A Sense of Religion at Home.

    I was raised a Christian. Eventually. There was a time when I was younger when I didn’t really think about it. Those were times when I remember trying to make this boy a sword in kindergarten. His name was Jack. I think I liked him. I remember wanting to make him a sword out of legos and give it to him, but my grandmother said that wasn’t necessary. I remember being pretty happy in general. I remember being amused by the simplest of things, like when my grandfather would fold up pieces of typing paper really tight. When he’d cut the paper, little pieces would go flying everywhere and I would just laugh and laugh…But at some point I was introduced to religion. I got a gold children’s bible book with beautiful illustrations and simple stories from beginning to end. I remember it had shiny red text on the front for the title. Reading the stories and learning them as well as appreciating the pictures wasn’t enough though. It was time to go to church. And if I remember correctly, it wasn’t until I started going to church that I started to feel nervous all the time.

     People knew more than I did. I didn’t understand why the kids had to be separated from their parents to go to Sunday School. I didn’t know the answers to the questions or understand the stories that the Sunday School teacher told us. I remember going to a church dinner with my grandmother and dropping a plate of spaghetti on the floor when I tried to walk to the table. I remember everybody looking at me and me feeling SO embarrassed. I remember my mom and I saying the Lord’s Prayer before bed time and I remember the times when it was finally up to me to say it to myself by myself before bed time and I did. I remember how great it felt to go to a less formal church (aka, one where we could where jeans) and how cool that felt. But I also remembered how big that church was. Eventually we stopped going altogether.

     It wasn’t until freshman year of college that I started to get “back into religion”. It was those experiences that turned me off to Christianity altogether, but I thought that I was just turned off of Religion altogether. My freshman year of college, I switched dorms and lived in a high rise. There were floors of just girls, some were just guys, some were half and half. I lived on the 7th floor and I met some new friends who lived on the 5th floor in a community room. I was welcomed in to hang out with them and watch football. And I remember thinking “finally, I’ve got a good group of friends”. But they weren’t friends. After football, one of the guys invited me to come out and see a movie with them. I was like “finally, a group of friends to watch movies with!” One night after that, we were all watching football again and one of the guys turned to me and said “Hey, some of us are going to praise and worship Wednesday night. Would you like to come?” I didn’t know what it is, but I wanted to be a part of it, so I said “Sure”.

     Turns out I was participating in this Campus Ministries group of Christians. They were very exclusive. They were quite religious and I think I stopped attending Praise and Worship meetings (or I at least stopped pretending to enjoy them) when the “leader” started talking about wanting to go out and minister to the campus and turn the campus into a Christian campus. I thought that was so rude because obviously the campus is made of more than Christians, right? The last blow to this group was when an old friend of mine tried to serve on the ministry. She was very artistic and a beautiful person but she had her fair share of issues with bipolar disorder and these people in this ministry were not the most helpful people ever. When she went and asked one of the girls if she could minister, they told her she wasn’t Christian enough, so no. That broke her heart and mine as well, so I was pretty much done. How Christian are you when you exclude and hurt your fellow people?

     So throughout that year, I kept going along with Christianity. I kind of hoped that maybe it was just that group. Maybe I just happened to find the wrong group of people and there were nicer people out there that were more excepting. More “Christian” I guess. So I went to a Catholic church for a while. I always liked those places because they were so pretty and ornamental and traditional on the inside. The songs echoed throughout the whole building and everybody just came together as one body in front of one pastor and worshipped the Lord. Right? Well, Communion time came. I always partook in communion in other churches, so why not? No I got in the line, and when I got shuffled through the line to the lady giving communion, she looked at me and said “Are you a Catholic?” I looked at her and I said “No.” So she put her hand on my forehead, didn’t give me communion, and said with her eyes lowered to the ground “Lord, please help this child find God…” and I immediately thought “Are you for real?!” So I stopped going.

     The friend that I went to that church with had the same mentality as that Catholic and the Christian ministry people I hung out with. He said that he, his friend and I were the only truly Christina people on the campus and were going in the right direction. Everyone else was going to Hell. It wasn’t until a later lunch together with some friends that he spouted some racist nonsense, that I stopped talking him. I didn’t think that Religious or Christian people spoke that way. So for a while I wandered around lost. I went to Mount Zion church with some fellow African American friends of mine. I thought that maybe it was a race thing. Maybe I hadn’t found the right church because the churches I had been to were predominantly white. Nope, not the case. I went to the church all dressed up, went in there and it was a whole production. The church was two or three stories with televisions and prompters and speakers everywhere, hundreds maybe thousands of people, even an older man who passed out from the “holy spirit” and he just got wheeled out like that’s an everyday occurrence. That was a bit much for me, so I stopped going.

     I even went so far as to go to a more communal church with some people I knew. One of these guys’ fathers was the pastor. So it was cool to know I was hearing from someone’s dad. The connection was deeper. The worship songs were displayed on a screen and played by the Christian House band and I sang along so hard, but I couldn’t help but wonder why I wasn’t really “feeling” as deeply as everyone else. Or maybe I wasn’t trying enough. I went to the same type of church in Lexington too. Only these Christians would sing and feel deeply and laugh with each other and then cuss each other out two hours later after a barbecue brunch. It just wasn’t right. So I stopped going.

     And when my mom became a Buddhist and handed me her cross saying that I should take it because she didn’t need it anymore…that’s when I took a break. I didn’t understand.

     It wasn’t until recently, like within the past year or so that I really started looking at Religion as religion and not a sect of something. I started to study bits and pieces of different religions and tried to understand the ins and outs of some religious persons and came to realize that none of it is different. That it’s all the same. From book to book to book, the basics are the same. The people are looking for the same thing. We all want the same thing. It just seems different because it looks different to the naked eye, but we’re all the same. And so I stopped studying religion so religiously and accepted that I was a Humanitarian and I celebrated people.

     When the idea for the mission house came about, I wanted there to be a prayer room, but I didn’t want it to be a traditional prayer room. I wanted it to be a room for prayer and reflection AND understanding where people from differing religions could really sit WITH each other and teach each other where they come from. Look at each other’s books and read them to each other and explain and know that they’re all looking at the same texts and that things can be learned from one another. That these books are on paper and bound in different materials but the word is the word and the golden rule is the golden rule is the golden rule.

    And that’s where I stand today. I am a religious person in that I believe in God (the creator and the presence) but I believe that the prophets under The Creator would not want humans to be so divisive. That is not what they were teaching. That is not what God/The Creator intended to exist on this planet that was given to us. So with the mission house, I want there to be a place where more can be given and received and learned. Because that’s what we should do.

 

What makes a house a home. A sense of belonging.

     I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on April 20th 1987. I am now 25 years old. I will be 26 in less than a month. I currently live in Greensboro, North Carolina and I call this place  my home. As soon as I was old enough to be on my own and had the option to move to a more permanent place in college, I knew that I would try my hardest not to go back to the mobile life of my past.

I was born in Hawaii but raised in Ohio and California. My mother was a paramedic at the time in Ohio, so due to pressing demands and third shifts, I was sent to live with my grandparents in California. They lived in Palm Springs at the time. So in my early years I went back and forth (sometimes by plane, sometimes by car) from Ohio to California. When I was 8 I lived in San Diego, California. After that I went back to Ohio a year later and stayed there until my mom and I moved to North Carolina. 6th grade through half of 8th grade I was in Raleigh, and then we moved to Atlanta, GA. After about a year and a half, we moved to Raleigh again where I went to one high school for a little while then transferred to the high school I eventually graduated from. College time came and I got accepted to Guilford College, but due to finances and the like, I ended up going to UNCG instead. By that point when I was 18, I had moved 8 times. During my junior year of college the option came to stay in the dorms or move off campus. A potential roommate situation fell through but I still wanted to be off campus, and when it came time to pick a place and stick with it, I did. And I made Greensboro my new home.

Since that time, I’ve moved in town a couple of times. I’ve gone from an apartment to a duplex to finally my boyfriend’s house with his mother and now this is my home. My boyfriend, his family and our two cats are my family of sorts. Each place that I’ve been in has unleashed a new era in my life. My apartment was my first place on my own. It had it’s ups and downs but it really wasn’t mine. I had tons of financial issues with that place and ended up having to leave after so many years. The duplex had potential, and I must say that it was the first time I felt like I really put my personality into the place. And it was nice to see that I could finally have a place that was “me”…but there were issues with that as well. The connecting duplex (although seemingly rented to one “nice lady”) was actually rented  to a family with drug issues, abusive tendencies and a major roach infestation which connected to my place. And no air conditioning in July. Wasn’t the best of situations. And then I moved into my boyfriend’s house when I almost had nowhere to go but back home to Clayton, NC (which is where my mom lives with her partner).

After all these moves and trials and tribulations which have opened my eyes to bigger issues (which will be commented on in later posts), it has really made me think of what makes a house a home. A sense of belonging definitely does that. But so does warmth. Good food. Good friends. Community. Inclusiveness. Connectivity. And as I think back on all the places that I’ve lived and the area that I currently live now, I want to bring all of those aspects of “what makes a home” into an actual space that people can call their own. A place that has spaces for relaxation, education, rejuvenation. Hope. Warmth. Family. A future.

And so, my goal is to build this mission house. It’s a place of hope. It’s more than just a center. It’s more than just a lobby where people can be preoccupied. They can learn and not be afraid to call that place their home.

I have floor plans that I will put up soon enough, but that is going to come at another time. The project will take 4-5 years to just get off the ground. Especially at the rate that I’m going, having to do so much on my own with my own hope and faith to drive it. But perhaps in 8 years or so when I’m almost in my mid 30s, seeing the place turned into a reality will be a dream come true for me and all of those who are close to me.

And so I leave you with a video that’s a true testament to second chances and a small peak at what can happen when people work together.