Growing up in a Christian family, my views of God, myself and the world around me were pretty well dominated by my experiences and impressions of church. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I’ve met and know a lot of really nice people in church. Still, my church experiences (church meetings, church sermons and Sunday School lessons, church relationships, church conflicts) were a pair of glasses affecting what and how I could see.
God seemed to be small enough and limited enough to be constrained within the priorities and practices of our church and the lives of these people. God really didn’t seem to have much interest in more than us, our meetings, our church building, etc. I know this sounds strange, even egotistical, as though we were the center of everything. Really it was that I had seen and understood so little of what God was up to that I thought we were mainly ‘it’ for him.
With a few more years, a few more experiences with God, and a lot more time learning to think through the biblical material, things look very different! Continue reading “There may be more to this ‘Christianity’ thing than you thought.”