Have I been brainwashed by religion???

I was trying to get to sleep the other night when a frightening possibility occurred to me: I realised that I spend an unusually large percentage of my time (by the standards of most people) thinking about church, God, His plans for us and what He wants me to do. All that stuff. This wasn’t the frightening part, the frightening part was that maybe the only reason I love God and try to live my life how He wants, is because I think so much about this stuff. In a nutshell: what if I’ve been brainwashed to believe what I believe?

You can believe anything is a great cause if you think about it enough. You can come to the conclusion that genocide is the answer, that Middle Earth is more real that the UK, that meeting your own needs is the only way to be happy.

But then again, if I compare God to the other things that have taken up my thoughts over the years, God seems to have had a noticeably different effect on me.

I’ll give you some examples. In my teenage years, like most other teenagers, I thought mainly about boys and romance and sex. I became obsessed with the desire to be in a romantic relationship, and I felt sure that this would make me happy and complete, but the real results were disappointment and low self-esteem.

Then I retreated from the world and into my own head. I barely connected with other humans beyond shallow, daily interactions. My daydreams became stories and I wrote them down, every spare moment of thought was spent in them and they became as real as reality. This preoccupation with myself and my writing lead to self-absorption, loneliness and an inability to connect with others, until eventually even my creativity dried up.

Now, however, I think about God (although I still think about relationships and myself and my writing, cos I ain’t perfect). In stark contrast He has changed my life in better, subtle and more beautiful ways.

I no longer search for romantic love, or need male attention to boost my self-esteem; more often it comes from the person who created me and the friends He has placed around me. I am not as introverted and afraid; I can make friends and keep them and accept love from them. I don’t write so much but what I do write is more meaningful, and I’ve been given an incredible opportunity to illustrate a book.

I’m not saying everything is 100% wonderful because it’s sure as hell not. What I am saying is that God has grown me and healed me, and continues to grow and heal me the more time I spend with Him.

I have not been brainwashed: I am a different human being than I was seven years ago. And it is not a change that could ever have happened by accident or by my own doing (I promise you, aside from the fact that it was happening to me, I had no hand in the good stuff God has done in my life).

The thing about God is that He loves each of us, and it’s not a sort of pity-love or begrudging-love, but He truly likes us and wants to spend time with us. The only thing standing in the way is our own desire to do exactly what we want, when we want (this is what sin is) because we are arrogant enough to think we know what is best for us. We forget that God is fairly competent at His job (running the universe and all) and that He loves us more than we love ourselves.

All this sin pushes God away from us until He’s so far away that we may never even glimpse Him. A big ole wall is built up so high that we don’t even realise that there’s someone calling our name on the other side. But when Jesus died, rejected by his friends, humiliated, arms outstretched, He took our selfishness, fear and sin with Him. He made a direct connection between us and the Almighty so powerful that you only have to whisper a thought and He hears you, and if we decide that we don’t wanna do our own thing anymore, because it doesn’t work very well, that we wanna do God’s thing, He’s right there, waiting with His arms outstretched.

***

Hello little friends! I didn’t want to write this post very much but I felt like God thought it was a good idea, so you can blame Him. If you have any thoughts or questions about this stuff please feel free to share them, either publicly on this post or privately by text or fb message.