My relationship with Christianity is a bit rocky and distant. It was the default religion in my life until my teen years, as Dad was part of the local Friends Meeting; the practices of the Meeting had a more pronounced effect on me than the actual trappings of the religion. BJ was traumatic to my view of the religion, and since BJ was vowing that he was a True Christian, I decided post-haste that I would be having nothing to do with Christianity if he were a prime example, and backed away from that faith with all due speed given BJ's attitudes and practices.
I've become more comfortable with Christianity in the past several years, after learning that BJ was not representative of faithful Christians truly in tune with their Divine, but while the Divine is the Divine (I'm rather universalist) I have a very strong separation from their churches.
Sometimes it comes as a source of wonder to me when I'm called upon to Speak to some of my Christian friends. How is it that they are Christian, yet I'm the one called to speak to them? Shouldn't someone of their own faith be the first choice for a mouthpiece for the Divine?
That happened this week, and my friend commented that it was a little funny. My response:
Yeah, it is a little funny. But we are coming at it from two different directions that cover some of your blind spots. Our perspective on it may enable us to see things that someone who is fully invested in a church may not be able to see. A regular church-goer might not remember as hard as they might otherwise that the world is one's church when one sanctifies it through prayer, and the people of the world are one's congregation when one meets them with the light of spirit and hope and friendship and love.
And that last, I thought I should share with the rest of my journal, because the world does need more of that. No matter what religion it is.