LOSING SIGHT OF NORMAL

When I was about 12 and my parents divorced, all that was normal disappeared. The very definition of normal seemed completely shattered. I no longer believed in it after that.

As someone who writes about faith on this blog, one might wonder if my faith had any impact on that level of emotional damage, even as a youngster. Let me tell you the imperative nuances of being raised in a particularly ineffective manner of faith, even if life involved the church.

SOURCE OF OUR LOVE

I was raised Catholic. My parents put me and my siblings through a Catholic school system, but what was lacking from Catholic instruction was a Godly love deep enough to reach my young and undeveloped spirit. Religion can get the best of any of us if we’re not careful and discerning. Let us remember, the mark of a Christian is how we first love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, quickly followed by how we love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31). If our love seems conditional or obligatory, one can quickly deduce it isn’t founded in a fear of God.

RELIGION AND RITUALS

Fear of God brings with it awe, humbleness and reverence. It quiets our loud inner voices and submits to His unquantifiable power. Fear of God produces a Godly love because He is the one commanding it, and we remember what He did for us in Jesus Christ. When we mistakenly adhere to religion only, we tend to forget about the love part of it. We play with the rituals but we lose touch with the manner in which to participate in them. Religion says that the crackers and juice are literally Jesus’s flesh and blood, and that if we don’t believe that, we’re not really Christ-followers. Faith says, “participate in these humble remembrances of who gave us salvation.” If we’re not participating in humbleness and gratitude, then we are just going through the motions without love playing a role. That isn’t what God commanded us to do, and it isn’t pleasing to Him in the least.

NOT REFLECTING CHRIST

That said, the Catholic school system I was taught by did not instill in me a fear of God, nor a love for God. What it did cause in me was to ponder what it meant to be a “good person,” because that seemed like the underlying lesson of Catholicism. If religion teaches us to be a good person but leans us towards hating the process of becoming a better person, then something isn’t right. I didn’t really care for school because I didn’t sense that my teachers reflected Christ; they portrayed themselves as people trying to be good for the sake of the institution paying them. Did I know their faith journey? Nope, and they never talked about it. I wasn’t emotionally stupid enough not to take notice of the fact that no one made me think twice about relationship with Jesus one time in 12 years. Belief in Jesus and a relationship with Jesus aren’t the same thing, by the way. I’ll come back to that a little later.

REVERENCE OF GOD

I heard the Bible, yes, and I was physically around people who claimed Catholicism for their life, but their seemingly unchanged characters never impacted my faith journey; or at least not positively. In fact, reading the Bible with people lacking a Godly love really impacted the way the Bible came across. Is that relatable for any readers seeing this? That’s how we know someone is a believer, right? They stand out from the rest of the people we know in ways that are loving, kind, giving, and sacrificial, and they don’t take the credit for themselves.

Believers also stand out in their reverence of God, their boldness of faith, and the manner in which they seek Him first. Furthermore, they reflect Christ’s attributes because they are mature enough in faith to recognize His attributes are more worthy and demanding of emulation than living out of their own self-defined journeys. If they aren’t doing any of those things, particularly around children in an environment meant to be fostering faith, then the impact will be spiritually damaging at worst, and confusing or misleading at best.

DEAD IN THE WATER

When Catholic adults don’t express a love for Jesus in their everyday language to young and naive children, what isn’t ingrained? The reason Catholicism exists. What happens when Catholic teachers convey religion and not Godly love? What happens when they don’t press the importance of a Biblically accurate fear of God? The students of those teachers end up mistaking faith for religion, lacking a strong spiritual relationship with their heavenly Father in Christ, and they don’t view Jesus as more than a name in a book. Catholicism is, effectively at that point, dead in the water in the hearts of those students.

I was one of those students when my parents divorced.

DENYING GOD FOR YEARS

By the way, Jesus wasn’t spoken about in my home growing up, either. There wasn’t prayer before bedtime, or turning to Jesus on a hard day. We said grace before meals, and that was that. So imagine how destructive it was to introduce trauma like divorce into the life of someone young, naive, and without faith in an all-loving, all-powerful, trustworthy God.

For years following, I denied the existence of God. I didn’t attend church anymore, it seemed pointless. Church is meant to build up what is already inside of us, and I believed there was nothing inside of me, or around me. Church is not there to be the only place we experience God, nor the only place we worship and praise God, nor the only place we express our faith in Him. But that’s what a lot of churchgoers did then, and plenty continue to treat faith like religiosity today. Religiosity says “go to church, sing the songs and say what they say.” Faith says, “I believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior over my whole life. I need Him in every part of who I am. There’s nothing I can do that I can do without Him.”

GOD-GIVEN RITUALS

I didn’t learn the above from Catholicism, I learned that when I became a Christian, 7 years after the divorce shook my life like an internal earthquake. And I keep learning it all the time, because if I don’t keep learning, eventually I’ll just fall back into religiosity, or worse—doubt—which isn’t life-changing in any desirable way.

Faith without works is dead, so in addition to serving people in the name of Jesus out of church, we also practice the in-church rituals to give honor and glory to the God who gave them to us. By rituals, of course I mean events like baptism, and communion. But we don’t rely on the rituals in order to claim our religion; we rely on our faith in the God who gave us the reasons we have to live the lives we ought to be living by calling ourselves Christ-followers.

OUR SCARS PAINT A RESURRECTION FROM GOD

The destruction of family and normalcy hurt more deeply than I can describe.

Between a school system of “good people” who weren’t living out an obvious faith life, a family who lacked a fear of God, and an emotionally devastating event, I can tell you I wasn’t relying on the idea of God to help me through the next several roughest years of my life: puberty, middle school, love life, and a divided home life. The fact that it all happened when it did is tragic in itself, sure. But looking back, I only confess to it being devastating or tragic as a means of validating my younger self. My perspective now is of pure gratitude. The emotional scars I received throughout those deeply challenging years made me who I am today in the sense that God directed me through the way it happened, otherwise I would have been dead already by my own hands.

ANGELS TO THE RESCUE

When I exited the church scene, God followed me home and He never left. Every time I denied Him, He stayed with me. Every time I wept and screamed in rage and disappointment, He was there with me. I truly believe that. I couldn’t see it through my adolescent years, but believe me when I say I see it now. He sent angels to stop me from killing myself multiple times. Jesus wasn’t through with me yet, He just knew what I could handle with His help in order to become the man I am today, preaching this to you all.

BOLD AND COURAGEOUS CHRIST-FOLLOWERS

In all seriousness, belief in God isn’t enough. Even demons believe, and they shudder (James 2:19). What is more important than the fact that we hold a belief, is being in relationship with Jesus Christ. One day He will either say, “Depart from me, I never knew you,” or “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” Only one difference: relationship. Do you know Jesus Christ personally through faith, or is He just a nice Jewish rabbi in a really old book?

If you believe in Jesus, make it known. Faith without works is dead. If we’re teaching young children about our Father God, shouldn’t we be humbling ourselves before we even walk into the classroom, prepared to both teach and to love in a Christ-like manner? If we’re Christ-followers, don’t we believe in being gentle and compassionate like Jesus, but also being bold and courageous like Him, denying the world its chance to put God in the dark and ignore the fact that life without God is literally hell?

TEACHING THE LOVE AND FEAR OF GOD

It’s easy to go to church, we all know that. Religion tells us to go to church, faith says that church doesn’t end there. Religion says evangelize, faith says practice our faith with the fruits of the spirit, which means we don’t need to shove Christianity down anyone’s throat; we talk about Him and dust our feet when we are rejected. Jesus says when they reject us, they reject Him too (Luke 10:16). We lead by Jesus’s example of loving, forgiving, praying, and granting grace and mercy to others as we have had it granted to us. Being a Christ-follower (Christian or Catholic) means teaching the love of God and our fear of God in the most Biblical ways we can. That looks like loving and disciplining children to understand how serious it is to reject God. But we do it not in such a way that causes them hate the idea of God, but in a way that produces awareness of just how important He needs to be in their lives.

EFFECTIVE EVANGELISM

When children don’t learn properly, they have the potential become unbelievers thinking that believers are the ones who need a more refined idea of God, and not them. And that’s ironic, right? We can express God as so “finger-in-your-face” that unbelievers see it as more of a religion that we need than they do. And that’s understandable! It’s also sad, because it’s completely backwards. We need to be loving others towards Christ, not demeaning them or intimidating them away from Him. 

All these years later, I’m giving praise to God for the fact that despite a horrible event that shook up my life and crashed it to through the floorboards of my so-called reality, I am an unapologetic Christ-follower today. I desire to see others find God in truth, and to seek Him from the Bible. Where are you on your journey?

LEARNING FROM WHAT LIFE WE HAVE LEFT

When a friend of mine passed away over a month ago, it really hit hard as a Christian because it was a poignant reminder of how short life is. Any one of us could just drop dead at any moment, and what was the substance of our lives at that point? What influenced our decisions, and could the influencers have learned to do a better job for the next person, to help them towards Jesus instead of away? Could we have said more instead of being so quiet? Or is God maybe calling us to sometimes be quiet and not try to play God to someone else?

BE A BLESSING FOR THOSE WHO ARE LOST

All of this, and more. But all within the microcosm that life is not up to us, it’s up to God. We make the choice to either seek Him or seek eternal darkness. There’s only two eternal destinations, and only one pathway there: Jesus Christ. If you know someone who is experiencing trauma, are you able to speak Jesus into their lives by how you are loving them? I challenge you to love someone like Jesus would. Change that person’s life and surprise them by how the Holy Spirit moves in you. Ask God for the blessing someone else needs and be an angel in their life. Watch someone’s life change.

In Jesus’s name. Amen.

Photo by Daniel Stiel on Unsplash