something honest

something honest

Going back to church feels like a high school reunion every Sunday. When someone walks in late, everyone turns their eyes and stares. Why does no one smile? You feel like killing yourself. You take a seat in the back row, next to the crying babies and horny high school boys and girls. Only after interrupting the private confessional prayer of some newlyweds as you’re trying to find a seat to their left, do you see the sign slapped across the back of the seats in front of you: “Reserved for parents with young children.” You ignore it along with the fifty other stares from people who are turned around in their seats just to look at you. You’ve got the parents with graying hair whose children are freshly graduated from college and starting some new tech job two states over, the women your mother aspires to be one day, wearing fashionable beige sweaters and cotton scarves they got from their best friend in their small group's Secret Santa, the kids who have stayed in the same town their whole lives, singing on the Praise Team, closing their eyes and slapping the sides of their thighs to the beat of the drum, and your old high school peers in their baggy jeans and wolf-cut haircuts–you wonder if they remember you, you bet they do, you evade their eyes anyway. The pastor finally gets up onto the podium, and begins: “Good…to see you.” A pastor-voice. An emphasis on every other word. You recall the most memorable pastors from your youth: The one who had such intricate sermons, he always went 30 minutes over. He cared about doing his work well. Still, you couldn’t bring yourself to love him or Christ because you felt like he hated you. Or the one who basically screamed at all of us that we were going to hell. Your mom was a bit disturbed. You thought that was better than letting all of us rot away. You still remember how he shared that he liked it when kids went up to him after his sermons. How he was grateful for your feedback. You considered speaking to him, but not really. 

I go to church a lot now. Sometimes I worry that I shouldn’t share this past stuff because it might pull me farther away from God or spread more church hate, but you’ve got to grapple with it--it happened and it's true. I still feel it. It’s why I hated a lot of parts of myself, and, honestly, the origin of my hatred for many things in the world. I feel like I tried to cry for help a lot at church, and now thinking about it, I was being overly dramatic, but I was a kid. I would write about how I felt lonely on my small group worksheets, shut up and stay quiet during lessons, and while the teachers and adults and pastors and their wives were all reading them, seeing me, preaching about Jesus helping the man on the side of the road while everyone else passed him with a blind eye, they let me die. I thought I was destined for hell and that God didn’t choose me. They didn’t want me to find God and even just smile for once because then they would be in the wrong and have to accept me. One of the pastors said that he can just tell in someone's eye if they know God. I guess he could tell I didn't. If I kept acting like this dark blotch with dull eyes, then life was in order. One of my only friends at church’s oldest sister accused me of looking at her vagina when I was a seven-year-old and she was seventeen. She and her friends laughed, and while I ran to my mother, and she told me that was bad, nothing happened. I was a kid who misinterpreted something. Later my mom told me the girl was being bullied by her peers herself, but still--I. Was. A. Fucking. Child. And so, I’d roll my eyes at girls like her. I'd speak to all of the other girls who hid in the backseats and ask if they'd like to play with me. I'd find a seat in the middle of all of the girls who excluded me, the one who wore tank tops to service and pretended they couldn't hear me when I said hello. I tried to be everything everyone at church was not. I was really hurt. This happens. This happens this happens. That's why I've got to say it. Someone needs to know. And now at my new church across the country, there are people who care. People who want me to come. People who don’t care that I don’t know God or initially appeared a little gloomy. We take communion each Sunday, and it doesn’t matter that I don’t know how to do it. We pray for each other, and it’s fine that I forgot what the person before me said and that I stumble over my words. They invite me to sing karaoke and stand up, dance, sing along when I get to the chorus. I can't get over the fact that people actually sing aloud when we do praise. They raise their arms, and they're kinda out of tune, and they don’t care if no one else does it. But the thing is–everyone wants to be here, and we’re all crying and praising loudly anyway. When I'm here, I wonder with why I grew up with such hate in my heart. But I can't forget it. I'm back at home. I'm appearing as someone who's changed. I’m at the ‘high school reunion,’ sitting in the back row, smiling at the pastors who didn’t remember my name. And when they ask me if I'm a newcomer, if I'm a new follower of Christ, I'll say yes to both. We were all children. We all don't know. We're all trying. I'm trying to be better. I'm trying to know God and you are too.