"We represent...."
The Lollipop Guild.
The Lullaby League.
Before I set the 5-minute timer, I must purge those songs and images from my head.
We represent Jesus,
our Sunday School teacher said. Whatever we say, whatever do, and even whatever we think. God knows our innermost thoughts. No thought is safe inside your head because GOD can see into your mind!
Well, that put the fear of God in my soul.
For a while.
How could God see inside my head? This invisible God, this silent God. Others seemed to know God, but I only knew sun and wind, snow and rain, joy and pain. "I come that my joy may be yours," Jesus said.
It's not that I paid no attention in Sunday School. I listened, and I internalized those words. I was indoctrinated with them. And I was to REPRESENT Jesus in all that I would say or do.
But, but, but, those same people who heard that same message would say and do mean things.
FREE WILL! God allows people to choose to do evil,
because God wants us to be free to serve Him or not. It's a test, really. If we flunk the test we might fry in hell for all eternity, but that's our own fault. We were given the chance to accept God's graces. If we reject them, we fry. FOREVER.
And it won't be pretty.
I was young.
Even as young as pre-Kindergarten, I wandered around in a haze of confusion. These things I was told made no sense to me. The older I got, the more of the Bible I read, the more my "cognitive dissonance" increased. Judging from what I read in the DSM-5 manual, I've misused that term. For me, it's when what I am taught clashes with what I observe and think.
My grandpa died when I was five and I was "too young" to see his body at the visitation, too young to attend the funeral. My little sister and I were left in the care of a great-aunt who had only one leg and scooted around the kitchen in her wheechair, calling me a heathen or some such thing. I no longer remember what I said or what her exact words were, but I do remember being informed in no uncertain terms that I had been naughty.
To this day I am "naughty." I do not have the faith of a child. I dare to QUESTION everything, even though Dad told us ad infinitum to "Just do as I say, and don't ask why."
If I represented anyone, I figured, I represent Eve. She was framed. What was her crime? She was told not to seek information, not to eat of the forbidden fruit, lest she LEARN things. First thing she learned: I am naked. Adam! We are naked! So they cover up, and God knows why. Busted. And they're evicted from the Garden. Sentenced to a life of toil and trouble, and the monthlies and the pain of labor for women, because women represent Eve, and Eve represents curiosity and the audacity to question.
I represent the heretic. There must be some kind of Creator, Math-Genius God, Watchful Father/Mother figure, but as far as I can tell, the Bible gives us a fairly incomplete vision of this supernatural presence in our lives. Don't even get me started on how incomplete the Bible is and how "It was never meant to be a history book or a science textbook."
With all due respect and reverence (believe it or not, I'm all about reverence!), it's all second-hand information to me. Words written by men who claimed to be inspired by God. Teams of academics and scholars (all men) decided which written documents would be decreed The Bible, and which were dismissed as apocryphal.
Other religions and mystics seem to agree on this much: God is love.
Those who threaten a human mortal (who has at most roughly a hundred years to sow evil) with ETERNAL hellfire are misinformed and mean-pirited, not "righteous" and "just," and not at all loving.
"Burn, baby, burn" does not represent my way of thinking. Hellfire and damnation do not represent the loving God I would believe in. I do not imagine that I manifest all that is good and kind, merciful and compassionate, forgiving and patient, but I try to represent all that is good and hopeful, not cynical and bitter.
Live and Let Live.
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