If you've been reading my blogs for a while, you know that one thing I've consistently struggled with since Kenneth's illness and death has been my faith. I thought I'd get more into that discussion today.
I was brought up by my mom, who was a single mother due to divorcing my psychotic father when I was 7. When I was little, I was taught to believe in God but not taken to church on a regular basis. After the divorce, Mom became increasingly more religious and as a result started taking us to church regularly. Over the years we attended churches of several different denominations: Methodist, Lutheran, another Lutheran, and finally a non-denominational fundamentalist Bible church with decidedly Baptist leanings.
I don't remember much about the Methodist church, other than I liked the children's church activities and it had red carpet.
At the first Lutheran church, my best friend and I got to serve as acolytes on many Sundays, which I loved doing. The pastor of that church, Pastor Bill, was also a used car salesman. He sold my mom a car that turned out to be a major lemon and screwed her over on the warranty, teaching me religion lesson number 1: Just because someone claims to be a Christian, doesn't mean they act like one.
The second Lutheran church was one we went to for most of my early adolescence. We were very involved there, with me being in the youth and the adult choir, the handbell choir, and youth group. My mom was active in the singles group. The other kids were horrible, though. I can remember being in youth group one night, and a group of girls were taunting one girl mercilessly. They called her a lesbian over and over again, loudly, and had her in tears. The youth group leader watched it happen and didn't do a thing about it. Incidents like that happened fairly often, so I stopped going to youth functions and limited my involvement to the adult choir and helping with the 3 year old Sunday School class. I helped with the 3 year olds until one mother pulled me aside and berated me for wearing a "slutty" dress. I was 12. I'd grown since the last time I'd worn that dress and it had gotten a little too short for me. The woman screamed at me and told me to stay away from her daughter. I was reduced to tears, told my mother, and that ended my involvement with helping the 3 year old class.
After we left that church, we were all pretty jaded by our experience with a big church, so we decided as a family to try a small one. We visited Manchaca Bible Fellowship and liked it, so we stayed for the remainder of my high school years. In the beginning, it was a good place. Their mission statement was "Rightly Dividing the Word of the Lord", and their main focus was on teaching theology. Sermons were an academic affair, with the Pastor teaching complex theological points and the adults taking notes. There were quite a few homeschooling families, which my mom liked because she'd decided to homeschool my brother and sister by that point. AWANA was big in that church, and my younger brother and sister both got very involved with that. I was much less involved with anything youth related, partly because I'd been turned off of youth groups by the last church and partly because I wasn't homeschooled like my brother and sister were.
Good things came out of that church. My mom met my stepdad there, and my sister met her husband there. Bad things came out of it too, though. My brother was introduced to drugs and alcohol by kids from the youth group, and stolen from by those same kids. My sister was ostracized by the youth group leader. The pastor's teaching changed from simply being Bible teaching into teaching about things like "unity". It started to become cultish. I graduated from high school and started refusing to go. The rest of my family stopped going somewhere around a year or so later.
From that point on, I haven't attended any church regularly. I still count myself as a Christian, but I've been burned too many times by church-goers to be interested in regularly attending a church. I've found exceptions to that rule. The church that we chose to get married in wasn't chosen for any reason other than the price was right and it was a beautiful building, but the pastor of that church turned out to be a wonderful person. If it wasn't such a long drive from my house, I might consider going to that church from time to time. Even after all of the things that happened in the churches we went to growing up, I still kept my faith. I figured that people would dissapoint you every time, but God never would.
At least, I felt that way until Kenneth.
I've been over the anger and disappointment I've felt with God, so I won't go into it again here. Praying for my son to be allowed to stay with me, only to have him taken away, has shaken my faith. I want to believe, I do. I can't help doubting now, though. All of the standard Christian answers to the question of "Why does God allow suffering?" seemed sufficient to me before I had such an intimate aquaintance with watching someone I loved more than life suffer. Now, they seem like empty platitudes. I don't think that Christians understand why God allows suffering ay more than the rest of the world does. Maybe it has to do with living in a world that has sin, but that seems to be a farcical answer when you're talking about the suffering of a newborn baby.
So on the one hand, I now have doubts. Big doubts. On the other, I cling to hope. Hope that my faith is real, hope that everything I've ever believed isn't just a big lie made up by men in order to feel better about their existence. Hope that even though my son is gone from this earth, that he still exists in spirit somewhere. Hope that I'll get to see him again when I'm done with life here. Hope that Grant will get to meet his big brother someday. I have a sense of wonder as I watch Grant meet his milestones, and I know that the miracle that is his life can't be anything but the result of a Creator. How is it possible to have such conflicting views about my faith all at the same time?
As it says in Mark 9:24 "...Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief."
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