My Responsibilty

Growing up as the daughter of a pastor, I became acquainted with the church routine. Sundays were always about getting to church early, staying late after, eating Sunday dinner, napping and then going right back for the evening service. As a young girl I don't think I had a problem with going to church; I even viewed it as something positive. But around the time I was about 12 or 13 years old, I began drifting away from what I had known my whole life and started taking in other people's opinion about the church and God. Like most kids in my position, I started to see church differently and would often criticize God  because of the less than Christian behavior I witnessed by some of the folks that were apart of the congregation. After I moved back to the states and became permanently enrolled in public school, I instantly recognized the lack of order in a lot of the kids I encountered. Looking back now, I couldn't have been in a more dangerous place at such a young age. By the time I got to college, I had completely dismissed God altogether and in my ignorance, came up with a baseless fact that the church was a fraud because the people claiming to be the church were also frauds. I know now that hanging around people who didn't obey God yet had their own ideas about who He was, flipped the good-girl switch in me. Even the bible says bad company corrupts good judgement. Anyway, for most of my college career my mom would hound me with the same question every week, "Did you go to church?" Of course she knew I hadn't and she'd make it known to me how disappointed she was. I would often get offended that she would ask me such a question having full knowledge already that I didn't want to follow in their footsteps.

Fast forward to present day, I am able to see so many signs of insecurities within myself that allowed me to stay in Satan's grip for so long. I realize now that the reason I became so defensive towards my mother about not attending church was because I knew I needed to be there and I knew God wanted me to be there. Furthermore, like a lot of unbelievers whose way of living comes into question, I saw this as a personal attack on who I believed myself to be and I pushed myself further from God. Now that I think about it, it wasn't my parents or any questionable Christians that finally deterred me from Jesus, it was myself! I could have chosen to be open-minded about Jesus' transforming processes on many people's lives. I could have chosen to explore God myself. I could have chosen to look to Jesus for guidance and not the "saints." But I didn't and in my stubbornness, I felt I was in the right for not choosing to do any of those things because I blamed the churchgoers and God for my problems. But back to 2012...

Now whenever I'm at church and I'm singing to God and reaffirming my relationship with Him, it is also the congregation that makes my soul happy. It was and still is such an amazing feeling to be around people who truly love Jesus and are making an effort to stay on course with His teachings. It's at these services that I realize the importance of the church not just in the world, but in the life of a believer as well. I'm shocked at how much time I wasted hiding from God and blaming my lack of spirituality on the church. Now I know that it isn't in my best interest to view God's people (no matter how righteous) as a playbook of how to live the way Jesus wants me to. That's not to say that I can't trust them or even learn from their actions, but what I am saying  is that the mistake of man is not the mistake of God. God makes no mistakes. And if a believer does fall short, whether they be a bishop or a janitor, it is because they have temporarily disconnected themselves from the counsel of Jesus. In other words, the lady who shouted profanity at a crowd of students at my private Christian school didn't do so because God had left her or because He isn't real, but because she had a moment of weakness. Furthermore, the weight of the world and all of its problems cannot be directly traced to God's absence or His "weakness" in not avenging the righteous or innocent, but can only be linked to our weaknesses and our apparent need for dependence on Him that many in this world have not yet come to realize. Besides, I believe that it takes a God like mine, although omnipresent and omnipotent and omniscient, to practice His own teachings by staying honest and faithful in His own promises by granting patience to all people in the hopes that they will turn to Him also.That's the kind of God I admire!

Song Of the Post: Holly Starr - Take Me As I Am

[K]