In July 2015, the most devastating thing happened to me, my mother passed away due to cancer. It initially was breast cancer and then progressed into her liver. I was distraught, hurt, angry, confused, and felt alone. My mother tried to protect me from her reality but now her reality was kicking her butt and mines along with it, the reason is because she tried to hide it from me (its a little difficult to hide stage 4 cancer, so I don’t know why she thought it would be possible.. silly mom lol). She was a very strong woman and I learned that from her. What she did not teach me was, how to deal with her death (not that she would know lol).
In times like these, you turn to your community of family, friends, or church for support and encouragement. I turned to the community in my church because I knew I would get the word of encouragement I needed to be good. (I know your probably wondering, why not family? I turned to family too but they were not primary. In my mind, they would support and show up no matter what). I was very wrong, I was hurt by the treatment and lack of compassion. I then grew to resent the people in the church, I started to see them as fake and hypocrites; I started too see why everyone believes Christians to be hypocrites. When I needed them the most, they were not around. So I kept to myself and shut EVERYONE out. I started having very bad anxiety, panic attacks, and heart problem. Had to wear a heart monitor for 1 month; to top it all off, I was depressed and suicidal. I did not want to kill myself but I started thinking about the thought of me not living anymore. I tell you, it was bad. BUT, looking back at that moment in my life, I see God’s finger print in every minutes of the days, until I completely recovered and grew to be a better version of myself (well… still working version lol)
I want to talk about the way society view the church. When someone states that they are Christians and believe in Christ, society tend to immediately set up standards that no one can attain; put them on a pedestal as though people can not make mistakes. And when they do make mistakes society and even those in the church shuns them. That is not God, those actions are done by ignorant people; they are the ones doing the shunning, the bible says, come as you are; with all your flaws and judgement and imperfections, EVERYTHING you are is welcome (my version simplified). Somehow, people now think, they must be clean before coming to the Lord or they don’t live up to the standards that were set in their imagination of what a Christian should look like or act like. When meet me and know I am a christian, they try their best to be not cuss or talk out of turn. But once I crack a joke, they realized that I am a person just like them but we are 2 different people living life dictated by different things.
It took me years to forgive my church because of the hurt, anger and neglect I felt but in reality it not on them. The Lord only allowed a few people to speak life into me as I was going through this tough patch because He knew they would be able to speak into my soul; but because I was hurt and angry, I shut those people out too. But God did not give up on me, because He used my colleagues as my church. Society believes the church is a building, when in reality the church is the people. I learned that, the perfection of Christ is found in the imperfection of people. Its people who makeup the church; hating the church is hating people and hating people is hating the Creator. So, if you hate the Creator are you truly a believer? If your angry at the church you are therefore angry at the people. If you call the church hypocrite, you are calling the God a hypocrite because He never created humans to be Him, he created them to be LIKE Him.
The Lord graced me a with great boss, who allowed me to have time off and great colleagues who prayed for me everyday and spoke word of encouragement. It took me about 2 years to forgive and about 2 years be able to go back to church. I love my church and its perfect imperfections. No matter your religion, understand that we are not perfect, we are imperfect people living for a perfect Creator.
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In Eden 