Lost my religion

So the last post was from February. I was speaking of a longing I have for some type of ministry. Not so anymore. I'm completely and utterly okay with simply being who I am apart from a church ministry. Slowly, I'm developing something of what might be called an opinion of the church, but I'm not sure if I really want to share it on blogger yet. Often is the case, in which people who aren't going down your path with you, jump right in and want to start pointing out how you're doing, whatever it is you're doing, wrongly. I used to do that all the time. I missed out on the point that someone else was having a totally different, exciting journey of their own that had almost nil in common with my own experiences. Because of this, I always knew answers to everybody's problems: just let them know how necessary it was for them to become more like me. I even liked to say: "if everyone were just more like me". Of course I said I was joking, but now I realize how serious I really was.

It's enjoyable now to just be a fuck-up like everyone else, without the aching need to always preach at people and get them to understand the big picture. Sometimes, there is no big picture (at least for the moment). Sometimes, it's just that you're kid is really sick and you're trying to find hope that it will pull through. Or your wife is sleeping around with another guy. Or you've been having an affair and you don't know how to get out of it; or you're up to your eyeballs in debt and sick of not going on vacation with your family because you're always penny pinching.

In cases like these, it's not about if you pray hard enough or believe, it's just about feeling like shit because you know you're in a situation that you can't make-believe away. You know it's going to take long years of your life and lots of patience to get out of it. And that's not bad. It's just the way of it. There's a lot of good and bad along the way in each of those circumstances. Good and bad that desires to be shared with friends who are really interested in the good and bad stuff and not self-righteous idiots who want to preach to you about how you have to change your life. That was my daily bread for like 9 years (at least).

Liberation is a feeling, which can only be cherished on the other side of captivity. Like the reporters who were recently freed from North Korea: I have been freed from 'ligion.