Church on a Post-It Note

We went to church again today and rather than journaling about it in a Word document, I'm going to bless you all with my brain smudge.

I'm not exactly sure what I believe, or what category of Christianity, let alone religion, that I fit into. I have attempted to sum up my faith many times in eight million words or less but alas, it just cannot be done, and maybe that's just it! That I don't have a fucking clue. And maybe that's not only okay, but maybe that's what faith is all about.

I do know a few things for sure and they go like this:

a) I believe that there's something bigger out there. I don't give a dirty dink if it's a she or a he or a purple polka-dotted camel, and I quite honestly don't think it matters. And even if it did matter, us mere humans wouldn't even be able to comprehend it anyway, so what's the point.

b) Whatever "it" is, is way better than I am. And for the sake of ease, and because I am secure enough in who I am to not feel threatened by organized religion, I will call "it" God. And usually with a capital "G" because if I truly believe it's better than me, than the least I can do it capitalize its name, for crying out loud.

c) And God has a whole lot to do with the concept of love: sacrificial love, brotherly love, erotic love, passionate love, unconditional love, creative love, mother and father love. I'll get into it another time but the thing that I have experienced the most about love is that as a human, our selfishness holds our love on a leash. It can only stretch out so far, no matter what we do. But then something mysterious happens where a bridge is built between the end of our leash and the end of the leash that our loved one is holding onto, and the love between us is now fluid. It fills the gap. It reaches to places untouched by humanity. We forgive when we couldn't possibly forgive on our own. We love when we don't have any left.

Our pastor talked a bit about why we were all there at church today, and he said that the bottom line is that we are there to remember that God is big and we are small. Not that we're not important, because we are! And we are loved. But that even though we sometimes can't see the forest through the trees, God has the big picture all figured out. Like when as parents we take our kids for their immunizations, our kids scream and kick the crap out of our shins because they don't understand why they're getting stabbed with needles, but because we are the adults, we know that it's keeping them alive.

And crap, I need to take my kids for their flu shots.