God as we understand him

Tonight we talked about finding that higher power, and I thought I would share here what I came up with.

I grew up Roman Catholic. I attended catholic school and believed in God. I believed in the church, in the nuns, in everything they said, and I believed that in order for God to love you, you had to do what he asked you to do. Like not have sex before marriage or take the Lord's name in vain. Man, I was annoying about that. And I held off on sex before marriage until I found someone who I thought I was in love with (well, I was) and I thought we would get married (we were 15). It took me a lot of guts to go through with it.

He broke up with me (2 years later) and I lost a little bit of my faith.

I moved a bit away from the church by the time I was 19 and stopped going to church. I studied religion in college and accepted that all religions have something great to say, but looked at them in a more clinical anthropological sense. Religions were developed with rules of society. These rules were made to keep people in line, or keep people safe. Don't eat pigs, because pigs carried diseases they couldn't handle back then. Don't have sex out of marriage, because then it would lead to pregnancy and single mothers couldn't be married off. The rules all made perfect sense when they were made.

But I always believed in a power greater than myself. There have been miracles performed in my life before now, and I always knew there was something working the universe and it sure wasn't me.

Now, I'm trying to come to a place where I can believe in the church as a power greater than myself, without pushing it into something else. I'm hoping to come to an agreement with God that I believe in him, and hope to find my place in the church without all those rules.

All I know now, is that I have to give my life over to the care of God. I am not in control here, and I know it. I never have been.