mid faith crisis

[exOBCstudent]

(07-10-2012 07:09 PM)SomethingFundy Wrote:  Something no one knows is that I was an assistant youth pastor esque for two years. The YP was a non fundy and my mentor who eventually came to my side of views amongst other things.

I flex between wanting to leave it all behind and getting angry at God. I admit, I am because I have seen so many good people hurt and run off and God never seemed to intervene. I find myself growing and fighting bitterness , I don't want to get so bitter I leave it all behind because even now, I can hear the still small voice of God like last Sunday He told me it was going to be okay.

I am so close to being done with an associates degree, sure its tracs but I can get my bachelors elsewhere if I decide to finish.

I am probably just going to finish then and take a long break from everything.

I'm too conservative for mainline christianity but too ''liberal'' for fundies.

what do I do?

SF, There are some very important reasons why you're seeing good people hurt and run off from the church "system" you're currently in. Perhaps what you're actually seeing IS God's intervention for them. That's how it worked out for my family and I. We first had to be totally forsaken and viciously attacked by the very churches we trusted to finally realize what was wrong...and it wasn't us!

It's perfectly NORMAL for you to feel upset and even bitter when having to deal with crap like that in your life. I'm sure you'll eventually learn how to deal with it and get over it in the future, but right now you should be asking LOTS of questions right now rather than just wondering why all this is happening and doing nothing about it.

I think God is actually going to use this to be a wake-up call to you. I think that most often folks will sit and linger as long as they possibly can until a situation or circumstance FORCES them to take action. God uses things like that sometimes to change us. I think taking a long break from everything might be what you really need right now. It gives you time to get outside of "the box" and think things through.

You'll go through a lot of the stages that many of us went though but in the end, I think you'll decide to break completely free of the bondage of religion and gain a closer walk with our Lord instead. God will comfort and guide you through it all if you're willing to ask the hard questions and make the hard choices that might be necessary.

Hang in there buddy.

[Ricardo]

SF,

BTDT.

Pretend like you have just gone through a death in the family. (which may not be far from the truth.)

Read up on the Stages of Grief. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

And know, above all, that no matter what happens you are loved by God, and by us who have gone through pretty much the same crisis before you.

There is no easy way through this. Strap on to the roller coaster, it is going to be a bumpy ride!

[seenthelight]

Growing up fundy, I was taught that "different from us" and "liberal" were other words for "wrong." When I went to college, a fundy-lite school, I saw people of other denoms than my fundy one. And they were NICE people!! It was possible to be a Christian from a non-fundy church! Who knew?!!

Now, many years later, I don't like to use the words "liberal" or "conservative" alone. They are comparative. To some churches, my beliefs would be "liberal" yet to others, they are "conservative."

Believe what you want to believe w/o using fundy labels they deem as indicating right & wrong.

Some people may say (or it might actually be true) that they have never had a mid faith crisis. But more often than not, I think that you are so not alone. After my son died three years ago and other fundy-in-law foo went down, I have decided to take a break from attending church. Do I believe in God? Sure. Am I a Christian? I know I am. Do I see God's function in my life the same as before my son died? No.

I feel that God is spiteful sometimes with the whole "rain falling on the just and the unjust" sometimes. I know our treasures are in heaven and all that jazz, but you know, would it hurt God to show a little favoritism and protection to Christians?? Every day of my life I prayed that God would "protect us from evil and from ourselves." Well, after my son took his own life, God certainly didn't protect him from himself, now did He? My parents have been in church and Christian service their whole married lives. Yet they struggle financially in their retirement years. Money doesn't fall like manna from heaven, but would it hurt God to keep stuff from breaking in their house or not sending the IRS their way to audit them??? I feel that the verse about a good father giving his son a fish not a stone is certainly not how God is doing it in my life. My marriage is a mess. I've lost friends since my son died. I lost my job. My in-laws hate me. Oh, and my son is gone. Will I see him again? Yes, but right now that isn't so helpful.

I feel that God has given me stones and basically I just want God to leave me alone. I know He's up there, I know Jesus saved me, but I just want to be a "free agent" for awhile.

So, you are certainly not alone in your struggles, only I don't allow it to be a struggle in my life. I have enough else to deal with. When I'm ready for God again, I know where He is.

[Ricardo]

seenthelight,

Wow! talk about a double or triple-whammy!

Take a look at Stages of Faith: http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/fowler.htm Fowler's book is dry as dust. (I think it was his doctoral dissertation.) While I'm not trying to box you into a specific stage or another, clearly your image of God is one of fantasy and magic. Careful with the description of stages above. There is no way to summarize Fowler into one page.

His point is that in the same church you may find Christians who are in different stages, who go to church for virtually opposite reasons.

Some of us don't see a transactional God, where if we do this, then God will do that for us. Example: "Pray without ceasing." Why? is God Deaf? Does He have Alzheimers? The answer I have found for myself is that praying is not really about God, but about us. When we remind ourselves that there is something outside of us that is greater than ourselves, we see the world differently.

As far as I know, there is no difference in the rates of cancer, strokes, dementia and death between the different religions or agnostics and atheists.

Are religious people happier? It is debatable. Which means it is not patently obvious. So what good is religion?

Quite frankly, the Protestant emphasis on "being saved" is sickening to me, now. I agree with Karl Marx that all this talk of Heaven ends up being opium, taking our our eyes off of what is happening here on Earth. Facundo Cabral, a famous Argentinian folk singer used to say: "Rich is not he who has has the most, but he who needs the least."

In general, I tend to like religious people better than non-religious people. Even the fundy nuts.

The idea of a god who would pick and choose where to send floods and earthquakes is obscene to me. Shit happens. God is there to give us strength, and to encourage to help others.

The idea that god would give me a flat tire which resulted in missing the plane that crashed is unbelievably insulting to the families of the passengers who did die in the plane crash. Again, it is magical thinking.

About going to church: I left my IFB church forty years ago. Since then, I've gone to various churches for weddings and funerals and to accompany my mother when she comes to visit me or when I go to visit her. The first twenty years or so, everything about the church infuriated me. In the past twenty years I've learned to take what I need and leave the rest. For the past year I've actually been visiting half a dozen churches pretty regularly, as part of my volunteering with a community organization. (Churches are great to reach large groups of people. It beats standing outside the grocery store...)

My Faith in God has not wavered. On the contrary it is better than ever! But my faith in Churches died forty years ago. Slowly I've come to the realization that the way I've been reading the Bible, that my assumptions about the bible where also magical, fantasy thinking. So I'm in the process of examine everything and keeping only the good stuff.

Meanwhile, a funny thing has happened: I find myself feeling blessed, no matter what church I go to, be it the Holy Rollers, the Catholic mass, or even, gasp, the Kingdom Hall!

[elfdream]

This is not an answer to all the questions but sometimes...emphasis on the sometimes God sends us what C.S. Lewis called 'a severe mercy'. Trials, hurts, disappointments. Think the prodigal son. Think Job. David running from Saul. God allows things so as to strip away what does not matter so we can see him as he really is and for some reason that is what he wants for certain individuals. Why you and not the person next to you? I don't know. Why Job and not his neighbor? Why David and not one of his brothers?

C.S. Lewis was not speaking poetically. He lost his much and was later to lose his wife and was speaking from a place of shared experience.

Why did Lewis' wife have to die in order for him to learn a lesson? I don't know but perhaps she had already learned hers and God knew she would have been willing to make that sacrifice. We don't know people's hearts.

Why did I get cancer? It was terrible at the time but it became a time of where things that do not matter fell away. There are things that I can see so much clearer now and while I am hesitant to say that I would do it all again I will say that I am glad for the experience because of what came from it.

[Ricardo]

(07-13-2012 05:57 AM)elfdream Wrote:  sometimes God sends us what C.S. Lewis called 'a severe mercy'. Trials, hurts, disappointments. Think the prodigal son.

Nooo! Please, not the Prodigal son! One of my favorite parables.

The Prodigal Father did not cause his son's misfortunes. The Prodigal Father was up in the veranda waiting and hoping. When he saw his son from afar he started organizing the party. He didn't know in what mood his son was coming. It did not matter. His son may have been coming with a chip on his shoulder, to blame his father for all his problems. His son may have been coming to ask for more money.

The Prodigal Father would have celebrated just the same if his son were coming in with his drinking buddies.

Shit happens. God is there to give us strength to overcome whatever adversities we face.

Seenthelight, God was the first one to cry at the loss of a beautiful life. All that potential. Trying to figure out why God was punishing him, or why God was punishing you, or conversely trying to make light of the awful tragedy of the loss of your son or trying to turn this somehow into a positive, is insulting at best.

If this line is what you were given at your church, stay as far away as you can.

What father, if his son asks him for bread will give him a rock? How much more our Heavenly Father?

The definitions of God we grew up with are totally bankrupt.

A redefinition of God is long overdue. We will only be able to do so if we abolish the Bibliolatry we grew up with and instead put the Bibles in their proper place.

Stay away as long as you need to. Avoid those people trying to console you by making light of the awful tragedy.

[elfdream]

I knew that what I posted would be taken the wrong way. Its ok. What Ricardo thought it meant was not what I meant at all...but once again its ok.

[Defraudedbygothard]

Well...this is another very timely discussion for me. Thanks for starting it SF, I plan to follow it down the rabbit hole. Oh and Elfdream I got what you meant.

[co_heir]

Elfdream, I got it too. And experienced it.

[Ricardo]

How would you feel about doing nothing about your son continuing to drive while drunk? Maybe he needs to kill someone on the road in order to learn... The fact that an innocent person may have to die? Well that's just the breaks. It was God's will...

Depression, anxiety, and other treatable mental illnesses are contributing factors in many accidental deaths as well as suicides.

If we continue claiming that the devil made me do it, or that God allowed this to happen, where does personal responsibility lie?

Not sure I really want to bring up the whole predetermination headache, but, I'm not sure we can leave it out of this discussion.

The image of a god who would kill Job's family members and utterly destroy his possessions, to win a bet with the devil, is NOT a god worthy of worship. Hence my efforts to find a different way of reading that book other than literally.