I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. -C.S. Lewis

Friends, because I care about you and because I love you, I’m not going to shy away from the truth in this post. That being said, I am not proclaiming that this post is the truth and the only truth. I am simply saying what has been truth for me and what I know has been truth for many others.

This post will include all the good, the bad and the ugly about my journey through Christianity. When I became a Christian, I had no idea what I would be getting myself into. So here it is: the truth about Christianity…

Before I became “one of them,” I thought about Christians as people who had worked hard to make their lives better. They worked hard to follow good rules that were based on respect, were probably pretty strict about complying with these rules, and were now soaking in the rewards of being such good people. Which is why their lives looked so good… From the outside that is. My first impression of a Christian was a woman who took my family in when we first came to Canada and my family knew her and all of Christianity as the “crazy catholics” because it was basically the same religion, Christians just seemed more intense. What do you know about Christians? What have you thought about Christians whether you are or aren’t one? What is Christianity to you?

I’m going to start with the good things about Christianity. I’m just about to hit 3 years of believing in this faith, and to be honest with you, I’ve tried going back to being agnostic in the last couple months just to see how it would work out for me… I’m not sure this has anything to do with it, but I have just lived the worst 4 months of my life trying to be agnostic after having known what it’s like to be a believer. Here’s why:

• Being a believer to me back when I first started believing meant that I would no longer make mistakes like I used to. It meant turning away from my bad habits in an attempt to be better, feel better, seem better (I was wrong and you’ll find out why later).
• Being agnostic meant that I believed that some sort of God existed because honestly, I couldn’t deny the spiritual encounters I’ve had. But it also meant I could do what I wanted because I didn’t actually know the repercussions of following the path that I thought would be best for myself. I became the god of my own life again and made decisions without seeking out my gut feeling, my intuition.

Christianity is not meant to ruin your fun. It wasn’t created to be the ultimate party pooper of everything in this life, as I used to think was its purpose. Christianity is not a strict, judgemental religion that hates gay people. Christianity is actually the closest thing to freedom that we will ever find on this earth.

Yes, there is a book that christians read. No, you won’t go to hell if you don’t read it.

Yes, Christians make it seem like there are expectations that people need to follow. No, they are not rules that you have to follow otherwise you’ll go to hell.

Yes, Christians believe that a man named Jesus walked this earth, who claimed to be God and lived a perfect, sinless life. No, Jesus nor God expect you to be perfect and sinless as he was.

Yes, Jesus. Christians believe that Jesus dying on the cross meant that their own sins were forgiven. No, Jesus didn’t pick favourites when he did that. EVERYONE was included in his plan of ultimate forgiveness.

Yes, when Jesus lived, he gave suggestions to people of how to live their lives. Don’t kill each other, don’t be rude to each other, don’t steal from one another, don’t go sleeping around, don’t disrespect each other (especially your parents), etc. No, the bible does not say to shove these suggestions down people’s throats and to hate people who don’t follow them.

Yes, Jesus was actually a nice guy. He made people who felt left out feel welcomed. He made people who felt invisible feel loved. He went to visit sick people. He loved being there for his friends. He served others above himself. He lived simply so that others could simply live. He cried too when he felt pain, he wasn’t an emotionless guy. He got angry when he saw disrespect. Just because he lived a perfect/sinless life, it doesn’t mean the life he was given was perfect. He was also tempted by “bad habits,” and never rubbed it in our faces how perfect he was, but instead offered ways to help us stay away from our bad habits too because in the end those suggestions could be better for us.

Examples (Jesus didn’t say these explanations I’m saying the explanations but he said the suggestions):

• It’s probably a good idea not to kill each other because somebody loves somebody, and people don’t like it when you kill someone they love.
• Maybe it would be best if you didn’t steal from anyone because you could get caught, go to jail, waste your years in jail instead of doing productive things for yourself and potentially shame your family.
• If you sleep around, you might get an STD or an STI or a bladder infection and to be honest, sex can be a pretty emotional thing for some people so also protecting your heart might feel better in the end.
• Lying probably isn’t good either because guilt builds up and if the person you lied to ever found out, it would hurt their feelings, hurt the trust that was built between the two of you and your rep is totally down the drain for being an honourable person.
• Don’t be mean to your mom. Or your dad. Parents are not perfect and in my case, they may be the reason I’m so messed up now. But I was probably better off being raised by those 2 people instead of being a baby on the street probably dead after 24 hours crying on the street. Our parents did a lot for us, even if all we see is all the ways that they messed up. Just don’t be mean to them.

There are probably so many more situations where Jesus taught us to be respectful.

TRUTH: If I spent the rest of my life believing this bologna about Jesus, God, Heaven and Hell and it ends up not being true, what did I really miss out on? At least I may be remembered as a respectful woman, decent friend, not-murderer kind of person.

REAL TRUTH: I’ve already messed those things up! Even as a Christian, I’ve been disrespectful, a bad friend, unfaithful, a liar, a cheat, impure, a pretty bad daughter, a lazy worker, etc. The list goes on and on. HERE’S THE THING: This doesn’t make me a hypocrite. This is me trying to get through this life as honest as I can. Just because I became a Christian it doesn’t mean that I have it all figured out and I am now going to live as perfect a life as Jesus did. Just because I became a Christian doesn’t mean that I hate liars, cheaters, murders, gay people, rude people, etc. Heck, one of my best friends is a lesbian!

Just because I am a Christian it does not mean that I have it all figured out. I am still a human, just like anyone else, who has to struggle through all the crap of this life too. I also get depressed. I also want to get drunk out of my mind when I have a bad day. I want to get laid by someone who may not end up being my husband in the end. I think about stealing when I don’t have money.

I AM NOT PERFECT.

Being a Christian does not make you perfect. Being a Christian has been the realization of how IMPERFECT I am and turning to someone who led a really dang good example of what it means to be a good, selfless person. Being a Christian means that I get to turn to someone who is perfect, blameless, sinless and watch how he lived so that I could learn to be a better version of me. Being a Christian does not take away from the artist I am. It does not suppress my dreams or passions. It simply helps create a better version of who I already am.

Christianity was not created to ruin your fun. The people that I’ve seen thrive off of their lives at its fullest potential were some solid, Christian people. Christianity is about having faith in the possibility that God is who He says He is: a really powerful guy who just loves you, like a heck of a lot. He shows His love in different ways, with mercy, grace, love, patience, kindness, not shoving His existence down your throat, not pushing down your doors to enter into your life. But he is a gentleman, and he’ll let you walk through the door whenever you feel like accepting love. How do we accept love from someone like God? Believe that you are worthy of the typical, Christian phrase, John 3:16. Believe that you are worthy of someone dying for you, because whether you believe it or not right now as you read this, he did. And what if he didn’t? As I said before I will spend the rest of my life believing that the price for all my mistakes was paid by God sending His son to show me how to be a better person, and then Jesus sacrificing his own life so that I could have mine. What will I have lost if none of this is real but I ended up being a nicer version of myself? Nothing. No regrets.

 

Now, the bad of Christianity:

Remember: Christians, just like not-Christians are also imperfect.

Christians do this thing where they bring their non-Christian friends to social events like a games night, a coffee house, social events where big groups of friends get together to hang out. The reason Christians do this is because they want to show their friends the place that they have found acceptance, kindness, generosity and love.

Christians find acceptance within each other because Jesus showed us what it meant to be forgiving with each other, no matter what the circumstance. Let’s say person A murdered their brother and person B stole a sticker from a store. Jesus sees both sins as the same because there is no “levels of wrongness.” Wrong is wrong. BUT: Jesus is Jesus. Which means that he forgives and loves person B just as he loves and forgives person A. Why should forgiveness be held back from any person? We are all equally imperfect humans, therefore all equally deserving of a God’s forgiveness. This is why Christians choose Jesus: because of a little thing called MERCY. Mercy is “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” This is the kind of God that Christians believe in. So because Jesus had mercy on EVERYONE that crossed his path, Christians do their humanly-possible-best to have mercy with each other as well.

This being said: Christians feel pain too.

This also being said: Christians hurt Christians.

This even more being said: Christians hurt not-Christians.

It’s the truth. It’s the bad truth. And it is understandable why people would say “Christians are such hypocrites” because we preach how good Jesus is and how good Christianity is, but more often than not, we forgot to tell people about how imperfect, broken, and stupid we can be too.

Remember this: If a Christian is preaching to you about how good God and Jesus are, they are literally talking about JUST God and Jesus. The bible that Christians so call “read” actually says and admits how imperfect we can be as people, therefore not promising that humans will be the answer for eternal happiness.

• Psalm 146:3 “Don’t put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there.”
• Psalm 27:10 “Even if my mother and father abandoned me, the Lord would take me in.”
• Numbers 23:19 “God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?”

Please don’t come to church with a Christian and expect them to fix you, because they won’t. Christians don’t lean on each other for the answers. They lean on a God who claims to love them unconditionally, but can lean on each other for friendship, community, etc. Christians need one another.

THIS BEING SAID: Christians also fail in this area. Just because we are Christians, it doesn’t mean that we didn’t go to high school, notice the cliques/trends and then bring them into the church as well. Christians are people too, and sometimes we let our pride and ego get the best of us and church can become a show, social events become cliquey, people say what they think is funny but can actually be offensive, etc. The bible actually tells Christians to CALL EACH OTHER OUT when things like this happen. If you see someone stealing from a store, you’d probably tell someone in the shop, right? As Christians, if we see something fishy in the community, we too will tell “someone in the shop.”

We are called to call each other out on our mistakes to help make us better people, but it is strongly WITHOUT JUDGEMENT. Jesus didn’t judge people when he corrected them. He said corrections to make people better versions of themselves. I made a mistake this year: I was dealing with feeling left out of the church community who are supposed to be “perfectly accepting and loving.” My way of dealing with it was leaving the church entirely without telling anyone about how I felt. The one time that I did tell someone how I was feeling I said it with so much anger, bitterness, resentment and judgement… The one thing God had asked me not to do. I pointed fingers at everyone and blamed them for feeling like crap about myself. I began to feel not just left out, but ugly, fat, crappy, and hating on myself. These things were not anyone else’s fault. But I blamed these imperfect people anyways!

Yes, I was personally hurt but it was a personal attack against me, not them. And somehow I involved them. I judged them. I never said bad things about them as people, but I spoke with resentment and bitterness in my voice about them, and that was enough.

I am not the only person that this next situation has happened to, and I’m sorry to those who feel guilty about being in this group of people, but it needs to be said and I will not sit in my mediocre corner of silence anymore. I have seen a large amount of people, Christians and not-Christians, walk away from the good things about Christianity because of the following problem. Here is the next bad thing about Christianity:

The cliques. The groups. The anti-social aspect of a “social” night. People saying things like “Oh, well not everyone will get along with everyone.” “It’s not high school so don’t act like it is.” “Jesus only had his 12 close friends and that was it.” “There wasn’t things like social anxiety in Jesus’ time so people weren’t so nervous around each other then.”

I say this next statement without judgement and actually with remorse because I too, am guilty of being an exclusive, all-about-me-and-my-friends Christian:

These are excuses. Excuses are for the weak. People who don’t want to be challenged and don’t want to grow will make excuses. I know that the people I looked up to and used to be friends with are BETTER than this. This is where we get into the UGLY of Christianity…

 

Welcome to the ugly of Christianity, where we get into the vulgar, nasty, naked truth and nothing but the truth.

The thing about Christianity is the attack that comes against God. There’s a little guy sitting in Hell named Satan, and he rules over the world of death and suffering (maybe Hell doesn’t exist, but at least it encouraged me to not want to go to a place like that and be a better person throughout my lifetime). So this little Satan guy is really mad at God. Hates him. Satan is so filled with hatred and anger that anyone who follows God is also targeted by Satan. Think about it like this: if there are two kingdoms fighting against each other, the kings don’t go for killing the other king; they want to bring down the other king’s kingdom first. Now, our God is too busy loving us and giving us life to even look once at Satan. Satan, on the other hand, has made it his mission to destroy the one thing that God loves the most: Us.

The bible says that “all good things come from God.” So why is there sickness in the world? Why is there so much brokenness, hurt, pain, suffering? Didn’t God make this world we live in? Why are there so many imperfections?

Like I said, God is a gentleman and He decided to give us free will when He made Adam & Eve. Adam & Eve, being imperfect humans, were the first to mess up. They messed up because Satan told them to mess up. Satan made false promises to them and they fell for it.

That was the first ever story in the bible after Adam & Eve were created. BUT don’t be fooled: Satan is still doing that same work today. The bible says that Satan comes to earth just to kill, steal and destroy. He’s making us fall for stupid promises such as riches, popularity, success, money. How does he do this? By creating things such as greed, pride, selfishness, lust, disrespect, judgement, etc. Who is under his attack? EVERYONE. Because EVERYONE has a chance to experience God’s love. So Satan is attacking our world with sickness, brokenness, pain, etc to make us doubt God’s power and His existence. That being said, Satan is also attacking our churches. He’s attacking Christians to break them apart, just as he is attacking not-Christians to not begin believing in God.

C.S. Lewis wrote a book called “Mere Christianity” where he talks about the existence of good vs. evil, and how both came about. My belief is that everything may have been neutral at one point, but because of God, the things He did/made were good. Then because of Satan, the things that he did/made were bad. So we now have a good and a bad guy.

The good guy made us.

The bad guy attacks us.

This is why “good people do bad things.” This is why churches are becoming selfish, greedy, cliquey, etc. Being on the outside, it is SO easy to blame those on the inside. But we forget who is really at fault: Satan.

How can this be fixed?

Well, I’m not going to push this down anyone’s throat, but I believe, with every inch of my being, that God has already won. See, no one told me that when Jesus died, he actually “went to hell”, and actually defeated the power and attacks of Satan and sin against our lives. I just found that out like 2 years ago and I was totally mind blown! Then, the belief is that Jesus CAME BACK, not just from the dead, but from Hell to tell us “Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that Satan has been defeated. Thank you. That is all.” Satan’s initial battle has been conquered by the power of God inside of Jesus. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT SATAN DOES NOT STILL TRY.

FAITH = CHRISTIANITY = BELIEVING means that we believe that battle is already fought, it is already won, and it means believing that Satan will never win because Jesus already won. Faith is believing in what we can’t always see or feel. You cannot tell anyone else how they feel. I can’t tell you to feel that Christianity is real, which also means that you can’t tell me that I haven’t experienced all the truth about Jesus that I’ve experienced. I can’t tell you that you weren’t birthed by your mother just because I didn’t see it for myself. So if I tell you that God is absolutely real to me, you can’t tell me that He’s not.

Trust me, I’ve only believed in God for 32 months and I tried to walk away from it in August until 2 weeks ago. From August until 2 weeks ago were the worst 4 months of my entire life. I felt SO alone. SO broken. But 2 weeks ago I decided to give God a chance again. He took me in again with open arms, despite all the things I had done, all the things I had said and just loved me. There is nothing humans can do to take us away from His love. No one has messed up bad enough for God not to love them. I’m about to hit my 36th month of having believed in God, and I can tell you now that I would never go back. Yes it’s been harder because people have different/higher expectations of me as a person, such as I’m not supposed to suffer from mental health because I have the “joy of the Lord inside me” or how I’m not supposed to feel left out of a huge group of ‘good Christians’ because “I’m supposed to find acceptance in God”, or how I’m supposed to be the “perfect daughter” because I have the “discipline of Jesus inside me.” It gets tiring and frustrating to not feel like I’m good enough for other people, but I want you all to know that we are good enough for God.

Christians are not being asked to strive & commit good deeds in order to get to Heaven. All it takes is the acceptance of God’s love into your heart, the admittance that Satan sucks and we have messed up, and the acceptance that Jesus did give his life for us. This is why I said that Christianity is the closest thing to freedom on this earth: God gives us the will to choose, He doesn’t force it on us, just like He gave me the freedom to walk away the last 4 months without chains around my neck so that I could figure out the truth for myself. After believing those 3 simple things, the freedom of knowing that someone who loves you unconditionally is taking care of every step of your way is the best feeling! That’s why being the god of my own life for the last 4 months was so terrifying, because I don’t know anything. I don’t have any of the answers. I don’t know what my next step is. Trusting in God feels SO good because someone who loves me would never let me foot walk on the wrong path.

So that was it. The good, the bad and the ugly of being a Christian.

The Good: It’s easy to become a Christian. Doesn’t take much.

The Bad: It’s hard being a Christian. Growing and learning is hard.

The Ugly: There is always going to be someone rooting against us and attacking us in our deepest, darkest, most vulnerable places. That will never go away until Jesus comes back. But in those deepest, darkest, most vulnerable places is also where we come face to face with God. So don’t be scared.