Faith

Raised Christian, and by Christian I mean a follower of Christ.  Denomination doesn't matter; as far as I'm concerned, that's people and politics, not faith.  Faith is between you and God, it's what you believe and how you live, not what you call yourself or where you go to church.  As a young adult, I walked away from God and the church I grew up in.  I was very disillusioned.  My family went through a lot of shit while I was a kid, and rather than being the safe and supportive family that it should have been, our church only added to the problems.  I think I always felt on the outside, I always knew I wasn't as good as everyone else, though it certainly wasn't overt.  Very subtle, in fact, but I'm pretty intuitive and empathic, and I picked it up; I just wasn't able to consciously recognize it and put it into words until I got older.

 Beyond all that, I really don't think the church did a very good job of teaching me how to actually live my faith.  I mean, they tried, and I'm not sure exactly how to describe the problem.  Mostly it was the same few - principles?- over and over again; daily devotions/Bible/prayer, relationship with God, _____ is bad (fill in the blank with all the church classics - smoking, drinking, drugs, sex, homosexuality, any other religion, etc etc).  And it's not that there's anything wrong with those ideas, per se, but it's not really enough to build an active living faith out of.  At least not for me.  It did nothing at all to show me how I personally can connect to God in a way that is unique and honoring of who I am.  They're blanket statements with no support for individualization.  Eventually I got tired of beating myself up and feeling guilty because I couldn't force myself to fit into the only structure I was given, and I said the hell with this, I'm done.

So at that point I was kind of at loose ends and trying to think for myself, in a sense.  I had a whole pile of ideas that were just kind of givens, I never really questioned them, they were just there.  So I was trying to sort through those and figure out what I actually thought about them rather than just blindly accepting them all.  I've always been drawn towards nature and a sense of magic or mysticism, so for a few years I explored Wicca and Paganism.  I dabbled, really.  I identified as Pagan, but I never found any particular group that I was interested in joining, although I'll admit I could have tried harder.  More importantly, I was still unable to find a fulfilling practice that was an active part of my life.

It was while I was pregnant with Xandri that I started questioning again, mostly because I was thinking about how I want to raise him.  Aqua has his own beliefs which he's very private about; if he has any sort of daily practice, I've never seen any sign of it.  Which is fine, it works for him.  But it does complicate things in terms of what we want to teach Xandri.  Mostly, so far, we just... haven't.  I'm not totally satisfied about that but I don't really know what I want to do about it either.  Anyways, so I was questioning again and slowly working my way back towards God when Xandri was born.  He was premature, it was a really bad and scary situation, and it's truly a miracle that we both survived it.  It was kind of a turning point for me.  I started identifying as Christian again as well as looking for a new church.  I visited a few different churches, including the one where I grew up.  I haven't found anywhere I'm really comfortable.  I have a lot of social anxiety, which makes it a big thing for me to even go somewhere new at all.  It's ironic.  Other churches aren't comfortable because they aren't my church and I don't know anyone.  My church isn't comfortable because it is my church and I do know people.  How's that for messed up?  It's just a different set of anxieties, really, but at least at my church I do have a few safe people.  Most of my family still goes there.  It's hard though, and I still tend to avoid going more often than not.  There's still a lot of the same old issues and I still don't really know how to deal with that.  I try to just take what I can use and leave the rest, but... it's hard to hear anything through the old hurts.

So here I am, basically as lost as I've always been.  I don't know that I could really say I have a faith, certainly not a living faith.  I guess this is one place where I'm something of a perfectionist.  I've seen examples of faith that is such a core part of who that person is that it just naturally flows out in their daily life.  Their conversations are full of Scripture references, prayer, how they see God working, or even things they're struggling with God over.  Not because they're being preachy, just because God is so much a part of their life, it just naturally comes out the same way I would tell a story about something cute Xandri did or Aqua would tell me about his day at work.  That's the picture I have of what faith should be, and I get frustrated when it doesn't happen instantly and easily, and then I give up.  Logically I know that it takes time and effort to build any relationship and that includes a relationship with God - there's a reason it's called a relationship, after all - but... yeah.  I'm still searching for my connection.