Of God

I'm a pretty nostalgic person. I've saved every letter, every note my mother and father have given me. I have movie tickets from every movie I've seen since I was 14 years old. It's kind of ridiculous really. I know that I need to throw it all away and only keep things that are truly meaningful to me but that's the part that gets me; it's all meaningful to me. So I keep it all in shoe boxes in my old closet at my parent's house.

Before I connect my nostalgia to my main point of this story, you should know that I'm not very religious. I say I don't believe in God or any part of Christianity but I find myself praying that things work out okay. I suppose if I'm being truly honest, the only reason I can give to believing in a god is to give you hope that they can control the things you can't. But I digress, I'm not religious but I used to be...and so did all of my friends.

I was raised Catholic and believed in God my entire life. When I got into high school, I started hanging out with kids from my church and this only strengthened my relationship with God. I became highly active in the youth group which was more or less an excuse to hang out with my friends all the time. We went on retreats, attended bible studies, went to mass, and even got together on our own to sing praise and worship songs. We loved God immensely and it bonded us tightly. And frankly, being openly gay, a sexually active gay man at that, was a constant struggle for me. But I was in high school and like every other teenager, I was doing my best to fit in.  I stopped having sex, pretended that my feelings for other men didn't exist and poured my everything into religion. I constantly fought an internal battle of "if acting on gay feelings was a sin, why did God allow me to have them." I often got the reply from the leaders of my church that "it all comes down to free will." but to me, being gay isn't a choice and I knew that I've had these feelings my whole life. I might not have understood them at first but they were there. I felt confused, frustrated, and alone. I felt like no one else understood my struggle to understand God and they could never understand what it was like to have such polar opposites fighting within their body. I felt like a token friend; someone people was nice to because they thought it made the a better, proactive person because of it.

Eventually, I went to college and discovered that The Church wasn't as welcoming without my group of tight knit friends there to protect me. I fell away from my faith and was only reinforced by the fact that my friends from my golden days with the church were slowly losing their faith as well.

Now, as I listen to songs about Jesus or the love of God, I remember those times fondly. I feel nostalgic for the times when I could spend time with all of my friends enjoying the things that bound us so tightly together. I don't miss the fight going on in my head, I don't miss the guilt or the sense of obligation. But I miss the simplicity of that life. I miss how easy it was to blame everything on God, good or bad. I literally had no responsibility for my actions. I felt free to do as I pleased because I trusted that God would take care of eveything. I only realize now that I was extremely lucky.