Experience and Belief

I'm a hoarder. It's so hard for me to throw things away, I keep thinking that I might need it, or there might come a time that I might fit into those size 2 pants, or someone else might need a sparkly bouncy ball that lights up when you bounce it. It's so hard for me to let those things go sometimes, I attach memories with things to help me recall the feeling that I felt when someone gave me that item, or where I was in my life when I bought it.

I love going to garage sales but I hate putting one on. It's hard for me to go through my stuff and discard things I once found meaningful. I still haven't been able to part with any stuffed animal that I've been given through the course of my life. Things we treasure are given away, sold, bought, and we move on to new experiences.

This paradigm is also true in the spiritual world. It is often necessary for us to discard cherished beliefs we had at one point in our life, to be faithful to our experiences with God. Leaving behind old truths, changing our minds, growing is painful. We need to remember that God didn't create us with beliefs already instilled in our being, we were taught the things that we believe. For many of us our beliefs that were taught were reinforced by experiences. But many of us, most of us, accepted the things being taught with little or not reflection or questioning. Well first, how could we? Many of us were quite young at the beginning of our spiritual education. And secondly if we came into contact with spirituality at a later time, we trust the 'experts' and the 'experienced' to tell us what it all means, how it should be, feel, where the boundaries are.

I remember when the idea of going to hell became very real for me. I was at summer camp as a middle school student and we were talking about the grace of God, how by believing in him (and be sure that they had the step by step ways to do that) you would be in this society of the saved. It was that easy. The ones who questioned, who lived their lives outside of the procedure, those who didn't believe "GASP!" were going to be going to this firey, dark, Godless place and it was our jobs as the saved ones to influence them to make a change.

I came back from camp realizing that I knew a lot of people who fit the unsaved, and I was scared for them, I was scared what God would say if I didn't save them. I became friends with people who thought the same way I did, I shunned people who didn't. I became very vocal, calling people out on their missteps, my friends, my family. I was God's little moral judge.

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who was Bahá’í. She bravely went to our Christian school everyday believing in something that looked different than all of us. I tried to talk to her about Jesus, I tried to save her from the firey gates of hell, and she was so patient and gracious with me. I told her Jesus was the only one and reminded her of what the Bible said would happen to her if she didn't believe. How ignorant, how ridiculous, and how hypocritical of me. I hadn't even read all of the Bible, I didn't even know which scripture to quote to her. I hadn't learned about the Bahá’í faith that they did know and study Jesus, but also studied other religious figures such as Buddha, Muhammad, and Abraham. I ignorantly condemned this friend of mine to hell in the name of love for her and love for God.
Where's grace in that? If anything God's grace is being showered down upon me in my terribly real human faults.

It wasn't until I came to college where I began to question and reform my beliefs. I became a Phi Lamb as the same person I was in highschool: judgmental, unwavering and had all the answers. My experience and knowledge of God was stronger and better than anyone else's, I was going to be a pastor and that made me special. It was like God had given me a special talent to judge, direct and counsel people in the straight and narrow paths.

I became chaplain my sophomore year and everything started to crash. People started to come to me with questions and problems that I couldn't answer or speak to their experience. So I watered it down, I tried to give them black and white answers, I gave them what they wanted to hear or I made them feel like they needed to change for the sake of their salvation. I didn't necessarily do that with my words as much as I did with my way of leading. In the midst of their questions I began to question on my own, while trying to keep the facade all together.

I went through about a year of deep questioning. My junior year I took a big step back from Phi Lambs, from church, from God. I looked at my experience, and I thought of the experience that those girls and others had shared with me. I realized that in order for me to believe in the full potential of God's grace and the power of Jesus that I needed to expand my view, and I needed to let go of the nitty gritty. I was inspired by Isaiah, "O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter; we are ALL the work of your hand." (Isaiah 64:8).

My junior year and most definitely into my senior year (more to come here: spiritual crisis) did I begin to realize that the God I was coming to know was the God who had much wider arms than I had perceived. His hand and his reach are much farther than I could ever imagine, and I believe that's what Jesus was sent down here to tell us. I started to realize that God wasn't done speaking to us when the Bible was created, He is still speaking to us and to me and sending us new messages everyday.

I am thankful for my time as a conservative, unwavering, got it all together Christian. I believe that many of the things that I learned in that time were true and even though I don't necessarily believe what I believed then, it helped me to become the person I am today and the person I still am becoming.