okay, so, for me, the embarrassment factor comes from the grand scale on which i flew my evangelical flag. i totally agree with lindsay's comment from several posts ago, about wanting to apologize to her whole graduating class. in my case, the collateral damage includes:
- people i tried to help (read: fix) in the name of friendship (read: i thought of them as projects)
- boyfriends i drove crazy with spoken and unspoken expectations (read: i trained my holy magnifying glass on their souls, weighing flaws against virtues like a judge)
- the student body at my college, where i tried to model exemplary christian life from my perch on the chapel stage (read: i went for highly visible leadership positions so i could "fix" more "projects").
so, i'm embarrassed.
michelle, you wrote your embarrassing note on a recipe card and stuck it in a box. i wrote mine on my forehead and paraded through four years of college and beyond. i was, to the best of my ability, responding to the marching orders given in youth group. the problem was, i had no concept of my own weakness, my own capacity to sin. thus, no humility. no compassion.
being broken of that pride happened later, in graduate school, when i saw my poverty of understanding on many levels. the comfy evangelical bubble burst. it was a bitter, painful revelation and stripped bare a lot of who i was and what i believed. it burned off my affinity for evangelical culture. my faith in christ was scorched too because it was so entangled with evangelical culture.
belief has slowly grown back in the years since. it's only God's grace to me that i remain a believing person at all. caron says she knows she's a christian because she's tried so many times to stop being one, and found that she can't. the same goes for me. that whole "perseverance of the saints" thing is for real. thanks be to God.
Darb, I think because I went to a Christian school all my life, which obsessed about all the finer points of Christian behaviour all along the way, by the time I got to bible college, as exemplary as my life may have appeared to others, I was suffocating and the evangelical bubble was distasteful. But I don't think I understood the gospel at all at that point, I'm not exaggerating. I'm not as much embarrassed about that as I am sobered by the possibility. I feel like I was very much an unbeliever at that point, for all my knowledge of the bible and theological crap. It feels to me like I didn't know Jesus. Maybe that's just an attempt to make sense of the huge dissociation there is for me too as I process my life in evangelicalism and now, but that's how I think about it.
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