate until somebody hit my blog by following my profile. Since my other blog is private, anybody who clicks onto my profile will probably end up here, and I had to come to terms with that. For the first time in my entire life, somebody's first impression of me would be based on my religious views and thoughts on the subject and that made me really uncomfortable.

I have a hard time being an open Christian. I think if push came to shove, I'd probably say I wasn't one. The people I started to learn about Christianity from started to resent my learning to the point where I felt I had to hide it. One would ask me flat out if I believed in God and I'd answer with an “I don't know,” when I really did know... I also hid it from my atheist friends who judged me and I hid it from my family who I thought would lose respect for me. I hid it from everybody and that's not an easy thing to undo. Plus, since my main blog (with around 1,800 posts so far) had to go underground, I kind of got used to my thoughts and ideas not being so public, even though they were kind of public anyway.

But the hiding's not the only reason. I don't like the connotation that being a Christian brings- the eye rolls, the judgment, the prejudice. I might believe in Jesus' teachings, but I'm so not one of “them”. That alone is a judgment on my part, and a pretty harsh one at that. I could easily blame it on my age- after twenty-eight years of mocking religion and its followers, it's hard to break the stereotypes I had even if I understand the other side now. But that's a cop out, really. They aren't my stereotypes.

The truth is, for one of the first times I can remember, I actually worry about what people think.

I was never that girl. I was the shy girl who would surprise everybody by making a total ass of herself in public all of a sudden and without even blushing. I was the girl who showed up for a French oral presentation on Yugoslavia in high school wearing a Santa suit. I was the girl who would walk downtown when it was super crowded, throw her arms up and yell “WOO!” for no reason. I am so not easily embarrassed.

Until now.

Religion embarrasses me. It does. I'm sorry, God and Jesus, but it's true. Then again, I'm not sorry, God and Jesus, because I somehow think religion embarrasses You too.

I don't want to be lumped into a category with gay-haters and abortion clinic bombers. I don't want to be lumped into a category with people who use religion to wrongly justify hate. I don't want to be lumped into a category with people who don't ever question their beliefs and what they stand for.

I just want to be me.

And me is a girl who is coming to grips with her past, which some might say is less than perfect (ok, fine, far, far less than perfect, but I'm not here to whine), but seeing it with new eyes- eyes that see that maybe there is a God who actually was there all those years when I thought I was completely and entirely alone. I finally was shown a perspective of God that I could relate to, and in learning about it, I realized how closed-minded my former self was toward religion.

But I still am. I still have huge issues with the church and with Christians as a whole. I think my base, my foundation based on Jesus and his teachings in the Bible, is fairly solid and is getting stronger the more I learn, but religion teaches that without church, you're just not making the sacrifices you should as a believer.

My mom left when I was two, and that set the tone for a lot of my life. In my teenage years, I was so angry and bitter and hurt a lot of people, but I also sacrificed a ton for a select few. When I got sick a few years ago, my heart changed completely and I realized how many people need help. If I went to the store, anybody would have thought I was just a regular girl in her mid-twenties, but I wasn't. I was on so many pills every day to fight an autoimmune disorder, all while going through the regular life of a full-time biology student and of a girl in a situation of domestic abuse. I was a disaster and I didn't really tell anybody. Instead, I tried to be useful in any way I could, and that was by being supportive and helpful. My ex would put me down for all of my volunteery efforts, saying I was a doormat, but really, it gave me purpose.

How many people were like me- ordinary on the outside and completely and totally broken and alone on the inside? Probably everybody.

When I gradually got better (I still refuse to use the word "remission"), I went back to work and lost that free time to help people. I felt far more useful as a volunteer than I did (and still do) in my job, in spite of the paycheck. I'm not helping anybody. I'm just crunching numbers in a cyclic fashion.

But in the end, it all comes down to the fact that I constantly work so hard to be loved and to be lovable. And so, even though my reasons are selfish, I do understand Jesus pretty easily. The forgiveness, the sacrifice, the love- I understand it. I understand the need the world has for less selfishness. I understand that human nature goes against selflessness, but that it should be something we strive for. All of the "niceness" Jesus preached I already had down without ever reading the Bible, just hoping to be lovable enough to be worthwhile.

I was a good girl without being a Christian (or even really knowing anything real about Christianity) and I was always as inclusive as possible. And inclusiveness and Christianity as Jesus taught it go hand in hand, but in reality, they're far apart in so many ways. I've already blogged about being rejected by the church a couple of times, but the lack of inclusiveness goes the other way too. For example, if I'm a Christian, right away people assume I exclude homosexual people. It's as though I'm supposed to look down on a lot of people for what they do that is unChristian. But I don't. I mean, sure, I'm judgmental in a lot of ways, but not for personal sin things. It's not for me to decide what's a sin and what isn't. There are obviously some things that harm other individuals that we really should not do. As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, "The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people." Your freedom ends where mine begins and vice versa. If you kill me or somebody related to me in some way, you're obviously affecting me and my freedom too. But between consenting adults, how does who you are attracted to affect my freedom? Really, in this girl's opinion, it doesn't. And therefore, whether or not it is a sin is between you and God.

Abortion is a little different as it involves the rights of an unborn child. Without going into too much depth (this post wasn't supposed to be about abortion...), being anti-abortion in a way puts the fetus' rights above the mother's even though for quite a bit of pregnancy, its viability relies heavily on her, and while I do agree that it is a pretty horrible process, I also believe that without access to abortion clinics, the babies will still be aborted, but through more brutal DIY means, which, apparently, were quite common back in the day. The doctors aren't the ones deciding the zygote/fetus/baby is unwanted. They're just providing a safer process for people who have already decided. Legalizing abortion protects women, even if, as usual, the system is abused by so many.

Anyway, moving on...

My point is that all of these things in this post and in this blog in its entirety, past and future, are core beliefs and broadcasting those on the internet is a challenge to say the least. I'm used to being open online, even about terrible things, but nobody will react in a fit of hateful rage toward the writer of a story of domestic violence or of sexual assault. Religion things, on the other hand and abortion especially- that can lead to scary stuff.

If you feel a strong desire to get scary on me, just try to remember what your goal is. Is it to spread anger and hate in Jesus' name? Would your effort better directed towards loving the people involved before they get to the point of what you call "sinning" and forgiving them and still loving them even if it's too late?

I'm not a protesty advocate. Nor am I a hardcore fundamentalist Christian. I'm just a girl trying to figure stuff out.

Even if this blog post seems jumbly and whatnot, I really don't think I've ever written anything that took so much out of me. Trying to word things as "unidirectionally" as possible so as to not be misunderstood in these things is so difficult. :D I know in my regular blog, my readers have been following me forever and know my intentions, but this blog is so new, and people are hitting me out of nowhere that it's hard to imagine any of you who stumble upon this by accident know what my intentions are or even remotely who I am.

It's hard to jump into writing a blog post without having the years of back up posts to hide it amongst. :D

Anyway, all that to say, this blog is a little scarier for me than I originally anticipated. But I'm the kind of person who, when I wake up and have the worst hair day ever and feel so self-conscious about it, if I tell one person, "Man, my hair sucks today!" I can walk through the rest of my day without caring about the tangled web that I'm carrying around on my skully parts. So I'm hoping that's what this post will do- take away my self-consciousness and shrink my inhibitions back to their normal state of nanoness.

It'll all work out in the end.

Right?

Right.