Christianity Unraveled

January 5th, 2021

I wish words were enough to explain my feelings. I wish memory were vivid enough to remind me of what I felt in those early days of tearing apart everything I believed about the world. I have a few words in my journal that I wrote, ones of nights of heartbreak and turmoil, but that is all I have to rely on. It is all that proves to me that what happened was real.

Sometimes I question if it was real. I wonder if I actually spent days and nights in quiet depression, enduring an unending sadness and emptiness that only comes from losing what you never thought you could ever let go of. It turns out that years of sermons about holding everything you care about loosely in your hands, surrendering all of what you hold so tightly within your control, can teach you to let go of the one thing they tell you not to.

Sometimes I wonder if the parts of my life we were told to surrender were only facades, mere distractions by the devil to dissuade us from laying down the one thing we hold the tightest to: our image of who God is.

It seems a funny and prideful notion to claim that we know who God is, that we alone understand God's heart, that other people's versions of God are incorrect. I think this is one thing that has frustrated me as of late, after deconstructing my childhood religion. Here, we have people claiming to be Christian. One speaks of Jesus as a social justice warrior, the other as condemning feminism. Another sees God as one who seeks punitive justice, more see him as one of restoration, and others understand him to be the epitome of love. There are those that read of universal salvation, and others of eternal damnation for most of the known human population. And all are right. It depends on how you read the Bible.

I wish the Bible never existed sometimes.