Originally posted by mainman
may I ask what happened 15 years ago?
Sure. Ask anything. First a brief history: My beloved Grandma took me to Vacation Bible School at age six and there I "got saved" - "became born again" - "accepted Jesus as my savior." Until I left high school, I attended a Baptist church (on my own, no parental involvement) and then I attended a Baptist college. I sunk myself, mostly as a method of surviving homefront craziness, into the church. Threw myself into it for all I was worth.
Now: a couple of years after I left college, things started to happen and my life got a little crazy. One of the hardest, most terrifying results of increasing craziness -- and the very best thing that's ever happened to me -- was that I began to question my beliefs. It was terrifying to question my faith because I had never done so. I had nothing else to believe -- or so I thought. I feared that if I began to question God I'd incur his wrath. I feared that if I questioned my salvation, my need to evangelize, my almost obsessive "daily devotional time" -- everything I'd built my life on, I'd find myself with absolutely nothing. It's very hard to explain; suffice to say
it was terrifying.
The shortest answer I can give is that this questioning began about fifteen years ago, and after a number of years I came to these conclusions: I can be a spiritual woman on my own terms. I can follow Christ without believing that the Bible is the literal word of God (how can it
possibly be?); I can embrace tenets of various faiths, most of which I used to consider cults; I can see the life & love in atheists (whom I used to reject) and the spirituality in paganism; etc., etc. -- and I can live by this quiltlike set of beliefs and be the woman I need to be.
This is an incomplete answer to your question. Feel free to ask more.