On "real" Christianity and the evidence thereof.

Christianity is about following Jesus. It's about being a disciple of Jesus, growing and learning through faith and through the teachings of the Bible. When I first started to learn about it, the Christians I talked to were all, "It's all about Jesus. Just Jesus." They threw out the usual line about how if I accepted Jesus as my savior, I'd be saved.

Over the past year or so, probably closer to two now, I've immersed myself in Christianity, even getting to the point of driving fourteen hours to get baptized at the church I loved in North Carolina. I thought I was in. I had Jesus, I believed in Him and in God. I also believed in Jesus' story in the Bible too.

If it's really "Just Jesus", I thought, then I guess somehow, against my better judgment, I ended up a Christian.

Unfortunately, what I've learned in the past couple of months is it's not as simple as "Just Jesus".

The human world is all about the filters.

When I started my degree in exercise science with a specialization in athletic therapy, I was told it would be a good gateway program to get into vet school later on. The problem was that I got filtered out. See, it's a small program and the ones who are passionate enough to go on to be athletic therapists are easy to spot. They're kind of jocky, but also super scientific and practical. I'm scientific and practical, but I'm not jocky. Even if at one point I craved a snowboarding career (I still do, but I stifle those dreams appropriately), I was nowhere near the build of my fellow classmates, nor did I know nearly enough sports trivia to even try to compete. The profs knew that. They picked me and a couple of other med school wannabes out of the crowd and gave us a really hard time. Why should we be there sucking up their resources when all we want is the piece of paper?

So I got filtered out. If there's one way to get rid of med/vet school wannabes it's to threaten their GPA. No matter what I did, no matter what I learned, I barely passed any of my classes in my second semester. My taping jobs were perfect. I'd practiced on my cadaver-esque ex as he lay passed out on the sofa every evening. I'm not even kidding. I taped him up good'n'proper every day. Elastic bandages to keep his pulled quads tight. Tape around his sprained ankle so he could get back on the field and continue playing... I taped every articulation and muscle on his passed out body. I even did my emergency care procedures on him too. But still, when the test day came around, I'd end up with a C.

C is for Christianity... :D

Definitely feels similar sometimes.

The last time I went to church was sometime in November. I sat down in my "usual" seat, usual being any seat on an aisle and close to the door. One of the regulars sat in the seat in front of mine. "Why don't you come sit here?" she asked pointing to the seat beside her, a mid-row seat. "Or is that too drastic a change?" (sarcasm)

I wondered why. I mean, I was sitting here first, right? So... How does it make any sense?

"I'm fine here," I said.

She kind of stopped talking to me after that.

We stood up, sang the usual songs that make me squint in my usual "wtf?" way and at the end of it all, there was the bread breaking, and the usual glares in my direction because I don't get in line.

Maybe it's just this church, I thought. Maybe we just don't get along?

So I took a break.

There was another more informal church that met downtown at 4PM. Since I'm a night owl, that time was more convenient for me. But I still didn't go.

Christmas came around and that's one of those times when everybody and their atheist nephew go to church. But I didn't.

After Matt Chandler's brain things happened (on the US thanksgiving), I went into hyper-prayer mode for a couple of weeks and then they found out he had brain cancer and I just kind of put everything on hold. I kept praying, and kept thinking about things, but suddenly, I felt as though my priorities were wrong.

The local church might create a community of Christians, sure. But the church I was going to felt like a forced community. It felt like a lot of people there were only there because church gave them some sort of validation and not only that, but it quelled a sort of loneliness within them. Christianity is supposed to do that, yes. Jesus is supposed to fill the void we may feel. But church isn't. You know what I mean? It's like the difference between meeting a godly person to marry at church versus going to church because it's a single people meatmarket.

I'm a magnet for lonely people. I wouldn't consider myself lonely, probably because I take for granted that I have so many people ready to be there for me should I ever be in need. But the lonelies flock to me. It's like they see something in me that they don't see in themselves. But in the case of this church, they seemed to want to fix whatever it was in me that they saw. They clung to me like I was teetering on the edge of suicide or something.

I may have a past that's nasty in some respects, but it's by no means any sort of sympathy generator. Just because your childhood wasn't so bad doesn't mean there's something wrong with me nor that you should feel responsible to have to nurture me to death. I'm fine.

Well, clingy people freak me out... but aside from that, I'm fine.

Anyway, the point being, here I was trying to wedge myself into this fabricated community and as I grew more and more uncomfortable and felt more and more controlled, I felt the need to get out of there.

But the Bible says we need community. The church I adore in NC is all about the local church. They've got forty year plans to reshape the community and stuff. It's great. And it made me pray for months to get an Acts 29 plant here. And finally, in my period of church abstinence, one of the Acts 29 guys tweeted that sure enough, somebody got approved for the Montreal area. Immediately, I emailed him.

In the meantime, I had offered to edit the membership course curriculum for the NC church. I'm good at editing and in the process, I could learn something, so why not? Even if it was fifty-six pages long. :-O

So on the one hand, I was reading and editing this enormous thing about the whys and shoulds about church committing, and on the other hand, I had emails coming back to me about gathering finances and networking and committing to this new church plant.

Whoa.

No, I thought. I can't do it. I can commit my time, I can commit my spirit, but committing my body is another thing entirely. I emailed back saying (paraphrased), "Look, I'll help, but for reasons I won't go into to spare us both the novel, I have a lot of trouble with commitment. I'll help any way I can, but I am quite limited." I didn't get a reply to that email.

Of course, being that I'm analytical about me, I had to figure out why I had so much trouble committing my body. As a kid, I had headaches all the time. I thought I had a brain tumor, but they never found anything. From there, I moved on to lung problems and throat problems and even had my very own voice doctor. One or two attempted sexual assaults caused me to drown any consciousness and awareness in alcohol. After I got out of that, I dabbled in anorexia, was held hostage for a few hours in another sexual assault attempt and then suffered a pretty severe brain trauma in which I lost my perfect eyesight and required glasses after that. I entered an abusive relationship, gained forty pounds in a few months and ended up nearly dying of an autoimmune disorder. I got out of that and ended up with a two year long migraine. Add to all that the fact that I had had panic attacks nearly from birth on until fairly recently and that I have severe food intolerances to nearly the entire world's menu, and the end result is my body and I don't fare very well in social situations. I don't like to commit my body to anything because it has a hard time being ok. It can't eat properly, it feels trapped easily and just for fun, it throws in some massive amounts of pain whenever it pleases.

I can handle emotional trauma. I've got coping mechanisms for that. But when your body shuts down, there's nothing you can do. I'm supposed to avoid stress at all costs. If I get stressed, my body is likely to start devouring itself again, either in the same form as last time or in a new form, like arthritis or MS (although, new research seems to have distanced MS from autoimmune things, so that's good news for me... if it's true). Trapping my body in any situation stresses me. You see?

Anyway, add to that that the new church planter and his wife remind me of the most terrible set of people I know (I'm not even kidding, the pastor had my betrayer's favorite song as his license plate, wtf? And his wife is identical to the betrayer's too. It's freaky.) and suddenly, I'm trust into an awkward situation. One, which, if you recall in spite of the absurd length this post has already attained, I've prayed for for months. Great.

When a couple of the Christian people I talk to online got wind that I wasn't going to church, all of a sudden, I was doing something wrong. And that's when the whole "Just Jesus" thing started to crumble and I started to get filtered out of Christianity.

Over the past few weeks, I've been told, "So then you're not really a Christian," several times by several people.

I guess that means I'm not.

Christians have this thing where they feel the need to panic about your salvation constantly. It's like everybody is teetering on the brink of losing their faith and so it's imperative that risky stuff gets pointed out as soon as it comes up. There's no benefit of the doubt here, because the stakes are too high. You know, eternity and whatnot.

And so, here are the few reasons my behavior as a Christian shows that my heart isn't really changed and therefore, I'm not a real Christian (or so I've been told):

- I'm not a member of a local church. Regardless of my reasons, regardless of the circumstance, if we want to be disciples of Jesus, we must care for His "bride", the local church. (Although, I'm still trying to figure out where in the Bible the word "local" characterizes the church..)

- I don't do communion. It's not important to me that Jesus sacrificed Himself. I spitefully (oh yes, spitefully, even if my body is physically unable to handle it) decline the powerful symbol and that's very telling.

- How did they put it today on twitter? Something like, Christians who want to warp the scriptures to suit their agenda focus on the vague scriptures rather than the clear explanations of scripture? I love the gays. And I can't pick and choose what I believe and what I don't in the Bible, so something's gotta give. Either we're interpreting Romans 1 wrong or oversimplifying it or...

- If I truly understood the sacrifice of the cross and the forgiveness it bestowed upon me, I'd easily forgive the three or four men who have assaulted me over the past sixteen years. Obviously, my lack of forgiveness towards them means something. As does my lack of forgiveness towards my mother who left when I was two and only returns when she's in some sort of danger or trauma (usually involving people of a criminal nature). And of course, not being able to forgive my betrayer for raping my soul falls into this category also.

- If I can't be godly and find godliness in a purely capitalistic, unethical work environment, then my faith is probably weak and I give in to temptation far too easily. Maybe other people can do it- maybe it's just me who can't trample people to get to the top in a godly way. Who knows?

- When I feel I fully grasp the gospel, that is when I actually grasp it the least.
- Conversely, if I say I don't know God, even if my basis for that seemingly agnostic statement is that God is so great that there is no way my inadequate human faculties can properly grasp Him, then evidently, I don't know God at all, and therefore, my Christianity is empty.

- If I feel God chooses those He saves and devote myself to prayer and answering questions in response to that, then by not preaching the gospel to the atheists around me every chance I get, I am not playing an active role in the salvation of others and I probably don't understand how important it is.

- Similarly, if I'm not constantly correcting my fellow Christians, I have no concern for their faith nor their salvation. If I really cared, I'd hold them accountable until they cut me out of their lives completely.

- Same goes for the gays.

- If I fall asleep before praying, it shows something clear about my heart for Jesus.

- If I pray that God take a suffering little girl to end her suffering, I underestimate His power for healing.

- If I love my own life, I don't trust God nor do I value the big picture that is His plan.

- If I don't see myself ever getting married, it's only because I don't think the God I worship is a good God who provides.

- If I feel deserving of anything, I don't understand God's mercy. But if I feel I don't deserve anything, I underestimate God's grace.

It goes on and on, and in the end, I feel filtered out. I'm not a Christian. My heart clearly shows that it is inadequate for Christianity.

Nevermind the love. Nevermind that Jesus loves me and vice versa. Sometimes, like they say, love just isn't enough.

But hey, at least the community I do have, the one that doesn't count because it's outside church, knows my heart. They know I've already committed myself to them, even though I commit to nothing. They know if they need anything, I'll sacrifice my entire being to make sure they get what they need. In turn, they know I'm not perfect, but they also know that I try harder than most people. They know my past and have loved me through it and vice versa. They know my mistakes before I make them, and yet, even though they wasted energy warning me, they're there to help me up after I've fallen (again) anyway. And they know I'll be there too.

I may not be a real Christian, but I do know how to love people. I do know community. I do know forgiveness, however difficult it really is in the hardest of circumstances.

And I do know that the God I worship is good in such a powerful way that we don't even have a word to describe that kind of goodness. And that, to me, is evidence enough that the judgment, constant criticism and just plain wrongs we commit to each other in the name of Christianity is not the way to godliness.