AtypicallyRecovering

Photo- mine

I’m not a ‘religioius’ person. Organized religion has become associated with hate, and I can’t ‘do’ that. I was raised in a church way back when they were still fairly inert when it came to discussing social issues. I had a good experience at church during my entire childhood and early adulthood, but when I moved to Texas after getting my nursing boards results back, I worked a LOT of weekends and nights, so church kind of fizzled out, though my beliefs are still strong… they’re just much more moderate and accepting of all kinds of people. I am a Christian, but I’m not going to judge others for their beliefs, or who they love, or anything else that isn’t my business. AS a Christian, I believe that if there’s no compassion involved, I want nothing to do with it.

Because of lifelong pain from humans, I tend to prefer animals and God. It’s much easier for me to believe in something that doesn’t want to hurt me, than a human, whose species has been the source of ongoing pain for as long as I can remember. With animals, there’s no agenda- they just want to live their lives doing their animal thing. With my dogs, they were more emotional support than any human has ever been, though a few have given it a good effort with what they had to work with.

SO, I tend to rely on spiritual things to get me through rough times. For me, that could be finding interesting rocks, the seasons, weather, stars, wild critters, or other things in nature. I feel like the outdoors is my ‘church’, and a favorite activity before becoming disabled was to take my camera out and take a bunch of photos of flowers, storms, tornados, rivers, hills, etc. I’m also getting a lot out of meditation books. They come in all ‘flavors’ with the choice of one’s own spiritual life being left up to each individual. Books like “Chicken Soup for The ______ Soul” are also ones I gravitate towards, along with some of the Hazelden meditation books, or ones like those. They have short chapters, and leave me thinking about a variety of things. They get me out of MYSELF, and looking at the much bigger picture around me. It’s critical for me to have an anchor, and that has always been God for me. But I see God through other things.

I used to be more rigid, when I was going to church as a kid. Thinking was fairly black and white (typical kid stuff), and since social issues weren’t really a church ‘thing’ back then, I had a LOT to learn after leaving home. When I moved to Texas, I encountered my first transvestite- a very nice man in the line at Walgreen’s where he was getting his make-up. I worked during the early years of AIDS, and met so many young men who would never leave the hospital back when everyone died. I got used to different cultures living in Central Texas, and for all of it, I’m so thankful. I met some amazing people of different races, beliefs, LGBTQ (one was a very brave trans man who was transitioning at a time when nobody was talking about it; he was a great co-worker), and other social interests. That was also all part of my spiritual growth. And I’ve stuck to the “everyone deserves respect and to be treated with dignity” way of thinking. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who showed me how to be a better person from having met them.

I’m far from perfect as a Christian, mostly because perfect doesn’t exist. I’ve been human longer than I’ve been a Christian. I still swear (working on it, just for the sake of really identifying what I’m feeling, and not just blurting something out). I have a lot of work to do, and have realized that nobody knows everything about what God thinks or said. The Bible is important to me, but so is the context of social norms at the time it was written, the things are NOT spoken about, and the fact that nobody could record everything that went on in the thousands of years it was written by humans, inspired by God. But the bigger thing that I was taught is that being compassionate and decent towards ALL people is the most important. With the recent things going, on in my life, that has been challenging. But I’m still trying not to forget what was good. It’s been a minute since there was anything to be an example, but it was there. I’m not sure how real it was, but it was there for a little while, and when I was most unstable medically and nutritionally. I’ve still got to look for the good.