I said, “okay God, I’m going to church”, and He activated my premium subscription in training to practice what I believe. If you believe it, you gotta live it. 

I got teary angry and walked out and came back three times, with God reminding me why I was there. 

Because I don’t go to church to learn what I am supposed to believe. The Spirit of God takes care of that in a plethora of ways through interaction with all people as I fully live in the real world. 

Church for me is an exercise in tolerance and unity, where the singing is great, we can learn to do meaningful service projects together, and I can ideally say both “right on dude I’m with you on that” AND “are you serious what the fuck are you saying” and wait to hear. For that last bit God and my teacher, David, are working on getting me to inhale/exhale and say “Tell me more”.

So I am going to sit here and inhale – exhale, fellow human, and remember that interacting with other people in church is about choosing to listen, knowing when to gracefully exit before rupturing relationship with strong emotive words, and knowing when to call a viper a whited sepulchre viper. Because that’s what Jesus did.

And because I went to church, I have some thoughts to share. 

This is not the most divided that Canada has ever been. Indigenous and other people who are not Caucasian have been advocating for equity for generations. There has been a massive imbalance in your favour. 

When movement started being made toward equity, you used your platform to complain about how your children would suffer in this more equitable world, since they might no longer have the benefit of oppression on their sides (but I don’t think you realized that this is what you were saying). What you actually said is that hiring requirements were being dumbed down to give people of colour an opportunity to generate income, and this was unfair to your better educated children. See a problem there? 

You suggested that if people of so-called colour wanted you to support us that we should probably be nicer to you, because we hurt your feelings by speaking candid truth, and so you were likely to stomp away from us, and refuse to help us at all. 

So, this is not the most divided that Canada has ever been. This is the most divided that Caucasians in Canada have ever been. Because the majority of you are worried about losing your life, your agency, and your money, whether you are vaccinated, unvaccinated, for mandates, or against mandates. The problem is that all of you are worried about losing your life, your agency, and your money, and mandates are the scapegoats that you are using to avoid looking more closely at what really scares you. 

Do you hear the rest of us now?

That listening part is where unity begins. People know that they are loved, when they know that they are seen and heard, and believed. That’s how Jesus loved. The loaves and fishes were incidentals. The oil changes and homes repaired are incidentals. They are the scapegoats that allow you to look away from the children and families who need to be seen, heard, and believed. 

Jesus went to find the woman at the well, sent pigs careening over a cliff, challenged all the unjust ways of all humanity in His parables and His daily life. So He definitely took a side, the side of love and justice for all humanity, and He was crucified for it. 

The thing that Jesus resolutely refused to do was to participate in useless nationalism. Because nationalism was a scapegoat and He was not here for that. 

This is my last word ever, I think, on church and its ways of being. I hoped to be able to work with the people who gather each week and say that we gather as a family. Clearly that is not to be. Because if we are family, we are a hella dysfunctional family, who is always focused on how nice our house is, and who have made this house which is supposed to be a house of love and prayer and unity, a marketplace where we need to focus on paying the bills to maintain its beauty. Jesus wasn’t here for that either.

In fact, God specifically said that He didn’t need a house. He knew what the house would become. I realized that this was likely so, as I read the temple story in the Old Testament books of history. Geeky Christian breaks this down well, here: (https://geekychristian.com/evidence-the-temple-was-not-gods-will/ ) God knew that the wise one who would build it would use forced labour (1 Kings 9:15 – The Bible), and would have a bloodbath flowing across its floors supposedly in His honour (1 Kings 8:5 – The Bible) . And He stayed around for it, because He recognized that this husk of a marketplace was the best that humanity could do, and it would carry the seed of His glory. We needed the seed, not the marketplace. And we still haven’t learned that.

Anyway, this is my last and final word ever, I think, on church. I am now focusing on finding other incompetent people like me who will let the Spirit of God guide us in unity to learn how to see, hear, and believe people so that we can serve them in love. I think that’s what Jesus did, and I am here for it.