Friday, March 13, 2015

Hello Fear....

I was about to start this post with, “I have not written in a while” but I realize that is redundant. What is more important is why I haven’t written in a long time.

Over the last few months a silence has crept over my soul. I slow, dark mist, a dark miasma of dread and fear, like a fog on a marsh it has hang around for long. Nothing I do can dispel this, well let’s call it what it is; fear.

Fear! Andrew Pacutho,  afraid?  Those that know me will find this hard to believe and still some will say, “but we are human, it happens” I find the timidity and fear as puzzling as most and the reasons a little confusing.

For the first time my fear does not come from outside but from within. Not within my spirit or my soul but within a community that i have called home and family for the longest time.  It’s like being of a different opinion gets you cast into the pile of the weird believer or worse backslider or labeled with something akin to you don’t know what you say and if you were plugged right it would all make sense.

While I have argued this out with friends close to me I still find the idea that I cannot be broken and messed up in church totally wrong. It’s like going to a hospital and being stigmatized for being sick.  There are so many questions and so few answers. The usual mantra of “God’s word has all the answers” feels hollow. Otyooo!!! I just blasphemed or something right? If the teacher cannot make plain the text, then the text, or the teacher or the student has a problem. I suspect it’s either the student or the teacher.

But more than that is the fear to speak out against perceived wrong things in church because suddenly you are or have been made to feel unsure of yourself.  You can’t be right when you are the only one who seems to see things a certain way right? They can’t all be wrong. Can they? If you are wrong, how wrong are you and must you keep shouting if you are that wrong? After all if you were right other people would stand with you right?

These questions can drive a man insane. I am still searching for the answer, praying that a light would shine in this fog but until then I shall sit in the back silent and do battle with my soul.

I shall leave church alone….and hopefully church will leave me alone…for a while.