Give faith another try
I gave faith a second chance and the payoff was abundant. Once lost, I now feel found.
It took me more than 20 years to get to this place. Mine was a spiritual journey with plenty of potholes, wrong turns and dead ends.
When things started to change
When I was a child, I went to church – not once, but twice – every single Sunday. Church life was the centre of existence for my fundamentalist Christian family, an insular place that protected us from outside, worldly influences.
When I left home at 19, I also left the church. I had begun to question many of its tenets: Why couldn't women be preachers? Was everyone who didn't believe in Jesus really going to burn in hell for all eternity? Could one church ever rightfully claim to have all the answers? And I was searching for answers to the bigger questions at the roots of all religion: Do you need to believe in God to be a good person? If God is all powerful, why doesn't he (or she) intervene to prevent starvation, tsunamis and childhood cancer?
The big break
I knew my church was restrictive, but I never realized how much so until I received a letter about a month after I officially announced I was leaving. In it, the minister and church elders advised me to repent and return, lest my "soul be barred from the gates of heaven." My family was devastated by my departure. I felt guilty that I had hurt them, but I also felt freed from the burden of being part of a religion that I no longer had faith in.
Yes, I still prayed occasionally, but my simplistic and selfish lamentations were of two types: "Please God" and "Thank you God." I was unsure of what I believed; my faith had become as watered down as communion wine.
How sweet the sound
As the years went by, my ideas about religion changed. By the time I was inching toward middle age, I realized I had left something important behind, and hungered to fill the loss. Deep inside, like rose petals pressed into a book, I felt a need for a spiritual life, for inspiration to live more deeply.
I was looking for solace in a world that seemed filled with strife, contemplative quiet in a life that felt as if it was moving too fast. And I missed church music.
Click to continue...
Page 2 of 4
