Have you ever felt urged by God to do something so profoundly that no matter how far you ran, there it was? That’s what happened to me. No matter what rock I tried to hide under, the word and the concept Undamned and the idea of escape was waiting for me.
There seems to be a growing tide of hurting Christians and religious refugees out there. There are so many that, to me, it has become a lost tribe. There are so many of these refugees that terms like “Religious PTSD” and “Post Traumatic Church Disorder” are being bandied about.
I have always been a Christian and a church- goer, so I am far from anti- church. But, I have always had a special place in my heart for this hurting tribe and have always wondered “what has happened to the Golden Rule, love your neighbor as yourself?”
Then I became one of these injured people. I had to find an escape. What I believed and how I believed it, was not freeing me. It was crippling me and holding me back. My spirit and soul had been severed from my religion by the experience of being judged, labeled and told how I should be in Church and who I should be in my heart and soul. I felt like a commodity.
Since I was afraid for a period of time to go to church to heal the wounds, I had to work out a plan to heal and recover from my religious addiction on my own. I had to look carefully at what I believed and why I believed it. What I had been told, I found was often not true. I had to go back to the Source document itself and see which of my beliefs were from Jesus and which were from somewhere else. In the process I developed tools to heal, find the truth and spiritually detox. The plan worked for me. I hoped it would work for others. I wrote the book to share it, but also for a reason that is not so pretty.
I had always been a spiritual wuss.
As I wrote it, I realized, that I had let others tell me what I believed as an act of cowardice, because it prevented me from examining what I really believed and boldly declaring it. I never had to stand up for my beliefs because I didn’t know what they were. The process of writing gave me the gift of clarity and I felt God urging me to finally stand up and be counted.
I am still shaking in my boots just a little bit, but here I am: My soul and my Lord have no color, sex, no party affiliation, no limits and no labels, nor would I impose any of those limits on anyone else. I am here to love and care for my fellow man. To have empathy for him and maybe win him to Christ by my life and behavior, but not to judge, condemn or hate him if he does not choose to go my way. People judged me and they were wrong. It is up to God to judge. I’m just gonna love ya.
. “Clean your finger, before you point out my spots”
Benjamin Franklin
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Undamned, My Escape from the Old Testament
by L.E. Kinzie
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