Windmills

Don Quixote had a relatively simple story.  He rode off to fight dragons.
Unfortunately, those dragons were actually windmills.
He tragically lost his love and cracked.  So he had nothing left to do but escape to the world in his head and passionately fight battles that didn't exist.


I started this blog because I wanted to share stories that might help people along their way.
My life lately has been a mad rush of trying to solve every mystery I find.  I don't love the beauty that I find...I just try to figure it out.  Because I've lost my first love, and life doesn't make sense anymore.  I think it's important that you know this story.


When I was 14 years old I fell in love.  My parents had just divorced a couple years before, I was struggling to find my identity, and I was just angry at everything.  But even more than that, I'd given up hope.  I didn't believe my life would turn out to be anything, but I hid that behind the clever disguise of humor.  Never would I admit anything was wrong.  I've written about this story before, but I'll tell again that I went on a weekend church retreat and met Jesus there.  He was the big gaping hole in my story, the final piece to the puzzle that was my heart.  I could finally be real with myself and with other people, knowing that God didn't hate me and hadn't forgotten about me.  I found an incredible peace in my soul that I can to this day only attribute to God.  The basics of faith fed me.  I read the Bible and it talked about how God was a father to the fatherless, and it hit me because I wasn't close to my dad anymore.  It said that God sees our efforts and that when we try to love people and do the right thing it's not in vain.  It said He loves us.  And that's all I needed.  All my life I'd felt like an alien in my own skin.  Because of God, I became me, for the first time.  This was my first love.


I attended church regularly from then on, because I wanted to know more.  I read the Bible on my own, but it was always fascinating to get new perspectives and to learn the history behind what I was reading.  There were people that I loved at that church, and I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could.


But church is a funny thing.  I thought that every teaching would be right.  I never expected any of these people to lead me astray.  But slowly, over time, I was taught to agree to things that I could never in my heart actually believe.  The point of this story isn't to bash church.  I owe a lot to those people that encouraged me and loved me as I grew and learned.  The point is to be careful what you listen to, and to stand for the right things, and the right things only.


The truths that I learned were God's love for all people, His unending patience through the ages, and how Jesus Christ set the example of perfect love and laid down his life to save us.  I went to church to learn more about what that means.  I guess in my heart I was always hoping to know more about how to love other people, how to forgive each other and encourage each other even in the most difficult of circumstances.  I wanted to know how to make the world a better place; how to encourage beauty and love everywhere; how to tell people that God was not angry or out to get them, but was waiting patiently and loving them no matter what.  I wanted to help people.


Instead I was told that faith is more important than love.  I was told that homosexuals were evil, that it was a sin to get drunk or to smoke a cigarette.  I was told that God sees people as Christians and non-Christians, and that it's a Christian's job to try to "save" people.  I was told that avoiding sin should be a person's highest priority, and that you were a bad person if you made mistakes.  I was told that church is incredibly important, and the only reason to talk to a homeless person was to try and convert them to Christianity.


My faith was a sweet wine and these ideas were the roofie that put me out.  They slipped in subtly, and I didn't even notice how completely unbiblical and wrong each one of them was.  I'll say it again, this post isn't here to bash the church.  I'm writing because after years of trying to figure out why Christianity is more and more unsettling to me, I need to confess and to get this off my chest.  I've listened to so many ideas that were so wrong, and I can't do it anymore.  I feel like Don Quixote, riding off to tackle mysteries that don't matter because I can't cope with my love being gone.


Church, you are not my first love and you never will be.  God knows what I need and loves me deeply in a way you never could.  He never judged me for cussing or drinking or staying out too late.  He'd never try to correct me for restyling my hair or missing a few church services.  He'd never try to make me judge other people.


God, I am yours, if you will still have me.