Treasures of Darkness

Well it’s been 6 months since I made my original list of the reasons why I avoid God.  At the time, I had every intention of taking the time to discuss indepth every item on my list.  I made it through #1 & #2. 

Well, I feel the need to skip forward to #14, because that is where I am.  I originally kept it simple.  I am confused.  Confused about God, faith, church, the Bible.  Everything.  But I think it goes beyond that, to the question I want answer more than anything.  What the hell does he want from me??

Is he trying to break me?  Turn me into a mindless obedient robot?  Torture me until I give in?

It’s been just about a year since I walked away from everything I knew about the spiritual life.  It has been the suckiest year of my life.  My husband has been continually unemployed, were financially a mess, I’ve developed life debilitating anxiety attacks, and I seem to have completely lost any assurance I ever may have had that there is any order to the chaos in the universe.

And yet, I perversely hold on to the belief that God exists.  Though, I still avoid him, afraid to get close until I can make some sense out of all of this.

Continuing with my exploration of the reasons why I avoid God, I come to #2 on the list:

 It often all seems too good to be true, and so I use the distance to protect myself, while I search for the catch.

This has actually been on my mind a lot for the past couple days, as a friend of mine seems to consider it his personal duty to convince me that God is great and He loves me, and just wants to have a relationship with me.

 I find myself reacting to it all so cynically, as in “that’s great in theory, but experience tells me otherwise”.   I mean, that’s what they told me in the beginning.  That’s the line that got me hooked, got me hungry for more.  It seemed like the ultimate deal; forgiveness for all my sins AND an “in” with the ultimate being in the universe, and the only thing that I had to do, was accept that He was who He was, and that He had done what He had done.

I was all like “where can I sign up?”  But almost immediately, the performed the old bait and switch.  I had signed the contract, but didn’t read the fine print, which was soon revealed to me in a series of increasingly strict rules.  And even though one of the rules was getting other people to sign the contract, I found that I just couldn’t sentence them to the prison I had somehow entered voluntarily.

Finally one day, I realized that there was just no way that I could keep my end of the contract, and gave up.  Part of me holds out hope that the contract wasn’t legally binding, and that I still have hope of heaven, but other times, that too, seems too good to be true.

A few days back I made a list of reasons why I avoid God, with the intention of later going back and looking at them more indepth in some sort of desperate attempt to be my own psychotherapist.

#1 ~ I don’t understand His motives

 I was taught that God created the angels as his servants, and then later went on to create the earth and eventually mankind.  It was explained that the reason for mankind, was that he endued us with free will with the hope that we would choose to love and worship Him.  Because apparently angels were not given free will, and had no choice but to love and worship Him.  And who wants love by default?  Not God, he wants it by choice.

Ummm….excuse me?  I could maybe buy this, if in the very next breath I wasn’t told about the fall of Lucifier/Satan.  I don’t think we give that evil entity enough credit, I mean after all, he managed to rebel with absolutely no free will whatsoever.  How is that possible?

So however he managed to do it, he then set his sites on mankind, deceived Eve, yadda yadda yadda.  Then God sets up this massive plan of redemption whereby he can restore the relationship between himself and His creation.  Well, all except his original creation, those pesky angels, 1/3 of whom sided with Satan.  For them though there is no going back, no plan of salvation, no redemption, just a future reservation in a lake of fire.

Can I be honest here, and say I totally don’t get that?  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

I haven’t been talking to God lately.  For awhile actually.  I’m like a stalker.  I read about God, I talk to his friends, I spy on the places where I think he’ll show up, but I do what I can to avoid any actual interaction.

The question of course is why?  On the surface it is the same issues that has plagued my relationship with God from day 1; fear and mistrust.  It’s when I try and go beneath the surface that it becomes more complicated.  What am I afraid?  Why can’t I trust?  What do I think He is going to say, ask, or do?  So much of it is tied up in my past spiritual experiences, but alot of it goes back further to issues that I have from my youth.

I know I have to face this, and in order to face it, I have to acknowledge it, name it, explore it.  To be honest, it’s not something I really want to deal with, as I am much more fond of the “ignore it and it will go away” approach.  But lets say, I do open up and confess all my reasons for my fear of commitment, that won’t necessarily make me immediately understand why I feel the way I do.    I guess I’ll start with making a nice list, and worry about making sense of it later.

Reasons Why I Avoid God

1. I don’t understand His motives.

2. It often all seems too good to be true, and so I use the distance to protect myself, while I search for the catch.

3. Avoiding Him makes it easier to ignore the contradictions.

4. I don’t trust Him.

5. I’m afraid he’ll make me return to what I left behind.

6. I view him as capricious.

7. I get frustrated and bogged down by the concept of His sovereignty.

8. I fear that He IS as he is portrayed by Christians.

9. I feel like nothing I do is ever good enough for Him.

10. My own feelings of inadequacy

11. Abandonment Issues.

12. I’m afraid that he will take everything away, or make me suffer horribly “for my own good”

13. Fear of Hell.

14. Confusion. 

15. Inability to separate God from the Christianity that I’ve known (i.e. abuse of power, legalism, fundamentalism)

16. Inability to reconcile the many faces of God in the scriptures.

17. The underlying question that if God is so great, why do all his people suck?

18. I am tired of everyone telling me what to do (and that apparently includes God as well)

19. Because it’s easy to.  Because I still focus on some God-Related stuff, it’s easy to make myself forget that I tend to avoid him personally.

20. Because I have little to zero real life interaction with other believers that might encourage me and/or change my mind about some of my fears.