WITHINmyWORLD

Description

Spirituality No matter what you believe in, in terms of deities, values, morals, customs, and afterlives, or even if you believe in nothing at all along traditional religious lines, each of us has our own spiritual story to tell, a series of events that led us to becoming the person we are today. My story's chapters are still being written, as are yours. I debated about putting a page about Christianity on my personal website for a long time, because I didn't want it to seem like I was forcing my beliefs on my visitors. But I decided to write about my spirituality because it is an important part of my current life, and my story is a bit unlike many other Christians' stories because it involves a long time of being outside the fold. My Personal Story Religion is definitely an important part of my life now, even though for over a decade I was not part of any church and was searching for something to believe in. To understand the whys and hows of my current religious beliefs and participation, you have to know a bit of the backstory. I grew up going to the Southern Baptist church my father's family had attended for at least four generations, but I always went with my grandmother--Mom and Dad did not come very often to church, and though I often wondered why, I didn't really bother to ask. It didn't occur to me, in my childhood, to ask why things were the way they were in terms of church attendance. Only when I was eleven years old and talking with an elder of the church did I find the true reason Mom and Dad didn't attend church with my grandmother and me. I asked the elder why there were so many different denominations of Christianity, since I already had personal experience of two (Baptist on Dad's side, Lutheran on Mom's side), and knew of several others. The elder replied that she didn't know why, but that was just the way it was. I then said that I had been to Mom's family's church services and didn't see a whole lot of difference in the message--just that the church had a whole lot of lit candles and the preacher was a lot more dressed-up. (I was nothing if not bluntly honest as a child.) The elder replied, as if scandalized, "Oh, honey...if you're not Baptist, you're not Christian." This left me thunderstruck. In the space of a few syllables, this elder of the church, a close friend of my grandmother's and up till then a friend to me, had basically just said half my family (my mom and her side of the family) was going to Hell, simply for not being Baptist. It stung me deeply, and I left the church and went home to ask about the religion thing once and for all. Mom and Dad explained then that the elders of the church had not been accepting of Mom's Lutheran heritage when she and Dad had married. They had insisted that if she was to become a member of the church like him, she had to be rebaptized, even though she had already been baptized by her father, a Lutheran minister in his own right. Mom subsequently did not feel accepted by the church, and though she tried to come and be part of the church occasionally when I was an infant, she had largely stopped coming by the time I was old enough to remember.

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