In the book that I am reading "Hope for a Weary Mom" I started the chapter about when life hurts too much. She spoke about how several hurtful events in a row didn't exactly take her faith away but it took away some of her trust and weakened her relationship with God. It mad we realize thats very much what happened to me. When I was really little before my parents spilt up we went to church all the time and we were a very active church family. Then my parents split up which made church attendance a little strained for us, but that was not the event that severed the ties with my childhood church. One of my older sisters got pregnant in high school and her baby was born very prematurely and with significant health problems. My niece only made it through the first 24hours of her life. I was too young then to appreciate what was happening and to even need to grieve. My family had trouble with the funeral arrangements for my niece. The church as a whole was against us burying my niece in their cemetery because she was born to and unwed teenager. At the time I was only in about the 3rd grade and I didn't really understand. I was much older when the hurt of that situation began to penetrate and compound with many other circumstances to drive me away from God for a good many years. Like the author of the book I never lost faith completely but I held God at arms length for a long time after being very passionate about my faith. Even immediately after this situation my faith was very strong in that way that only a child's can be. I could not get my mom to go to church after that, but there was a church across the street from the apartment complex that we lived in that had Awanas . I begged and pleaded to go. My mom eventually let me try it out and I took my younger sister. I loved it. I can remember praying to God and telling him how fervently I wanted to be saved and believed in Him. I remember the vigor with which I would memorize my bible verses, I made it all the way to the highest level at Awanas (and not all of that is because I was an overachiever). I was always so excited.
Then we moved to another near by town because out in the country was the only place my mom could afford a house after the divorce. I went to school in this small town from 4th-8th grade and tried three different churches with different friends. None of them stuck and I eventually ended up finding another hurtful situation. Im not sure exactly how old I was. I know I was a teenager and I was going to Wednesday night youth at the home church of a friend of mine. I had been attending Wednesday night there regularly for a little while. One night they began talking about divorce. I was the only child in that room who had divorced parents. So the leader of the class after talking about how much of a sin divorce was, looked at me and said Kim your parents are divorced don't you wish they would get back together. (I was outspoken even then.) I looked her directly in the eyes and told her no because that was not what was best for my mother so that was not what I wanted. She thought is best to make a comment on how divorce was never a part of God's plan. In the middle of class when she said that to me I got up and walked out of the room and never went back to that church and except for sporadic attendance did not start to attend church regularly for probably about 14 years.
No these two bad experiences weren't the only grief I had. I have spent a lot of time already telling you about some of the hurts that I have dealt with growing up, but because of the negative experiences that I had with these churches when I began to grieve in the hard times of my life I did not feel like I could go to church. I felt that maybe just the churches around here or maybe churches in general were tainted and they just weren't for me. I tried to keep up my faith and my relationship with God by myself. That never works and the strength of my convictions faded significantly, I lost that joy that I used to have about going to church.
Until I lost my dad almost two years ago and had to grieve in a completely different way I just wasn't ready to come back. And God always knowing the way to my heart was able to motivate me to want to try to involve myself in a church again for the sake of my girls. With a nudge from a friend of ours my husband and I found a small local church to try. And so far we have jumped in feet first and I am healing slowly but surely and I am growing. But I am not going to lie sometimes I still get vey nervous and I still have not been comfortable enough to fully open up to the people at church. Many of them do not even realize that I am loud, I never shut up, and I can be quite pushy. Baby steps. Its all about the journey.
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