Then in high school I went to public school again, and everything changed.
I wasn’t on the outside looking in anymore. I was confronted with the realities of the “world.” I learned that sex was fun, even outside of marriage. That drinking wasn’t just for alcoholics and deadbeats, but when you had a couple beers some things became a lot more fun.
The pillars of my constructed church reality were beginning to shake. What I was experiencing flew directly in the face of the “sin isn’t fun” and “being a Christian is” mindset that had been drilled into me as a kid.
The older I grew, the more angry I became about this constructed reality.
I felt like I was tricked into believing that Jesus lived in a Sunday School room, but he doesn’t. He lives in my small one bedroom apartment and in the cold pour at Pat’s Tap and in taco shops and in the midst of conversations at work.
He lives in the homeless shelter I used to visit after college, because it was a free meal and the church job I had didn’t pay me enough to buy groceries. It was a chance to have good conversation with men who were nothing like the people I met in church, and knew a lot more about the Jesus that I knew.
And if I’m being honest, I find it hard to find God in a building where we sing all the same songs, and recite a list of what we believe (just in case we forget it later), and where Jesus looks like my Sunday School teacher.
I want to experience the God of wonder beyond all constructed realities.
I want to meet the God of majesty.
Have you met God? Where have you found him?
