It started in 2013. I got married in January and a month later, in February, my mother got a DUI.
We came from a fundamentalist background where the fact that mom was drinking, which she kept hidden for a year, was more scandalous than her having done it while driving. Because of this, my mother carried a lot of shame. She slowly attended church less and less and eventually stopped coming altogether.
There were other factors at play during this time that are too difficult or too personal to describe. What ended up happening, though, was my parent’s marriage began to deteriorate, and they eventually divorced.
My mother’s alcoholism and her absence from church were the impetus that caused a thirty-year marriage to collapse, and it all started a month after my marriage began. Suffice it to say, this wounded me terribly.
In the fall of 2013, something else happened: I started college. I was twenty-four at the time, and for the first time in my life I became fully immersed in a culture that I had rarely been exposed to.
I started school to become a social worker. This required me to take a lot of humanities and social science courses. I took classes in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others that taught a contrary message to what I had grown up with in the church. We discussed topics like mental health, sexuality, and evolution that conservative Christians often oppose, dismiss, or ignore.
It became difficult to reconcile the traditional picture of God with the… [Read more…] about How I Lost My Salvation
