That got them off my back. But hell. Now we needed to go to my in-law’s church once, so I wasn’t lying.
Now I had to do some serious—something. Something. I didn’t even know what. All I knew was that I had this giant chip on my shoulder regarding all things Christian-related, and it was starting to get very heavy.
I thought that it was time to apply my non-negotiables to Christianity and eliminate it from consideration like I’d done all other organized religions so far. It seemed fair. So, starting with the notion of not being willing to worship a created object, I turned the powers of the internet to the question of Christ. Christ, who I’d firmly shut out of our wedding, was, as far as I understood Him to be, a created creature. After all, He was the Son of the Father, and sons are creatures, so this should be pretty cut and dry.
The search engine helpfully directed me to the first chapter of John, specifically the first few verses. Then it helpfully directed me to a website where I could read these verses in about a million different translations.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
You know the phrase, “my blood ran cold”? And when you feel it, you’re so scared that it’s like your blood has actually turned to ice water?
There is an opposite feeling, but I don’t know if there’s an idiom for it. It’s when you’re so suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of safety that your blood feels like it’s made of sunlight. That’s what I felt when I read those words in John.
Oh, I didn’t understand it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a bible scholar, and I’m certainly not a theologian, but I was able to glean one thing from that passage: Christianity didn’t teach that Christ was a created thing. He was in existence from before time, with God, God Himself.
Immediately following on the heels of that discovery was one even more meaningful for me. Christ was a Word. A Word.
He was the conversation God wanted to have with me about Himself, a conversation He had waited so patiently to have while I flailed about like a three year-old on a Halloween sugar crash temper tantrum, kicking the kitchen floor and sticking my fingers in my ears and alternating screams about “Talk to me!” and “I don’t want to listen!”
I sat there for a while, staring at the computer screen. All this time I wanted God to talk to me, and then I went around doing things like censoring His Word from my wedding.
Christianity had cleared the first of my ridiculous hurdles. I was interested in seeing what it revealed to me in a church service, and so the next Sunday, I found myself stepping foot in a church for the first time since Ken and I were married.
Tomorrow Cari tries to make sense of the thousand-and-one strains of “true Christianity.”
