How Small Town America Saved My Christmas: Part 1
When I was about 8 years old, I didn’t know the difference between a Protestant and a prostitute. This is not the start to a dirty joke. It’s just the truth.
One day after a Girl Scout meeting, I was sitting in the back of a 1992 Dodge Caravan carpool and overheard two moms talk about Susie’s mom and how Susie’s mom was a Protestant. Up to that point, I had never heard the word “Protestant”, so I assumed a Protestant and a prostitute were the same thing. Why I knew what a prostitute was at age 8 is beyond me, but I was mortified and thought it was highly inappropriate to air Susie’s mom’s dirty laundry in a car of 8-year-old girls.
Being raised Catholic, I only knew of the Catholic church. I didn’t know what a Protestant, a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Mormon, or any other of the long list of religions you could be were. I just knew Catholic. When other kids told me they were going to church, I assumed that churches were all the same, just on different street corners. And I just assumed we all believed the same things.
To be fair to my parents, they weren’t sheltering or hiding anything from us. They were just raised the same way, and to be honest, I think they might have assumed the same as me.
But as I grew up and my thoughts and questions developed, I learned there were, in fact, other churches and beliefs. (Oh, and I also learned the difference between a Protestant and a prostitute. Turns out, there’s a huge difference.)
Unfortunately, as my eyes opened up to the world, I learned that if you go to one type of church, you tend to disagree with people who go to another type of church. At least, that’s how it seemed most of the time. It actually looked quite easy for people to find things to disagree on. I even found myself in the middle of arguments over differing beliefs that I wanted no part of.
Even the different Catholics disagreed on things! (Yes, there are different kinds of Catholic.) One side of my family is Roman Catholic and did the “sign of the cross” by touching their forehead, then chest, then left shoulder, then right shoulder. The other side of my family was Byzantine Catholic and did the “sign of the cross” by touching their forehead, then chest, then right shoulder, then left shoulder.
I was so confused…and frustrated.
Didn’t we all believe in God? And Jesus? Isn’t that the biggest piece of all the different buildings we filed into on Sunday mornings? We all agree on Christmas and Easter, right? How come we spend so much time fighting about the small stuff if we all agree on the big stuff?
As it turns out, I became so frustrated with the whole idea that I, frankly, threw the baby out with the bath water.
I stopped going to church. Period. I was done with it all. Every last bit of it.
And that lasted for many years and is a story for another time.
It wasn’t until my early adulthood, my marriage, and the birth of our first child that I started on my journey to figure out my faith.
After months (okay, years) of searching for the right church for our new and growing family, we landed in our new church home. I didn’t know what religious denomination it was and I didn’t want to. It was just God and the Bible. It felt right, and it seemed so simple and obvious.
Was this the way it was supposed to be all along?
For the first time in my life, I felt like I could hear God’s raw message for me without the distraction of all the pomp and circumstance. For the first time, I felt like no one was fighting about the small stuff. We just all showed up on Sunday for the big stuff.
For the first time in my life, I was happy to just be Christian. …is that allowed?
Of course you know what happened next. We moved…across the country.
To Be Continued…
Coming Up Next…
How Small Town America Saved My Christmas: Part 2
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