I recently sat back and thought about the church and how sometimes the people who are in the church can be the hardest people to provide acceptance although they call themselves the ones others should turn to.

Recently a friend was going through trials at her church and wanted to turn away completely. It was a perfect opportunity for me to remember how I got through my own experiences with Christians and uplift her in the process.

I can remember being judged for having a child out of wedlock, getting divorced, and practically being a teen. Being the daughter of a well-known pastor and man in the area didn’t make my plight any easier as well.

Through that experience, I learned that “religion” is not what I wanted to be apart of.  I am a daddies girl so I truly believed with my heart that what my dad was teaching had some truth to it. That there was something bigger than me and I had to figure out how to silence the noise of those around me to find him.

I wanted a relationship with God yet I knew he was bigger than the box I had been taught to put him in.

He wouldn’t have created me to stay in a desolate place and what I had gone through wouldn’t have caught him by surprise. I was still living so how could the circumstances in my life be so bad that he would turn away from me? I didn’t believe he would or even wanted to do that to me.

And once I truly got that realization in my heart. I begin to look at myself differently and how I viewed others in a new light.

I looked at my trials as “tests” and focused on what I had learned in the past to pass them rather than looking at them in fear or anger.

I knew, in the end, I would overcome them.

When I truly understood this in my heart, in my being, “church hurt” could no longer affect me or come against me. I understood that those people were reacting in their truths and their truths were not mine.

Just recently I learned someone who was high in the church was spreading false information about me.

Rather than being upset like I usually would be, I corrected the person and smiled.

To know that I was even on their mind, with no title such as theirs, showed that I was known. I was making a change that was being noticed.

I am who God created me to be. Beautifully and wonderfully made. When I got to know him for myself I got to know who I was in relations to him. And that my friend, was a life-changing experience.