Do as I say, not as I do right?

I had always heard that phrase "do as I say, not as I do" never really understanding what it meant. That is until attending the church. The pastors and the elitist were the epitome of this. There were sooooo many times when we were taught not to do something and they did that particular thing, or we were told to do something and they didn't. So i decided what better way than to just list everything that I can remember......here they are in no particular order....

Garbage in, Garbage out= only listen to Christian music/ the pastor loved several secular artist I found out on one teen activity where I had to ride somewhere with him, and after being drilled about only listening to Christian music and music that glorifies God, I got in his vehicle to see the Beatles number ones cd, Elvis, a couple of Country artists the radio station was on some oldies channel.

Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight and like movies are from the devil himself and watching them, even wanting to, will send you straight to hell immediately=i was scared to death, literally of watching any of these movies for a very long time, I actually only felt comfortable enough with myself and my faith to watch the Harry Potter movies this year! The reasoning behind this ban of the movies was that we weren't strong enough to seperate the fantasy and the reality of these movies and we would fall prey to the belief in magic and spells and imagination and lose our selves. I went to my teen teachers house one night for an activity and what did i see next to her tv??? The Lord of the Rings (1st movie) and Harry Potter!! Can you imagine the horror i felt and the betrayal!?

Drinking, wanting to drink it or even having the thought of drinking strong drink will lead you straight to hell=we had this huge entire study about how even thinking about strong drink is the same as going out and getting drunk. We even would go to a certain fish restaurant every year for thanksgiving until they started serving wine that is. The pastor vowed that we would never patron them again for this reason. That all changed the minute a deep pocket opened up a pizza parlor selling alcohol, then we can visit them anytime we wanted, even have them sponsoring the teens for camp and having the teens selling their pizza to raise money for the teens. Our standing up against this was truly the beginning of the end for my husband and I.

Owls are a representation of aliens and demons and you should never, ever wear them or have a statue of them in your house=we had a study when the movie came out called district 9 or something where the people were claiming that they all were visited by a white owl, that turned out to be a alien, where the pastor attempted to prove that the bible, a few weeks later, the pastors wife redoes her daughters room and decorates with what???? OWLS!!!

You may read these things and think I am just being picky, but when you are drilled and scolded over and over again at how going against these things makes you a bad Christian and that you should question whether or not you are really saved, things like this matter to me.

i will post more as they come to me!

And then there was this one time at camp.....

Notice I didn't say band camp, so No, it's not like that, but I did think it was time to talk about our camp experience! Where to begin...well with the beginning i guess. I had just begun attending, maybe had 4 or 5 months under my pre-teen belt when it was announced that we were going to be traveling down to the Okefenokee Swamp for camp. 4 nights and 5 days away from my parents and brother, i was scared and excited. Of course, like with everything else there were rules. Shorts and skirts had to be knee or finger length, no spaghetti strap shirts, no cleavage, no personal contact was to be had at all with the opposite sex (keep at least a pencils length between you at all times), no boys were allowed in the pool area while the girls were swimming (in tshirts no less) and vice versa. All seemed somewhat reasonable, but of course when you tell kids what not to do they have the inane desire to do just that! Schedules were strict. Bible study twice a day, sermons at night and mandatory games (unless you were dying and even then that wasn't acceptable). Of course we were the more "liberal" of the churches that attended with us so we weren't allowed to talk about us wearing pants and listening to music with "drums" aka contemporary Christian music! The last rule...whatever happens at camp should stay at camp, our discussions and bible studies are between us and y'all. As the years rolled on, we drew away from the other churches, picking and choosing who was allowed to join us in our attempt to get away from the secular world. Things kept changing, the basketball shorts gave way to cool-lots (yuck), the pc rules became even stricter and the fun seemed to be sucked right out of everything. By the time my children were attending camp, the camp experience as I knew it was long gone, replaced with a terrible excuse for drilling the teens with more rederick about how evil parents/adults are and you should only befriend those who are in attendance of the church.
The things that were being taught to the teens started turning a corner for loopy as well. I remember the night that my daughter came home and wanted to tell me what they were being told at her Wednesday night study. Imagination was a sin, because imagining leads to magic which leads to the devil and hell. Yes people this is real! They were also told, that no girl and boy should ever be alone, no matter what age or the circumstance until they are married. Now i have my ideals of how dating should go, but this seemed a bit extreme to me. This and many other things are what led me to begin questioning the way of life we were living, not question God, but man and his ideas of what he thought God meant.

This memory came to me last night..

I remember this one time, we (the ladies of the core group) were shopping for some clothes for camp I believe, and we decided to go to Goodwill. We were looking thru the racks of T-shirts and one of the ladies found a old VBS t-shirt from one of our previous VBS's. The oldest woman who was with us got so flabbergasted, she immediately snatched it up and saw there was a few other of our Church shirts and bought them all with this logic "we need to buy these shirts, we don't want some outsider wearing "OUR" church shirts". I remember being a bit thrown back by this, I mean it's just a shirt, or it was to me. But this type of thing would repeat itself thruout my stay at the church several times. I remember just a few years back, my family was scary broke, so i was researching different ways to help us save money and one of the ways I found was the most amazing blessing, Angel Food Ministries, a weeks worth of groceries for $30. You cant beat that. Well I was so blessed by this I of course was sharing this with everyone I could. So my friend who had grown up to marry the youth pastor wanted to start, but he couldn't lower himself to go to another church and pick it up, so I was doing it for her. I eventually suggested that our church should consider getting involved in this ministry, the youth pastor's wife thought it was a great idea, but didn't want to take it to him herself, so i did. Big mistake. I was told that we didn't want to let "outsiders" in our church, people we didn't know coming in our church. As if I had spoken blasphemy against God himself. I apologized and tucked my tail and left, stunned. How could a church not want to help others in need? Isn't that what a church is supposed to do? Now let me run this by you the reader, we are claiming that we are a church, an outreach, but we don't want outsiders in our church (so how do you expect to grow as a church body?)????? Isn't that the picture of IRONY?? We can't send people to help feed the homeless, donate money to a shelter, send people as missionaries to help spread the word of God, BUT what we can do is take up a collection to send the youth pastor on a "Baptist History" trip across many states, asking for thousands of dollars so he can tool around the U.S looking at old markers of men who died doing something to "better" the Baptist name, spending thousands of dollars to have some guy recreate a painting of certain Baptist's in their best moments, putting up horribly ugly gaudy grave markers to commemorate certain men out in the middle of only God knows where that will never be seen by men other than those who were there when it was put down. They have their priorities so ass backwards. My heart has always been to help, and to be in a place where they wanted nothing to do with this was just one part of me wanting to leave!