Day 553
My Higher Power has this irritating pattern of using broken people to do great things, usually through other broken people. If I were creating a Higher Power, I would undoubtedly make it more accommodating to solving problems directly with those in need. This process of having to share our darkness with others doesn't make sense to me.
I grew up in a loving family that went to church every time the doors were open. I knew my theology as a teenager and fine-tuned it in a good school that taught about a loving heavenly Father that wanted to show us all grace. And then I went out into the world and got in the long lines of judging each other, especially my fellow brothers and sisters in the church.
I did create my own Higher Power that would interact more directly with me and certainly more efficiently with me than any of the broken people I was put on this earth to help. I believed in God, and still do, but my Higher Power for most of my life was me. I was a fixer, I was a beacon of goodness, and I was reliant only on the perfection of the pretty people in my life.
That was then. Now I know with great sadness that there are a lot of people around me that are suffering as I was, but I can't tell which ones because of the 'rules of religiosity' that require us to be God's pretty people. I can't help them any more than I could keep myself pretty. But God can, and He may use me to help them, and He may use them to help me. It still seems inefficient, but I've seen it more in two years of recovery than I have in decades as a church leader.
–JR
Unrepentant geraldines
I'm gonna free myself from your opinion
I'm gonna heal myself from your religion
I'm gonna free myself from your aggression
–Tori Amos, “Unrepentant Geraldines”
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