Categories: church
Tags: Christianity
Date: 06 January 2006 20:59:50
[Disclaimer: this is being written after a couple of quite hefty glasses of wine. If it's crap though (the blog entry I mean, not the wine, which is very nice as it happens) I'll still leave it up here, for posterity or something.]
Excited Rainbow Girl opened a can of worms started a little discussion (later taken up by Tractor Girl) on regrets and "what ifs". This, coupled with a lighthearted thread on Ship of Fools entitled something along the lines of "What I would tell my 15 year old self", has got me thinking somewhat more introspectively than is probably healthy, but if I post it up here then maybe I'll get it out of my system. Yeah right, till the next time.
On the SoF thread I wrote about my past church experience - some of you will probably know that I became a Christian at 18, plunged headlong into the (very charismatic evangelical) CU at uni and then at 21 plunged headlong into an equally charismatic evangelical church in SE London where I stayed until about 3 years ago. My advice on the thread to the 15 year old me was this: "That God stuff you're starting to get interested in - that's fine, go with it, but when you're in a church service, the second you start thinking "This is a bit bonkers", listen to yourself and start to explore a bit wider. Don't leave it several years trying to figure out if it's you or them." I have to say one of my biggest regrets (which I know I can't change so is probably utterly pointless, but life's not that easy, is it?) is that I didn't leave that church several years earlier than I did. Not because it didn't have its great times - it really did, and there are people there still that I love and respect so much - but because I spent so much of the early days thinking it was the only church I could ever imagine myself being in, so when the rot set in (for me) I ended up spending way too long pretending everything was OK when it wasn't, rather than exploring healthier (for me) opportunities elsewhere. This has had knock-on effects on all sorts of areas of my life, and I do sometimes wonder how different things might be today if I'd had the courage to move on earlier than I did, what different paths I might have taken, how particular situations might have worked out differently.
What I didn't write on the thread was more specific advice about relationships (and lack thereof). Something I might have added was "You're not going to be married by the time you're 30, so stop sitting in church waiting to be noticed and Do Something!" Another thing might have been "Lighten up, and lose your virginity in your mid-20s - that would be about right for you I reckon". Controversial? Very probably. I'm not desperate to get drawn into a virginity debate, and even with a view on virginity which means that I don't necessarily think that losing it results in going straight to Hell without collecting £200 it's not something I take at all lightly, but I can't help thinking that that's one thing that if I'd got it in an appropriate (for me) perspective sooner would have saved me all manner of hassles later on (not to mention several hundreds of pounds' worth of counselling bills!). The ironic thing, of course, is that if I'd made different choices and followed my hindsight advice I'd have probably ended up with different things which eventually led to humungous counselling bills, but even knowing that it doesn't shut out the "what ifs" and the "if onlys".
Through all of this (realising that I've mentioned things only very superficially) one Bible verse which has, somewhat bizarrely, come to mind is from Genesis 1: "...the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters". That is an image I find at the same time comforting and puzzling. Comforting, that whatever I do, however much I get wrong or right, God's spirit is there in the background, watching and hovering, keeping me and not letting me go. But puzzling, that there wasn't a sudden "Let there be light" moment sooner. Did my fear keep me in the darkness longer than I needed to be? Did God keep me there because it was the best thing for me? I really don't know - somehow I suspect it's both and neither, somewhere between the two.
Life's bloody complicated sometimes, isn't it?