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Originally Posted by NZexCK
Serenity lives, yes and yes to everything you said. I am reminded of a photos I saw shared on facebook recently of a group of about 20-30 teenage sisters singing hymns together in a very public part of town (we used to all have to do this during summer school). There are 3 main sisters in the front, one of them looks genuinely overjoyed to be singing hymns on the street (I think she was a serving one), the other two look like they are really making an effort to look like they're having a good time. Everyone else in the background looks utterly miserable and aren't even trying to hide it. They're looking off into the distance, overly "studying" the song book
I forgot to add that the LR even dictated to us when we should get baptised. As soon as we turned 11/12 ish there was a whole meeting at a camp that placed intense pressure on us to get baptised. Afterward we were "encouraged" to pray one on one with serving ones and then when we retuned to our locality we all got baptised together one after another. Everything in my being was screaming out all through the meeting and all through the baptism that this was so so wrong. But 12 year old me felt like I didn't truly have a choice. I went along with it because of the peer pressure, my insecurity and the need to get approval/validation from the adults I was surrounded by. There are no physical barriers or physical threats, only psychological.
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same here, the song book thing, there was always this awkward silence where the teenage sisters were looking down or glancing at each other awkwardly as if to say, “you choose the song! hurry up choose the song! I dont know what song to choose!” I thinknyou can make a comic strip out of it.
And being baptized, I think in the church in Chicago, the age was 10 years old. I didnt even know if I had genuinely consecrated my life to serving God at that age, but all the adults were looking at us expectantly. had their cameras out and all the Amens. Being the first in line in my cohort didnt help either (it wasnt that I was enthusiastic, I was put first in line because I was supposedly according to my birthdate, the oldest in my age group.) . Tbh I didnt know how to swim and the whole time I was more worried about water going into my nose than anything. When I came out of the water, I felt “light” not because my sins were buried but because I was like “whew, I didnt drown. That was my experience of baptism.
In regards to career choices, I ended up in the paychology field and I do art as a side hustle, so double oops.