Friendship
The questions I ask myself now:
Am I angry at the fact that:
- the loyalty I have for my Christian friends cannot ever be reciprocated due to their beliefs?
- all of my Christian friendships will result in their attendance at my future wedding to be sad for me?
- the “friendships” I do have with them are only to rope me into their religion?
- they complain and complain, but instead of leaving, they just continue to go and find more things to complain about?
These past two weeks have finally opened up my eyes to how I’ve been deceived all along. Being backstabbed and thrown away by the fellowship hurt me deeply.
But at the same time, it’s liberating to release my expectations of my Christian friends (expectations were the motif of this past month) and begin treating them how they’ve always treated me.
Attention Whore
Is getting attention and feeling important/useful to other people really what you will betray your friends for?
Do not expect me to humor you anymore. Ever.
Everything you do is idiotic. You are helping no one. You are self-centered, selfish and senseless. No one likes you. Haven’t you realized that yet? And yet you will keep pushing away those who might put up with you, just so you can feel slightly important by knowing something that an actual leader doesn’t. You’re a perverse snake: slithering around on the ground, pretending like you mean something to anyone who will give you their time of day. And when people around you develop and grow their friendships, you pout and throw a fit, complaining to the leaders about “cliques” and how the state of the fellowship is deteriorating due to certain people. You’re the scum of the earth. You’re Satan’s lieutenant; how fortunate of you to have a leadership position.
Don’t expect me to trust you, either.
You’re exactly what Christianity needs to get rid of. You’re exactly what will make Heaven a terrible place to be, should you end up there. I thank your God that I’m not in your religion, because of people like you.
The difference between a good Christian friend and a bad one is that the first will be considerate before taking an action, while the latter will do whatever he/she wants, and beg for forgiveness afterwards. But even then, he will beg for forgiveness, at the same time try to defend himself that he was never wrong for doing it.
Thank you being so prompt in reminding me why I don’t go to your fellowship. It took less than 24 hours after I attended an event of yours for you to gossip with me with the rest of your leaders, to speculate about me, to try to figure out what goes on in my sex life, to figure out what’s “wrong” with me, to figure out my “struggles.” And you show not one bit of remorse for exploiting my secrets for your sense of superiority.
Say sorry. But don’t say to me, “sorry, but it was really your fault.” I see through your deception, prince of lies.
Breaking Free
It’s so difficult to look at other people who have made their own life choices and not try to do any of the following:
- feel superior or reason my perceived superiority in any way,
- talk them out of their choice, or
- judge them or break/put them down for their choice.
I have a lot of trouble respecting people. I get angry when I can’t rationalize why something is, or why people do or follow certain things. I see people partway or in noway passionate about what they’ve dedicated their lives to, and it just makes me angry that they’re just at a standstill, partway to an ideal but currently in a swamp.
I see the future of their lives: desolate, desperate, deprived of life. I see one going to church every Sunday yet feeling the silent judgment of his congregations’ eyes and the pedantic prose laced with venom that seeps from their holy mouths. I see another being crushed by trying to follow the unfairly impossible rules and then put back together with the deranged idea of divine forgiveness; like a vase being broken and glued back together so many times with the promise of becoming a perfect vase. I see another going through all the motions of the religion while never outwardly expressing any reason, any happiness, any notion of why he would go through all of it, only to live the rest of his life on the weekends taking part in menial adventures in hopes of salvaging what’s left of his freedom.
And yet they continue on their path. Their path is their own, I realize, but as a friend I want them to help reach their goals. Christianity looks golden, but why do Christians and their lives look so tainted? Even the “ideal” (that is, the Sunday Christian lifestyle) looks to me like hidden sadness. The other “ideal” (that is, the come-home-to-someone-you love lifestyle) looks to me like it’s achievable without religion.
I understand that Christianity is partly the idea of a universally prevalent problem of sin, but sometimes I think what if one could look at a so-called “depraved” situation and think, “You know, maybe it isn’t so bad if I can find the right people to get through it with. I love those people.” And they become a united family that can hold each other and weather every storm. Maybe Babel’s citizens loved each other before God confounded their language.
At some point, I’ve got to realize that although it was not me who shackled myself to whatever past biases and assumptions keep me down, it’s my fault for keeping those shackles on. Not to berate myself, but it’s my life whose reigns I can control, and I haven’t been doing so (and I probably won’t until I graduate).
What if I could make everyone rethink their reasons for following the traditions of their parents? What if I could make people learn that they can change their lives for the better?
What if I could convince myself of that?
Ramblings about God’s Plan
I wrote this during the post right before this one, but I couldn’t find anywhere to fit it.
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Isn’t is so convenient that “God’s plan” coincides with the materialistic consumerism on this side of the globe? I’d assume that God’s plan would be something so much more meaningful, for example that most if not all Christians would become ascetic-like missionaries/nomads with socialist ideals (as during Jesus’s time) and run around helping and loving people, like the good Samaritan, who paused his own life and travel for at least a day to help a complete stranger who might have a completely different set of beliefs. It feels so contrived that most Christians want to be in a stable, high-paying job with a nuclear family so they can “reach out” to the non-Christians who have stable, high-paying jobs and their own nuclear families, which is such a niche of a market that I cannot believe that God would send most of his American followers to live that life. In all honesty, it just seems like most Christians choose to live the life they want, and fine-tune the unimportant parts to God’s will, waiting until they break God’s commands to beg for forgiveness, over and over again.
I think it’s about now that I’m realizing that Christian or not, I don’t want to do the 9-5, 5 days / 40 hours a week life. Half of me wants to say that I’d do it to sustain a family: I imagine that a stable income is the price a person would sell their soul, if it meant maintaining a living. I think if I really did have a family or a potential family or a significant other to devote my life to, I would bear the 9-5 life for them. I’d hate it, but they’d make it worth everything. As a Christian, I wouldn’t believe that God’s plan for me is to sell my soul to the devil. The other half of me says that that lifestyle is horrible, but not only that: I wouldn’t have the people to make it worth it.
I’m not sure what’s the middle ground here. Pascal’s wager would work out nicely if I weren’t such a short-sighted person.
At the end of the day
you’d choose your brothers, because blood is thicker than water.
The Hatred
My days of lamenting about my cognitive dissonance are over, but as I find myself seeking and grasping for the reigns of my life, I also find a fiend of aggression rising up from within me. It’s like some sort of uncontrollable beast that follows me around and surfaces randomly when I least expect it, egging on what would have been my cue to grin and bear it into opening my mouth and letting venom fire, or furrowing my brows into pure hatred in the form of an icy cold stare. I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time until it sees an opportunity to take control of my hands and do some actual damage.
Nowadays the trigger is stroked so easily: them laughing with each other, them and their “concern,” them choosing fellowship with exclusively one another over hanging out with those dirty, hell-bound non-Christians, them looking on towards me with only the desire to convert me instead of seeing me as a person, them weighing me, as a person they know, against the arbitrary values that they’ve been raised with, them worshiping — no, them playing instruments and feeling spiritual.
When it happens, all I see is red. The fiery hatred steaming inside me melts any good feeling I may have had before. Each breath I take fans the flame growing inside of me. I can’t control my eyes, which turn into laser sights that burn holes through whatever I’m looking at. My entire being feels like bundle of dried grass, a conflagration ready to engulf everyone and every thing around me once someone takes my dare to touch me.
It feels like I’m being ripped apart. It’s torture, living here. Is there no harp for this spirit of hatred?
And yet the green-eyed monster of the community that was ripped away from me continues to taunt me ever so listlessly, dangling happiness like a carrot in front of a donkey. Yes, it was ripped away from me. While others can continue on their jolly golden road without ever seeing their loving God strip them of their dignity, whisper into their ears the promise of love and then forcibly take away all hopes of happiness, that is what happened to me. But it just doesn’t happen to some people.
And yet it is a lesson that everyone needs to learn, especially Christians: the path is so much narrower than it seems. And so many are on the paths parallel to the narrow path that lead to hell.
- The path of blessings, rewards, and relief is not the path of suffering and immeasurable, Job-like pain of the body and of the mind.
- The path of lesson-learning and God-tailored trials is not the path of voluntary persecution and martyrdom out of not blind but honest faith.
- The path of maintaining relationships merely to try to “save” non-Christians from hell is not the path that leads away from it.
- The path of having a community of “brothers and sisters” (if you can even call them that) to spend Friday nights with is not the path of sacrifice and dutiful loyalty to a god.
- The path of doing good and following orders is not the path of salvation.
- The path of the same habitual sin and the same habitual repentance is not the path led by the Holy Spirit.
- The path of conforming to the world’s pattern of getting a high-paying job and tithing 10% as one’s dues to religion is not the path of the communist-like fellowship that Jesus created amongst his disciples.
Would you trade any of the latter for any of the former? Would you insert a piece of paper saying “Forgive me father, for I have sinned” into the vending machine you call God to get whatever you want? How often could you do it and how often will your conscience be cleared, each and every time?
But I digress. This is what I wanted, wasn’t it? To be a subject of love-out-of-duty, to be encapsulated and defined by my sin and astrayness, to be on the outside looking in, feeling rage? The prodigal son would like to have a word with me, I know, but I’m not nearly at that point of rock bottom yet. And I don’t want these so called “Christians” to be waiting for me with a feast and judgmental stares.
If I do come back, it will be between me and Jesus, and no one else: not my friends, not Christians, and not the values instilled in me from my upbringing. Until then, let’s hope the wrath monster can be quelled.
Tether
Sometimes I can’t help but feel that the bonds I have to people are their tethers to me, to try to rope me in to what they want, with all implications succeeding.
But I’m also scared that the friends that don’t know me as well are afraid that, given the chance, I’d tether them the same way, because they’ve only seen the persona that I’ve been projecting: one of ignorance and detachedness.
The Impossible
I stopped believing that the impossible could happen the same time I found out that leaders were flawed and that my ideals could not exist in this world.
No good in humanity.
Everywhere I look, all I see is selfishness. Even Christians, to me, appear only to be Christians for their own good.
I wonder if I will be able to truly witness an event that wasn’t motivated by some type of self-advancement.
Hmmm
“When you hear nothing from [church leaders] but that you are nothing but evil and you need to change the unchangeable nature of yourself, that is only a message kids can take for so long.”
That would be the reason why we need Jesus Christ, but I see no Christian ever have felt this way.
