Christianity Unraveled

December 3rd, 2019

I have decided to quit. No longer will I be on the worship team at my church, nor at my campus ministry's largegroup. No longer will I disciple anyone, and no longer will I be a part of the Bible study. It seems to me that I have been distancing myself from all these the past few months, and now I am fully releasing myself from them. No longer do any of them feel like a joy, but rather they all feel like an obligation in which I cannot be my authentic self.

Even so, I am hoping that people will not perceive my quitting as a passive act of simply giving up, but rather as what I hope to be a restorative action of letting go. Yet, it does seem, now that I think about it, like I am just giving up: As though I should continue and push through, as though I shouldn't let people down, as though I should at least keep trying to love God and be in community with people who do as well. But, the problem is, I can't. I can't continue doing that. That path has led me down to this place of feeling trapped within a person that I am not, this place of fear, this place of, at times, overwhelming sadness. And I cannot continue pretending anymore.

You see, the truth is, I haven't been at church for three weeks now. It seems to me that every time I go, I am wrought with mourning, and I must either succumb to my feelings and release and cry or I must suck it up and not reveal what is truly happening in my head. None of the choices seem good, and so I don't go and instead pretend that I am not going because I would rather watch a sermon online that I never get around to.

I suppose what I am feeling is that I just need a break. That I need to stop everything.

And even so, each time I go to a Christian event, I realize how much I forget about the beauty of community. How much people truly do care and love. How much I am cared for and loved. How different they are than what I perceive.

Perhaps this is what I am truly running from: Community. I continue telling myself that I am not, that I pursue relationships with people, and that I will for sure create a community when I move to the cities later this year – but how do I know that is true? Now that I reflect on this all, I realize that I have been trying to run from Christian community (community in general, I suppose), I haven't really been investing in any relationships besides my one with Andrew, and I honestly don't know if I will have the effort and energy to create a Christian community when I move. Or even the desire to.

That is what I must be lacking – a desire. I simply don't have the desire to be in Christian community unless the community is one in which we discuss and acknowledge that maybe we are wrong. And even then, I don't know if I desire that. What I really desire right now is to create for myself a bubble of isolation in which I am alone in my thoughts and in which people can read my mind and realize what I am thinking about and accept that without me telling them a thing. What I want is for people to hear me without challenging me. What I want is people that I can fully trust to not think I am "going off the deep end" and "need to be put on the prayer chain."

What I want is to stop feeling like this.

To stop feeling like I need to cry every time I approach a topic in religion without being purely intellectual. To stop feeling like I need to monitor everything I say whenever I talk to people who are Christian – or, people in general. To stop feeling like there is a difference between my genuine self and the self that I portray to the world. To stop feeling like I have the 'better answers,' the 'right answers,' the 'truer interpretation of the Bible.' All I want is a community that is questioning the topics I am and won't be defensive when I bring up what I am feeling and thinking. All I want is a space to be free to seek and speak and to not need to qualify myself.

Isaiah 30:15 says, "In returning and rest you shall be saved." Here, returning actually means retirement/withdrawal in the Hebrew, which also means this: "the action of ceasing to participate in an activity." And thus, here I go. I am ceasing to participate in the responsibilities of the evangelical church, and I am desperately hoping that I will find peace and hope away from it. Perhaps this is the wrong choice, and I know many people who would and will say that it is. But for now, it is what I must do. I must stop. I must cease. I must return and rest.