Early religous voyage…

I don’t think my family decided we should go to church until I was around the age of 9 or 10. I remember I was sitting in my old living room and I was being told by my mother that we were gonna start going to church every Sunday.

“I was leaving the apartment complex I clean on Wednesdays, ” she said to me, “when I heard a loud thud on the roof of my truck. I got out looking to see what it was and there on the roof of my truck was this…” she held a pocket sized orange copy of the New Testament to me. “…Just out of thin air. What are the odds? It’s a sign.”

If you knew my mothers as well as I do, you would know what a fantastical person she is. Weather she likes to admit it or not she is impressionable, emotion driven, passionate, highly imaginative…and extremely naive. For example this past year she has devoted her every spare moment to becoming a true survivalist, watching shows on TV like “man vs. wild” and things of that nature, reading books and tips on the internet because she is convinced that in 2012 the world is going to end.

I never would purposely burst her bubble about this “sign” but to me it is a complete possibility that this was a coincidence. Perhaps someone on the top story of the building threw the bible out the window. Maybe they where frustrated, maybe they lost there faith.

But at that age I listened and I went to church with my mother. I did enjoy it at first, you know, minus the whole getting up at the ass crack of dawn.  But I got involved. I volunteered with the coffee and donuts in the morning, I joined the youth program, I helped with the annual Easter Passion play and Christmas play, I joined the church choir, I even started going to a private Christian school in my 6^th grade year. So you could say that I was involved in my religion.

Everything I did, thought, said, etc. was in the name of Jesus. My morals, my life style, my opinions all where direct results from what I learned from the bible. When I was questioned about my belief I answered with the typical “it takes more than something you can see to believe like I believe”. So what changed…..The only thing that changed was my age and location.

We moved in the summer of 2000. It took me and my mom some time to find a new church community. A few we tried didn’t quite sit well with us and after a while we just stopped trying.

Fast forward a couple years… I realized I didn’t have any answers to the most important question to myself. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Did I truly believe in Jesus anymore?  I had these moral standards which I constantly questioned; I didn’t know who I was. Why was I such a bitter, depressed person all the time?

There comes a time in everyone’s life where they realize there personalities are completely different form there parents. My mother’s lifestyle and religion was not right for me.

I was raised Christian practically, so I thought I had to be because my mom was a devout Christian woman. It wasn’t like my mom came up to me and said “hey…these are your choices!” I wouldn’t know the first thing about making choices at that age. I didn’t know what I wanted at that age except to make mom and dad proud.

So I did the thing most teenagers would do. I got mad. Mad at the restrictions I had put on myself for no reason, got mad at my parents for dragging me along with there decisions. Mad at God and all hated “Christians”. I didn’t have a clue why anger was the choice emotion. That would take a few more years to figure out.

I learned a lot in the next four years. I did a lot of growing up. From that point, I made a decision to take action. I did a lot of research and studied all different religions. I studied everything from Catholicism, to Hinduism, from paganism to Satanism, always keeping an open mind to try and find a religion that fit what I believed. I became obsessed with religions. I realized it’s one of the most important personal choices you could make. Someone could have a shit job, a crappy home life, be on the brink of bankruptcy, shunned from society, and still have their religion, their faith.

I tried Catholicism; I even tried a Baptist church, thinking the high energy level would get me into the groove. You can paint an elephant yellow and brown like a giraffe but it will still be an elephant. I just felt out-of-place.

I tried a few unorthodox paths. I had a brief stint in Buddhism which had a lot of enlightening and peaceful attributes but still didn’t fit. I tried paganism which did stick for some time. I found it very freeing, with choosing your stations, whether you wanted to practice alone or with others, if you wanted to work spell or not and I did enjoy being in touch with nature. I agreed with a lot of different points but the judgment and fear of being shunned by my own family and the misconceptions about the religion itself where endless.

In the end, I didn’t feel right about labeling myself as any one of them. To tie myself to any one faction seemed wrong. Soon I began to realize I just didn’t like labels. The idea of categorizing yourself seemed to me, like caging yourself somehow. Like putting your self in a mold so you are that and nothing else. Why pick a road and stick with it when you can travel off the beaten path and live free. So I choose not to choose and continue my search. Not for an answer but to better understand the world of myths, legends, the Historical Jesus, and where is all came from. I know to believe is to have faith even when you don’t see it but I am the kind of person who just has to ask “Why?”

My journey so far has taught me why I had such negative feelings for the Christian religion. It went against everything that I am; structured organized, restricted….controlled.

I’m sorry if I am making the religious search sound like buying a car, but honestly, shouldn’t it be like that? We only have one life. We have the right to religious freedom or as Aerosmith said “The freedom to choose what you choose to choose.”