Piecing it back together.

I’ll explain my thing with church and religion now.  I was born and raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist, but didn’t try to  take my spirituality seriously until later on when I was about 20 or so.  At that time an evangelist came to our church and began conducting Bible studies in the vein of a more extremist Adventist view. They were very well-taught and organized and really dove DEEP into the meaning of scripture and the connections between certain concepts in the Bible. I decided to join the studies and really try to apply them to my life if I felt so moved.  Well…what I ended up learning were interpretations and concepts that I could not truly accept.  There was a short period there where I tried to “follow the rules” out of fear for my soul, but God saw it fit to show me how flawed that reasoning was and I backed away from it to study more and try to understand better before making permanent changes in my life. After more Bible study, prayer, and conversations with others who were in the same Bible studies as me, I put the false me away for good.

The thing is…a lot (not all) of the concepts I learned rang as absolute truth from a Biblical standpoint.  There they were, in the Bible and if you were to be a true follower of the whole Bible as the Adventist faith requires, you have no choice but to live your life by those laws/standards/whatever.  The problem is…as I said…some things I could not accept.  Not because I was being selfish and wanting to “keep my sinful ways” as some people have put it.  No, I was actually trying to change my life.  I could not accept them because I did not (and don’t) believe that they were true.  Feel free to ask me to elaborate on what parts I don’t believe later on. Then I thought:  Well…if I can’t believe these parts of the Bible, how can I believe all of it?  I was taught that you cannot pick and choose what Biblical values you apply to your life and leave the ones you don’t like.  I was taught.

Let’s wrap it up here:  So…I found myself in a dilemma: Here I was trying to get a better vision of God and trying to follow my faith as closely as the length of my life would allow, and it backfired. I learned how to study the Bible for myself and was educated more on Adventist doctrines and found that I disagreed with too many key points to salvage any sort of religion I could follow. I was worse off than when I started.  At least when I started I believed…