Sometimes I leave God behind to Follow Myself

I haven’t been blogging because there have been a million things going on around here.  For one thing there was a huge pro-life bill getting passed in Texas. A few of ya’ll may have heard about it. I spent a lot of time in the last few weeks at the Capitol, at home watching testimony and debates and talking to a lot of people who supported and protested the bill. It was a lot to take in. I was a bartender for most of my life so I am naturally a people person. I watch people and listen to them. I don’t much care for the social engineered narrative. From either side of the political spectrum, and they both have narratives.  So, being in Austin during this whole thing was awesome.

I have this bad habit of getting so wrapped up in something that I start to think that the “other side” is the enemy and then God always, and I mean always steps in and whispers in my ear “see that person there? I love them just like I love you. And YOU are the one who needs to show them that.” I don’t know why He does that to me, I really would much rather hate that persons guts for thinking that it is ok to dismember fully formed fetuses from their mother’s womb. And the evil one is counting on that. He is counting on my love of belonging to help ruin all of the work that my angel and I have done for the last four years to make me less of a heathen, by the Grace of God.  The evil one is counting on my need to be right all the time to ruin the fact that I know what mercy is and know that I should show it to others. He is counting on the fact that I am prideful, snarky and have a bad mouth to ruin me. He knows all these things about me, he knows all my weaknesses, because I lived in the palm of his hand. Me and sparky were the best of friends. I lived my life serving everything that would send any soul to hell in a handbasket.  He knows it. And he tells me he knows it every single day.  He is always in my ear telling me how I am kidding myself about being a saint, about how much Jesus loves me, how God has my good in mind always and that I am kidding myself that the Catholic Church wants anything to do with someone like me. And when his voice doesn’t quite get the reaction from me that he wants he cons other people into being his voice by telling me what a loser I am, how I shouldn’t do this, or do that; you know, haters. Haters are tools.

The other day I had enough of this and I just sat down and had a talk with God. I asked Him why He lets this happen to me. Why didn’t He keep me safe from all these people who like to call me names, talk about me behind my back, and are just over all jerks to me?  One of those jerks gets to drive a brand new Cadillac that I want, while I drive my car which I’ve named “The Death Trap”. It just all seems so unfair.

Then I finished up reading Elizabeth Scalia’s book “Strange Gods”, and it hit me. I have totally lost track of God. I am no longer in a relationship with God, but in a relationship with the god that I’ve made in my own image. I’ve done it AGAIN! I’ve left God behind to follow myself.

This line practically pimp slapped me when I read it after my little fit with God : “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image,” she wrote (Annie Lamott), “when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  Pg 112

I just set the book down and began to sob. I expect God to hate everyone that I do. First of all I shouldn’t hate anyone, and second of all what the hell is wrong with me that I have left God sitting on a rock on the path while I keep marching onward to “find myself”.  I think that it is so easy to fall into that trap when we are doing “good”.  The good can be just as distracting from our relationship with Jesus as the bad. I didn’t know that. As I read Elizabeth’s book, I saw everything that has happened to me since my conversion. My self-absorbed pride, how I think and talk about others, and how distracted the pro-life movement can make me from being a saint. And I have seen that in others as well.  Like how so many of us in the pro-life movement talk about the women and men on the “other side” of the issue or who have had abortions.

I just have such a problem with people’s views of these women and men even. If nobody taught them how to love then how in the hell are they supposed to know? Jesus still loves them, as the Body of Christ it is still our responsibility to teach them somehow. But we shouldn’t say things like we are looking down at them. I realize that part of my offense is based on the fact that I was that kind of girl. I was a slut who sold my body for my rent and a pair of shoes to drug dealers and did many other things. I was lost, broken and convinced that God had no room for me. And that if I did go to Church that I would be faced with people who wondered what kind of self-respecting woman would let men do those things to her. It is what kept me away for a long time. I’m not blaming anyone, my choices were my choices, I take responsibility for them, but we have to quit talking about people like this; especially pro-lifers. Nothing good comes from it. There is a way to speak truth in love about these things. Hell if I know how, because I am just as bad, but there is a way and I think everyone in the pro-life movement needs to make knowing how to speak Truth in Love their #1 priority; just my humble opinion. I was called a coward and a hippy the other day for saying that we shouldn’t say “women should keep their legs closed”. That isn’t being a hippy, that being Christ like. And He is no hippy.

The fact is that if what we are doing is about ourselves and not about doing the work of God then it is activism and that activism can become something that comes between us and God. And then we start rejecting Him and His truth and start following an ideology. The devil does not care what we follow as long as it leads us away from God. That is the bottom line. I have let myself be led away from God and I can feel it in my everyday life. Please pray for me to trust in His Mercy , dust myself off, and turn back to Him.