"Learn your religion. Do not inherit it." I sat looking a text post that said this for a while, thinking 'maybe I did inherit my religion?'. Admittedly, I felt a few pangs of conviction, but that tends to happen quite often when you're a christian. I was born into a christian family, but not a conservative one - yes my siblings and I went to church when we were little, but when we grew into our teen years, moved countries and stopped going. My parents held onto their beliefs but never forced them onto us. Sure, we were taught not to swear, they tried to keep us away from parties and prayer was always meant something to us, but mum and dad never made us feel like we had to live life a certain way. I couldn't be more grateful for the way they brought us up, it was an idyllic childhood. Every one of us kids strayed away from church for several years. When 3/4 of us found ourselves back in a church it was at different times, but more importantly, it was without our parents. This is how I know I did not inherit my religion, my parents sat back and let me make life choices for myself, I made mistakes along the way, but I found my way back into church on my own. Life's pretty cool like that.
Now that I'm back on my own in a new city, I don't have a church community to lean on. For those who don't know or realise, that is a massive support pillar in my life completely gone, church communities are incredible. Once you find a church that suits you, you can walk into that place and feel completely at ease, you can seriously cry in front of everyone and people will understand, they'll just pour kindness and love over you. Having left mine, I'm now a bit lost. My parents haven't properly gone to a church for almost a decade, I feel like their motivation is slightly adrift when looking for one here. I need them to be motivated, because I don't want to slip, I want a church to call home here, however, I'm finding the more weeks that go by, the less I care and the more complacent I get.
I'm going through this whole phase of questioning everything I believe in, which is a good thing because it expands my 'mind-horizons' and my knowledge of existence, which will eventually lead me to discover the ultimate truth. The fact that I barely know anything about other religions pisses me off, I feel ignorant and selfish thinking that mine is correct even though I know next to nothing about Islam or Hinduism, is that weird? I want to work on that. There are also aspects about my religion that, deep down, I'm not okay with.. Only small things, but everything matters. Most of all, I need to work on myself. When I sort myself out, I'll be satisfied, hopefully happier too.
Arbitrary side note: I was talking to this guy who genuinely believed everything in this world is meaningless, he kept saying it. "We all die, everyone forgets." "Everything is meaningless.". I thought it was a very dull way to view life, so my response to him was, "you mean something to me", he got irritated.
