Greetings,
At age 15, I joined a word of faith church pastored by a well-known televangelist. Because of my visual and hearing impairments, everyone was so excited and sure they would see God perform a wondrous healing miracle. Of course, as time went on, my impairments got worse, and they began to wonder what I was doing to hinder my faith. even my mother jumped on me. “Why aren’t you healed yet? You must be doing something wrong.”
Yet, I continued to hold on to what I thought was my “personal relationship with Jesus. Why? I’m not a dummy, nor an I particularly credulous. But belief is based on what we want to be true, not what we know to be true. Using logic and reason with a Christian is like sending fm radio waves to someone with an am radio. As long as I needed Christianity to be true, for me it was true.
My visual and hearing impairments led me to ask questions that other Christians just weren’t asking. I read things in the bible that they didn’t teach me in Sunday school. I got to the point where I was so disgusted by what I had read that there was just no way to keep loving and worshipping the blood-thirsty, schizophrenic, draconian psychopath that Christians called God. The behavior of other Christians , not just toward me but toward each other and toward non believers, didn’t drive me away from Christianity, but it made it easier to walk away once I made the decision to do so. I didn’t discuss it with anyone or try to explain my decision to anyone. I just walked away.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than this brief synopsis.
