Quote:
Originally Posted by ExChurchKid
... I just don't like having religion or God shoved in my face. .. Mostly what I need from God right now, if he even cares, is to fix the damage. Even if the LCs got everything crazy wrong, I still tried for 2 decades to be a good Christian. I think that should count for something, but I'm left with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and a severe lack of close family and friends. It really grinds my gears when someone talks to me in a way that attributes beliefs to me that I don't agree with.
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I'm very glad to see some former LC church kids post here. The damage suffered to their humanity, growing up in that environment, was extensive. Most of them were so traumatized by it that they don't want to talk about it, but avoiding the subject entirely may slow the healing.
So - while this is a forum largely populated by Christians who wear their faith on their sleeve, figuratively speaking, it would behoove us all to remember that not everyone thinks exactly the same. In fact, I'd say that this may be an antidote to the "everyone must think exactly the same" mindset that we remember so well.
And I offer my own experience as a representative sample. After leaving the LC physically, it took me years to unpack what happened mentally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. At one point, after years of fruitless church-hopping, I just gave up. I was tired praying to a god that didn't answer. I started to pray one morning, because I was supposed to pray, but instead,I said, "You're fired".
I didn't pray or read the Bible for several years. And they were good years, relatively speaking. Better than the previous ones. Less frustrating. Eventually I realized, that you can't deny your soul-life unless you first have one, and after being generous and selfish with myself, self-indulgent if you will, I got some small semblance of a soul-life, a humanity, a "me", and began to seek again. But it was on my terms, not someone else's. I get to define what the Bible means to me. Of course I still listen to others, but I own the terms of my journey.
Today, I feel that many around me have been conditioned to 'see' what the Bible says, and if it says something other than our conditioning, we look away. The LC is a poster child for this, but it's only an extreme example of a widespread phenomenon. But if one instead looks away from their received conditioning, and starts looking at the actual contents of the scriptural text, a narrative emerges. It can be quite fascinating, really. Happy hunting.