Going to church is like drinking Sake. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad and sometimes you just drink it because you're used to it. I have never had Sake but I watched someone talk about it once. Since the 2020 pandemic hit I have rarely been to church. I wish I could blame the corona virus for why I haven't found a church to attend. Honestly like anything else in life nothing just happens. It's a snowball effect that comes in time. That's how relationships fall apart. That's how habits form. That's how babies are born. Nothing just happens. Everything has moments that we either ignore or just deal with.
To most people this wouldn't be worth talking about but for me it was a real moment. I grew up in church. I knew church lingo before I knew what verbs and nouns were. It always confuses me when someone talks about their pronouns. There are no pronouns in church. Everyone is a doc or a ma’am or a Mr. or so and so’s brother sister cousin baby mama. Identity was found in church names not titles. We were known by our favorite bible verses. Our purpose was found in becoming like a hero in a bible story. Being connected was more important than being yourself. I’m not saying that's good or bad, it's just the way I grew up in church culture. You learned to be whatever the church needed.
All grown up and I still remember all the innuendos and church social cues that lead to you being a part of that community. It was so nostalgic going to church this morning. I remember as a kid going to my grandmother's church. Back then I lived in a fantasy world. Preachers were not as cool as saturday morning cartoons. When I sat next to my grandmother at church she told me to be quiet. I wasn't asking questions. I wasn’t wondering where the bathroom was. I was talking about random stuff going on in my head. I heard the preacher talking but my thoughts were more important as a 5 year old kid. I got three times then my grandmother very calmly reached under my little chubby arm and pinched the life out of me. I don’t remember If Imade a sound or not but Ido remember my soul leaving my body. Let's just say that I didn’t talk in church ever again. Because I was no longer talking I began to listen. Because of that I grew a habit of learning to listen to a preacher and writing down my own thoughts.
So today when I went to church I wrote down notes. I thought about my life and the lives of people around me. I listened fully. Without judging or having a bias about the way the service went. I went in without an expectation of needing my previous church experiences. What I heard in the service was filtered through years of church attendance but also years of listening for the voice of God. What I’ve learned is God often speaks outside of church but people rarely listen. God isn’t saying exactly what the preacher is saying. He uses it but he speaks through life experiences. God's not bulldozing his way into your life. He waits for you to look for him and then he does things.
I’m sitting in church and I realize why I haven't been back to church in 3 years. Grief and change. I wish I could tell you something profound, the preacher said. But as usual it's what God uses in your own life that speaks the loudest. Saying words verbatim do have their place. But I realized through his words that I had held onto some things even after all these years. First of all grief. Back in 2020 the pandemic hit and most people got sick. A few people died. Now most wouldn’t think much of it if most people were unaffected but sadly one of the few people who died was a woman named Ms. Vickey. She was a church mother in the church I attended at the time. I never really acknowledged my relationship with her. Whenever I would see her she would give me a hug. I usually didn’t hug anyone, mostly because I’m introverted. But I can now admit that hug meant a lot to me. It was the hug of a mothers love. She was white and I didn’t know her any better than anyone else but her kindness impressed upon me a realness that stuck with me to this day. The other thing is she encouraged me to write. This was before I cared about writing. She told me randomly one day that she loved what I wrote on Facebook and because of that I started writing more and even did poetry in front of my church.
Now I love writing. I remember one time I went to an editor to ask what they thought about a book proposal. They told me that I needed to learn how to write. That single sentence discouraged me so much that I stopped writing and reading for about 2 years. Until Ms. Vickey told me she liked what I put on Facebook. I didn’t think anything about writing until she reminded me about it. One word from someone can really change how you see yourself. Some random editor told me I couldn’t write, so I got discouraged. That editor wasn’t trying to be negative. They were just being honest. Writing is a skill that needs to be worked on. But all I heard was that you're not good enough and quit immediately. Ms. Vickey told me she loved it and that was enough fuel for me to write again. Words are powerful enough to change our internal existence.
Memories are often the blueprint that we build our life on. When Ms. Vickey passed I was upset and hurt because although we were never best friends. Still, her kind words meant the world to me. I didn’t grieve when she passed. I just ignored the thought. After covid passed and church opened back up my life was changing rapidly. My job wasn't paying enough money and it never would. My beliefs were changing. In my heart I was going a different route on certain issues my church didn’t sway on. Not a matter of heaven or hell, just a matter of life. I started reading more books by people who left church and seeing their experience opened my eyes to how christianity is viewed outside of the 4 walls we worshiped in every Sunday.
God started to give me ideas about being more involved in my own personal life. Taking care of my health and paying bills and getting my own place. Things I ignored because I didn’t know how I was going to do it. All these things were building up inside of me. The unchecked grief of Ms. Vickey's passing and my changing thoughts about church control and rules over people's lives and how people use the bible as a moral guide instead of a book. The bible is not God, the bible isn’t what gives us value. God doesn’t value us because we know a bible verse. The book just tells us about his love but the book can’t decide his love for us. God’s love is already decided. He isn’t some words on a page. He isn't some rule book that people halfway follow because it fits with their political agenda.
Because of my grief I partly blamed the church for her passing. I partly blamed myself for not being there when she passed. I partly blamed God for her passing. I never actually thought anyone was at fault. I just suppressed the grief and ignored the ideas. She died and no one was to blame. I wanted someone to stand on trial. I wanted justice but the coronavirus wasn’t willing to be judged by a jury of my peers. It wasn't going to show up for the sentence date. It was in the air and then it was gone just as fast as it came. Uncaring. Unbelievable. Undeniably painful to only a few people we loved on this Earth.
As I’m sitting in church I realize that Ms. Vickey was one of my last thoughts before I left. I started to tear up. I started to grieve. I have no idea where this is going to go. I have no idea what my next church experience will be like. I just know that I went to church and I didn’t judge anything or anyone. I just let it all happen around me without needing to influence it or needing it to fulfill my every desire. For the first time in my life I didn’t need church as usual. I didn’t need God to give me some sign. I just needed to show up and let God be God and I will be me. The preacher didn’t have to make God make complete sense. The worship team didn’t have to sound like angels. The church members didn’t have to make me feel special. After 3 years I can come back to church without needing her to be what I want. I don’t have to fight her theology, I don’t have to correct her injustice, I don’t need for everything to be aligned to my reading level.
If I'm really honest I have no idea when church attendance became so complicated. So many things changed that I couldn’t see myself at any church. I had changed too much for enjoyment with God’s people. I was too christian for the world and too disagreeable for the church. This morning showed me what I was ignoring and there was no need to ignore it. There was no need to fight it. Life is always changing. We don't need to have all the answers. We don’t need to make everything right. God isn’t asking us to do that to go to church. Ms. Vickey never asked me to write better in order to write. My own changing ideas about church were not really that big of a deal. Everything just snowballed and I crashed. This morning I got back up, walked into church and started another snowball again. And this time I’m gonna throw them. I’m going to enjoy the process. I’m going to grieve the losses instead of blaming someone. I’m going to work on not letting the change throw me down a mountain. I’m going to say to my mountains be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea. Whether they move or not is not my concern. My part is just to speak well, believe more, and grieve when I need to. Oh, I laughed too. Today was a good day.
Ps: This church wasn’t better than any other church. This message wasn't the greatest there has ever been. This church wasn’t friendlier than any other church I've been to. The singers were not the most talented that ever existed. Now on the other side of attending a billion hours of church services I can see that church is not a hill to die on. It’s a ground to build a foundation with. It’s a community to build up future Gennies' who need hugs and don’t know it. A common ground who need more Ms. Vickey's to encourage future writers. I hope you find yours.
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