How to Stop Playing Church

jordonewrites

Uncategorized

Mar 30 2016

The following is an excerpt from my book, I Believe in God, Now What?

Order your own copy for the sale price of $2.17 by clicking here.

Photo source: http://piczard.com | http://codecarvings.com

I was living a double life.

Everyone knew it except for me. God was my friend, but only on Sundays.

Other days, I preferred to live a life of secrecy. I enjoyed God, but only when I needed something.

And I was blind to my own faults, so I couldn’t understand why my life was in such disarray.

“Why me?” I would ask myself. “What am I doing wrong?” Little did I know, I was paving my own path to destruction.

Before I understood that believing wasn’t enough, you would see me in the club with a drink in one hand and weed in the other.

Sex was my main stress reliever, but even that wasn’t enough.

All along, I had no idea that what I was doing was “against God.” In my own eyes, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

After all, I knew other people in my church who were living that way too.

I didn’t know that I couldn’t listen to music that shouted “F**k bit***es, get money” while on Sunday listening to the sweet melodies of worship music without having an internal conflict.

I hardly even cracked open my Bible unless I had an emergency. I thought believing was enough. I didn’t know He wanted my life too.

My crazed habits only intensified as the stress in my life became greater, a stress that I soon realized I was only bringing down on myself.

In the middle of living this life that many would consider to be “wild,” just about the worst happened to me.

I was raped.

This was an event I didn’t want to look at in my mind, that I wanted to deny, but that brought me deep emotional turmoil in me, a turmoil I very nearly couldn’t deal with.

I certainly couldn’t deal with it as I was, undisciplined and immature, and without really accepting the solace and the peace that God can bring.

Amid the aftermath of being raped, I blamed myself for what had happened.

I was dealing with the pain the only way I knew how, through drinking alcohol and smoking weed.

Even when I would try to stop one or the other, or both, I couldn’t.

I had become addicted to the exhilaration that came with each of these substances.

Instead of taking my pains to God, I was releasing them in a joint.

Only, it wasn’t release, it was a vicious cycle of getting high and coming down and having to get high again—an addiction.

One particular night, after I got back to my apartment from the club, I came to my room and prayed on my knees, as I did almost every night before going to sleep.

Watching me, my friend asked, “How can you go from grinding at the club to praying on your knees?”

I said something like, “God knows my heart. Going to the club doesn’t mean I don’t love Him.”

Strangely enough, my friend was raped around the same time I was….

So, what happened with my friend? How did I learn to stop living a double life?

The rest of the story is in my book, I Believe in God, Now What?