Freedom is Ditching Church on Sunday Morning

This morning, instead of driving to church, I drove a loop outside of town and then I came home. And nobody knew it, but me. This was possible because my parents visited a different church this Sunday while I was supposed to go to our usual church. Except, I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

Things have been different since our old paster died. Even then I barely believed in it all, but he was a lot of what held my faith together. Now we have a temporary paster that everyone seems to like. Or maybe they don’t, but the elders’ team chose him and they’re acting as though they like him because he probably is what is best for the church. He has a few different ideas that are revolutionary to the congregation but in a way that doesn’t actually affect their daily lives because they aren’t the ones being condemned to hell.

Anyway, since he’s been there, going to church has been harder for me. For a long time already it was a chore that I was used to and kept up with in order to maintain a healthy relationship with my parents. It’s a small price to pay for peace in my house. And after all, if I have an eternal soul I want to be able to make some sort of educated guess about what may happen to it when I die. Church is about the only place where you can get information on that kind of thing. But, this Sunday, I decided not to go, and you don’t know the amount of space something takes up inside if you until it’s gone and you feel the void where it used to be.

My morning began with the decision already made. I had to convince my parents that I was going to church so I got up at nine am and took a shower. Then I got dressed, and I sat in my car to warm it up. And it was at that moment that I had a conflict of conscience.

It was only a week ago when I had decided, again because I kept changing my mind, that God was real and that church was only corrupt because it was created by people. That didn’t mean that I shouldn’t go. If God is real than he deserves my worship and my love. And how am I to know that not going to church today wasn’t going to start leading me down a path where I forget about him altogether? What if it just makes it too easy for me to never go to church again as soon as I move out of my parents’ house? After all, if God is real then I need to make sure I have a relationship with him for my own good.

There were plenty of times in my life where I was sure that God existed. My relationship with faith has always been like a boomerang being thrown away, but always coming back. And during the moments when I come back, my faith feels stronger than ever. I tell my Lord that I’m sorry and that I’m His and that I’m going to try to do better. And it feels so real. Things go perfectly for me and I feel the peaceful presence of someone watching over and guiding me. I mean, if we’re looking for an example, posts about God never show up on my Instagram feed, and yet, as soon as I have a crisis of faith, there’s a post assuring me that the Lord is there for me and that he will never abandon me. How do you explain that showing up then? Even at times when my faith is weaker, I eventually ask God just to help things be okay, and I feel like I’ve given my problems to someone else who knows how to work with me so that they are. Time and time again I have wondered if God is real, and I have come to the same conclusion that I am not alone in this world and that I could not be this lucky without the guidance of something larger than myself. So clearly, I should just suck it up and go to church.

Then I sent a quick text message to my friend to see if she was in town because I needed somewhere to go to kill time while I waited for my parents to leave. She wasn’t, but that was okay because I had a back-up plan. I pulled out of my spot across the street and just started to drive out of town toward my church. Except, once I got far enough out of town, instead of turning left I turned right.

Now, everybody knows about those social constraints that we all obey so that we can fit in with society. Well, I can be pretty uptight about what counts, and what doesn’t. As a middle child, I have a tendency to be a perfectionist at times. So it makes me very uncomfortable just to do something that could almost be considered breaking a social taboo. All of this translates to if I get a text while driving I am going to ignore it. I am not going to check it while driving, (even though I was on a flat, back road with nobody else around) and I definitely won’t pull off to the side of the road to just answer it then keep going. Except that is exactly what I did.

When I decided not to go to church this morning I had opened up a block of time that, for the past twenty years, I have not had available to me except on the rarest occasions. That was something that I was highly aware of. Especially because the reason I had that time now was since I made it available for myself. And with this newfound freedom comes the question of what you’re going to do with it. I didn’t really know the answer to that question. After all, this is only one day. Only one hour extra that I get. It’s almost nothing. But it made me feel free enough to do small things I never would have done before. I took advantage of the side of the road to send a text message, and on my way back into town I treated myself to coffee and breakfast that I normally wouldn’t have bought just for me, and then when I got home I did the freest thing of all. I peed with the door open.

For a long time going with my family to church on Sunday morning has been something I did because I had to. At the times when my faith was strong, it felt like I was making the conscious choice to go. But if I’m honest with myself, I would be going whether or not I was choosing to. That is especially apparent to me lately because of all the changes going on in my church. I question religion and the truth about God a lot. I find it impossible to turn my back on His existence, but I learned something new today about my religious experience that I had never understood before. That it’s not a one-for-all situation. Religion is a subjective experience, and sometimes the church isn’t the key to freedom. Sometimes it’s the oppressor making you blind to what you’re capable of whether that’s big or just small.