“When did you become a bible-thumper? You didn’t really come off as a Christian in college.”
This blog is something I have been thinking about writing for a while now, but was finally determined to put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) when I was tailgating for the Virginia Tech game over winter break and a guy I hadn’t seen since college said the quotation above to me. It hurt, but it didn’t shock me. In fact, I was surprised it had taken this long for anyone to say it to me, and perhaps that’s what is most shocking.
Imagine your doctor telling you your health is really at risk and it is time to start dieting and exercising or else your whole life is going to spiral downward. Slowly but surely you switch out the chips for baby carrots and don’t let yourself watch any Netflix unless it’s while you’re on the treadmill. The transition seems like it’s taking forever and it’s a painful process but then you see someone from home and their eyes widen as they say, “I hardly even recognized you!” I imagine it’s a similar feeling, except that weight loss has a positive stigma and organized religion, I’ve observed, puts certain people off.
For most of my life I can think back to what was going on in any given period of time by which human I was dating at the time… minus my senior year of college, in which case I was too busy keeping the bars of Blacksburg, VA in business to be bothered with dating. There is no denying that I partied hard and had fun (I refuse to use the phrase “too much fun” although it may be appropriate here), but if anyone had asked me at any point in my life if I was a Christian, I would have said yes, because I was raised in Christian churches and I knew about Jesus. Truth be told, even though I had heard the stories, I had an absolute lack of spiritual awareness.
After graduation and moving to Florida, I began spending a lot of time with a human that did not encourage me to be my best self or make me feel valued. I’ll skip the details, but it was a really painful time for me that left me feeling borderline worthless. WHO WAS THAT GIRL AND WHAT WAS SHE DOING? It was ongoing for too long. Add that to being homesick for a family that was states away and long-distance friendships that were beginning to exist only through Snapchat and I was secretly starting to crumble.
You know those little round vacuum cleaners that roll around the house all day cleaning by themselves and get stuck in a corner, backing up and hitting the wall over and over again. You watch it and think, “Is that thing going to figure out it has to do something differently if it wants to stop banging itself into this dead end corner?” I had become that vacuum.
Then one day I woke up and pulled my laptop on my bed and looked up “nondenominational church in Gainesville, FL.” It felt like it was out of the blue, but now I think God just knew that I needed an undeniable change in direction.
I found Alive Church via Google and was there the next Sunday. The first couple of sermons I honestly cried. Sounds weird, I know. They weren’t sad or super obvious tears, it was just an experience that I can’t really explain, like things were finally making sense. The very first time I was there, sitting in the dimly lit congregation, the Pastor’s wife (Pastor Tabatha) got up on stage in her power stance and said “You. Are. Worthy!” Honestly, I forget the rest, and I couldn’t tell you one bit of the lesson that day except that it made me both laugh and cry, but when she said these words it was like they were crafted for me and I can’t WAIT to pass them on to women and girls around the world. I’ve been back every Sunday (that I’ve been in town) since and you know what? I like who I am again. I have the only validation I need and it’s so freeing to not have to endlessly chase after someone’s approval.
“I will not cause pain without allowing something new to be born.” Isaiah 66:9
