It doesn't always feel weird while it's happening, and the human responses to things are all still there. It's just...it's a whole-ass Experience, isn't it, living that way and then slowly finding your perspective changing.
It 100% is. And I think that's the hardest part to get across is how not-strange it seems, until suddenly it does? I don't know, I've struggled for a really long time with figuring out how to explain my feelings re: the Pentecostal Charismatic faith and my personal relationship with it and the best way I've been able to do so is just by like, telling people what it was like and letting them draw their own conclusions, but even that isn't very accurate at the end of the day.
And yes, to the experience of other Christians reacting as if you/your church are some kind of batshit crazy weirdos.
YES. This was like, SO DEVASTATING to me as a child/early teen who was starting to see fissures in their family's faith practices but still wanted to believe in something. It was really jarring to be clinging to the belief that there was higher power that loved indiscriminately and walk face-first into discrimination after discrimination while trying to find an avenue to that higher power that felt more true.
I've said to Mucca that it felt like living in a world where everyone insists that magic is real, but you can't see or feel or work it yourself.
THIS. 100% THIS. What an elegant way to put it, wow. Yes. It's exactly like that. And I totally get you on the whole, assumption that everyone is faking despite the fact that people seem to have some real stuff happening.
I was talking about it with a friend the other day and explained it as like, I know it's never been true for me. I've never felt like any of the Charismatic gifts were an actual power that I wielded or had access to, and even if that's the factual truth and it's just the human desire to be special and connected to God in this particular way, I think there's a beauty in that yearning and in wanting so desperately to feel the presence of your God there with you that you manifest it yourself in ways other people can't understand.
I don't know, it's a whole big complicated thing and I'm still angry about a lot of it at the same time that I like, miss parts of it? I wouldn't go back but I've definitely grieved some for what I lost when I had a sort of shattering of that particular faith.
Anyway, yes, it's totally an Experience and it's a really hard one to explain and I'm glad that you're out there and you Get It (even if yours was further along the bonkers scale than mine) because it's so rare that people do. <33333
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It 100% is. And I think that's the hardest part to get across is how not-strange it seems, until suddenly it does? I don't know, I've struggled for a really long time with figuring out how to explain my feelings re: the Pentecostal Charismatic faith and my personal relationship with it and the best way I've been able to do so is just by like, telling people what it was like and letting them draw their own conclusions, but even that isn't very accurate at the end of the day.
And yes, to the experience of other Christians reacting as if you/your church are some kind of batshit crazy weirdos.
YES. This was like, SO DEVASTATING to me as a child/early teen who was starting to see fissures in their family's faith practices but still wanted to believe in something. It was really jarring to be clinging to the belief that there was higher power that loved indiscriminately and walk face-first into discrimination after discrimination while trying to find an avenue to that higher power that felt more true.
I've said to Mucca that it felt like living in a world where everyone insists that magic is real, but you can't see or feel or work it yourself.
THIS. 100% THIS. What an elegant way to put it, wow. Yes. It's exactly like that. And I totally get you on the whole, assumption that everyone is faking despite the fact that people seem to have some real stuff happening.
I was talking about it with a friend the other day and explained it as like, I know it's never been true for me. I've never felt like any of the Charismatic gifts were an actual power that I wielded or had access to, and even if that's the factual truth and it's just the human desire to be special and connected to God in this particular way, I think there's a beauty in that yearning and in wanting so desperately to feel the presence of your God there with you that you manifest it yourself in ways other people can't understand.
I don't know, it's a whole big complicated thing and I'm still angry about a lot of it at the same time that I like, miss parts of it? I wouldn't go back but I've definitely grieved some for what I lost when I had a sort of shattering of that particular faith.
Anyway, yes, it's totally an Experience and it's a really hard one to explain and I'm glad that you're out there and you Get It (even if yours was further along the bonkers scale than mine) because it's so rare that people do. <33333