Quote:
Originally Posted by Intothewind
Some folks throw out the baby and the bathwater. Do what you need to do.
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You may need to throw out the baby, bathwater, bathtub, and bathroom.
In my case I went from the LC into a community church, then into an even more extreme sect than the LC (without details, suffice to say they took religion very seriously, and felt everyone else was "Babylon").
Then I got discouraged and basically gave up on a consciously goal-directed "spiritual journey". Interestingly, this is where my professional life took off: it wasn't that I forgot about God so much as God quietly began presenting a set of continual challenges at the workplace. And I loved it! At that point, church was the same old, same old, but work was full of revelations, possibilities, and experiences. But "Christianity" was forgotten for several years.
Eventually, the God of my Fathers, who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, began to seep back into my consciousness. But things were different; I'd been trained to think independently, and to take responsibility for my thoughts and actions. If something was true it was because I found it to be so, not because God's self-appointed oracle had spoken, or even because Pastor Bob down at the community church said so. And if I failed, which I did often, I had to "man up" and admit it, and learn from it.
The LC bedrock is thought-suppression, but what a liberating moment when I could do the same as WN did: go through sources both modern and ancient, and figure out for myself what to keep and what to modify, or let go of.
Lastly, my experience here on this forum has been an example of Christian fellowship. Not everyone on the forum was bowled over by my thinking. That's a necessary corrective. Not only do I not agree with everything I read or hear, but not everyone is going to agree with everything I say. That, my friends, is called a discussion. It's okay. It's not the sound of division, but rather something like "the sound of many waters" (Rev 14:2). That is the new song (Rev 14:3).