I am the first to admit that my childhood religious experience was unusual. I don't remember how long it lasted, but I distinctly remember going to the AG church one week and the Baptist church the next. One week I'd be expected to raise hands, weave back and forth, shout "Hallelujah", and get into the music, which would be played by a piano, guitar, drums, and singers. The next week we stood quietly, hands clutching our hymnals, and sang hymns played by an organ. One week there were prayer requests; the next week there were not. I remember asking my dad what would happen if I raised my hands at the Baptist church. "The pastor would probably think you had a question," whispered my long-suffering father.
Outward signs. Easily understood. The implicit message, though, was quite a different matter. The one church taught that once you had accepted the Lord into your heart, that was it. The other stated that if you were walking down the street with sin on your soul and got hit by a truck before you could confess it, that was it. You were doomed. I'm not sure why I experienced the second belief system as truth and not the first, but that was me, and I was stuck.
In the years since, I've been a church shopper, sometimes even a church hopper. I found myself running from the nonliturgical churches and entering the liturgical world--it gives me true comfort and peace. However, there is a catch. This is the very church that I was warned against as a girl. Close kin to the Catholic church, whose Pope, my old church whispered, was the antichrist, my church of choice advocates for all and invites anyone--gay or street, broken or whole, Christian or not--to sit and say their prayers. My soul is at peace until the relic thought of the past enters in. "What if you're wrong?" it whispers. "What if in your quest for freedom you have traveled too far and are now among the damned?" The answer--I don't know. But I ask the Lord's patience and forgiveness and hope that I will one day be able to worship with nothing but peace in my soul.