#evangilism

[dzrjesus]

“We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.”

- John Stott

More quotes @idesirejesus

[dzrjesus]

Let’s get to work Christian, and may the Holy Spirit guide you in the name of Jesus who is altogether glorious, Amen

[dzrjesus]

Like many of the Christians in the Bible we too Are chosen to travel for our Churches and carry out acts of Grace. 

Photo by Vaida Tamošauskaitė on Unsplash ,Edited by iDesireJesus

[dzrjesus]

“And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” - Acts 2:21 

Subscribe to www.idesirejesus.com for faith based articles and prayers.

[winry-lucy-beth]

I'm going to ramble a bit about processing my religious trauma because I need to write it out a bit. Maybe it might be helpful for someone dealing with the same thing. This is just where I'm at in my process right now. My depth of understanding is regularly changing.

I am coming to the gradual realization of just how much spending 13 years in Mormonism and a decade in evangelicalism has messed up my mind.

While I have almost completely deconstructed the lies the church told me about the rest of the world, I have realized I haven't completely deconstructed the lies it conditioned me to tell myself about myself. The realization that this is the root of a lot of the things that have been holding me back from being the person I want to be is really hard.

I think I believed that religious trauma was the result of being harshly abused by the church. I thought it had to be something like going through gay conversion therapy whereas I was just in the closet and in denial. I thought didn't have any religious trauma because I did get a lot of emotional benefits from the church. I thought that if the discrimination against queers in the church was never directed at me as an individual then it didn't effect me beyond my trying to deny my queerness. I believed that being raised surrounded by people who had chosen not to "practice homosexuality" or who had gone to conversion therapy didn't mess with my mind.

Now I am beginning to understand that the years of denial have become the default mode for how my mind deals with any kind of thought or emotion that I am afraid to have.

I spent a lot of time being conditioned and conditioning myself into thinking the thoughts that the church wanted me to think. I conditioned myself into a denial of the reality of my thoughts and feelings. I would literally have a thought or feeling that didn't fit into the evangelical framework and I would gaslight myself into believing that I either A. Did not have that thought (as though it never occurred) or B. Convince myself that the thought came from external influence or was rooted in something unhealed within me and therefore wasn't a real thought or a real feeling.

While it is true that thoughts and feelings do not always reflect external reality. This isn't what was happening within me. I was not reacting to reality. I was convincing myself that my inner thoughts and feelings were completely unreal if they didn't fit into a Christian understanding of the world. Everytime I was attracted to a woman wasn't real, everytime I felt constrained by the church wasn't real, everytime I felt unloved by the church or my family wasn't real. I denied all of that to the point that now I struggle to identify my own emotions because my first reaction to any feeling is to doubt it's existence.

Of course, I know this makes no sense. Emotions simply are, if you have an emotion then that emotion is real. Yet almost a decade after leaving the church, I still cannot get that voice, that tells me everything I experience isn't real, to shut the fuck up.

My entire childhood my mind was being fucked. I think it should be illegal to mind fuck a child like this when their brain hasn't finished developing. I'm glad that I am finally aware of it but the fact that the church, after taking so much from me, still gets to impact my mind and my relationships is a painful reality.

[liberty1776]

Street Smarts: How to Engage Non-Believers: Greg Koukl Interview - The B...

[skystonedclouds]

Evagilism and miracles.

[mizterkungfu]

View this post on Instagram

This is Happening!#cruisingforpeace #victoryoutreachoxnard #vooxnard #premierpro #adobe #reachingthelost #evangilism #lowlow #lowriders #homies #oxnard #venturacounty #filtros #elrio #chiques #northside #southside #westside #eastside #ventu #saticoy #elcampo #daavenue #morpark #Tokas ....