I’ve been far away from Jesus for decades. I quit going to church with my family when I was a senior in high school.
As you can tell, this is not a post about literacy, but more so about learning. I hope you’ll read it all.
I never stopped believing in God on my 50-year journey. I have encouraged others to pursue their faiths, or search for a faith to believe in.
I lied about being a Christian from the time I was a child until I was 13. I said I was a Christian when I didn’t even understand what that meant.
Then at 12 I accepted Jesus and was also confirmed in the United Methodist Church. I was an OK Christian for a while–I carried my Bible to school, skipped class to buy doughnuts, confessed my sins to others, loved in the agape sense of the word (wanting for others what God would want for them). Until I quit going to church with my parents. Then I became an awful Christian.
I have accumulated 30+ years of less than acceptable behavior, bad attitude and acts of revenge. I’ll never be right in the Christian sense.
But maybe I’ve tried for a decade or so, thinking that maybe Jesus will love me and care for me and forgive me. All this from under the influence of a “little old Pentecostal lady” that was a good friend to my mother. My mother, who unfortunately died at the young age of 62, some 13 years ago.
The day after she was ordained as a pastor, the reverend showed up at my door. I had been familiar with her presence up to that point. She prayed with my mother frequently during Mom’s extended illness, a case of unconfirmed pulmonary fibrosis. Mom had a terrible disease that makes it hard for its victims to breathe, and causes the heart to fail because it doesn’t have enough power to pump blood through the thickened walls of the lungs for oxygenation. The sufferer quite frankly suffocates to death on the inside, if heart failure doesn’t take them first. My mom was spared the pain and suffering that could have been.
So the reverend shows up at my door a year or so after my mother’s death, and offers to be my “surrogate mother”, I’m sure she meant replacement mother or mother-figure in my life, which I did not want. But I’m too nice, and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I said OK. And the reverend and I, 30 years apart in age, became fast friends.
I confessed my awful, un-Christian sins to her, and she took naps on my recliner, on the front porch, in the spare room. We watched mostly Christian television together on Saturday evenings. Occasionally we’d watch a movie like The King’s Speech or The Iron Lady. We watched lots of Christian made-for-television movies. We joked and laughed and were silly.
Then she started getting serious–all the time. She screamed at Satan for every thing bad in her life, whether she was in my house or hers. Obama was the Antichrist, Nancy Pelosi was “that woman”. And every time an alleged sexual offender’s deeds were broadcast on the news, she would shout with my doors and windows open, “Cut it off! Castrate him!” I always knew she was zealous about worshiping God, but she was becoming loudly zealous about everything. It was hard to be a God-loving, neighbor loving, an enemy loving, and also forgiving Christian with what I felt was venom, not love, spewing from her mouth constantly.
She was convinced I wasn’t tithing enough, I didn’t go to church often enough, and even when I felt like my relationship with Jesus and God were satisfactorily close, I didn’t seem to be a good enough Christian for her because I wasn’t watching the heavens for Jesus’s return and didn’t agree with her politically. At this time, I had one friend my age who was making a female to male transgender transition, and another male friend my age who was vehemently against being a Christian or allowing me to express my faith in any way–even in my own home–without being berated or belittled.
Yes, I collect them all.
Then one day it dawned on me (with the help of a family member), she had started cussing randomly, had problems controlling her bowels regularly, and her health was also failing. I was worried about dementia. I was worried she would try to drive!
This is the same woman who 30 years earlier was holding her husband in her arms when he died, who said she couldn’t cry unless the Holy Spirit gave her tears. She endured a difficult childhood with a hard, alcoholic father. She cared for her parents and her husband’s parents, two of whom had Alzheimer’s, and she was disappearing into the void of forgetfulness before my eyes.
The reverend had lived the majority of her life for the advancement of the kingdom, with love and forgiveness for others.
Now she is due to be moved to a rehab unit or hospital. She has had a stroke they say. I say probably a brain aneurism from throwing her medicines around her house and screaming at the devil with everything left in her. Whatever the cause, she needs help. She needs prayers.
I’ve come to the end of my rope of faith. God told Abram to sacrifice his son, the son he promised him and Sarah, but saved him in the end. Lucky for Abraham his mind moved quicker than his dagger-wielding hand. I don’t know how God is going to save my reverend friend. In my unprofessional opinion she has mid- to late-stage dementia, she can’t remember where she’s going or what medicines to take. I’m thrilled she can remember who I am still.
It pains me, God, to know that someone you has served You, who has served her family all her life, sacrificing her needs for the needs of others, is in such a state of suffering, that she has had to be bamboozled into staying in the hospital, rehab or not, 24/7.
The other option is more Godly, but unconscionable. She could be relased, forgetting to take her meds, or worse yet, deciding which meds she wants or doesn’t want to take. This could prove deadly. She’d go on yelling at the devil and maybe have another aneurism. Maybe she’d get in her car and drive until she got lost. Maybe she’d cause an accident. Maybe she would have another fall (She has had three falls in one month recently.)
But in case you missed it, God’s rewards are not in this life, but the next. I’m having trouble with that, as I know God gave me this life on earth for a reason. Other than caring for other people, like my mother and the reverend, I have not felt much personal purpose. Why these people think I’d make a good impromptu nurse, I do not know. I’m barely holding my simplified life together. But, I have learned that life is not fair, loving others hurts, and God does not operate with the same ideas of what constitutes justice and fairness in this world as many of us on this earth do.
It probably would be redundant to say, life, God, they are not fair. But I’d probably more so appreciate a prayer for my reverend friend and me, that I can remain friends with her until the end, showing compassion and love. In my life, well, I guess I’d ask God for mercy. I certainly don’t want the punishment I deserve for all the bad attitude and bad behaviors. Pray that I’m a better believer. Pray that I’ll be good enough in His eyes and he will keep me from the hell my mother and the reverend seem to be enduring, in spite of their very-close-to life-long faith.