Numb to Church

It's Sunday morning and your conscience is telling you to go to church but reality is asking you a very legitimate question. "Why?" You scan through a list of churches in driving range of your house and the whole scene just looks like a busy blur of shallow activity. Numbness is the sensation that the idea of church brings to you. I'll never forget when I was sixteen years old and I busted my knee skateboarding. It wasn't one of those bloody mess sort of things. The blow took place just below the knee cap but the force raised a knot the size of a goose egg and to this day the feeling has never came back. Skateboarding was my passion but I quit that day. Those of you that know me know that I got another board in recent years but it was just to reach out to some young people in my life. I've never pursued skateboarding with the aggressiveness and vigor that I did through my early teens. Why? Because numbness is an incredible deterrent. 

When a person gets hurt by church it is rarely an injury that can be seen on the outside but the damage that takes place to the infrastructure of that person's spiritual peripheral nervous system can take all the feeling out of life. The network of Christians that we live around is where we wind up pulling most of our conception of God from because it's the easiest place to find His working hand. When a piece of "God" turns out to be an absolute fraud thats a blow that can set you up for a recovery so slow that you'll likely die before it happens. This morning you find yourself at a place where you need to be getting out of bed and getting ready for church but you really just need some answers, too.

Before I try to describe some kind of "fix all" for you to implement into your life I want you to take a deep breath and realize that what you feel is normal. God designed you. He knows what your weaknesses are. God knows where you've been and what you've been through. If you decided to make today another Sunday that NO church saw your face you didn't decrease on His "favorites" list. All those church people your life used to revolve around may completely forget about you. Maybe they think you deserve every struggle you face because of how disappointing you are to God. None of that matters. Fact is, if you are a born again child of God, He was sitting on the edge of your bed this morning like any good daddy would be smiling at you with that "lets give this another go" look on His face. Yep. Contrary to what you may believe He is still crazy about you. As a matter of fact, He'd really like to spend some time with you. That blow you took, that numbness you feel, it may make a whole lot of people in your life look complicated but God hasn't changed any. Don't let any person that has wronged you cheat you of fellowshipping with God. 

The second thing I want you to realize is that God is interested in healing you. Man would be happy if you would just suppress all the questions you have, jump back into performing, and pretend like everything is fine but God doesn't need another hypocrite contributing to this same problem in other people's lives. No, God wants to heal you. When I was in middle school there was a gang of bullies that made a lot of people's lives miserable. I remember going home in the evenings and walking around my neighborhood with my dad. I'd share I'll my frustrations with him and he'd encourage me. Most of those guys got kicked out of my school within a year or two but my dad sustained me while they were in my life. The problem is that most of the time Christians put "dad" in with all the things that hurt them and walk away from Him, too. Your Bible hasn't been inconsistent, though. God isn't responsible for all the two faced religion you've seen. When we cut Him off with all the church people we open ourselves to falling into some serious sins. Maybe thats where you are today. Maybe your life has slid into all sorts of shameful actions because of your numbness. The sin in your life may be "confirmation" to all the church people that they were right about you when they had those "bad feeling" about you they claim they had. Religious fakes usually think they are prophets, don't they. They're too blind to see that they created the situation that got this ball rolling in your life. God is a good daddy and He is hurting for you right now. If you stop and look you'll see that gentle hand of grace that has never stopped reaching into your life. Step one is to get back on talking terms with God. He hasn't cut you off. You've actually cut Him off. God breaks fellowship with cold hearted rebellion not injured desperation. No, friend, He's still got full focus on you and He wants to walk you through this. He can sustain you. He can HEAL you if you'll let Him.

The third thing I want you to realize is that whether you are twenty years old or seventy years old it's ok to start over. Maybe you were deceived spiritually about a lot of things that lead to your numbness. Maybe you had your faith in people instead of God. Maybe you were part of a church that was just plain wrong about everything. Maybe your own family did this to you. Here you sit somewhere in the middle of life and you are tore all the way down back to your foundation. You can rebuild! You can set out on the frustrating journey of church hunting and find a group of people that love you and you can start over. There are places like that out there. It may take some effort to find and it may not look like anywhere you've been before but you can find it with God's help and you can shamelessly stand up, start over, and walk out of the ashes.

The last thing I want you to realize is that relapses are going to happen. You are going to run into those people that hurt you in public or on social media. You are going to be riding down the road one day and randomly remember the injustice you've seen and you're going to get angry again. We like to pretend that once we get a victory we never revisit our defeats but this is not a movie or a novel; this is real life and you are going to have frustrating relapses here and there. Buckle your seatbelt and stay honest with yourself. What you went through was bad but you don't need to live in it every day. Recognize self pity in your life and don't feed it. When Jesus healed the cripple man He told him to take up his bed and walk. That man was no longer sitting in that spot where he suffered for all those years but in all his victory he still had a reminder. He still had that bed in his hands. Let that bed be a reminder of Christ and His healing and not of the years that disease robbed you of. It's going to take some time and effort, friend, but you can get the feeling back. You don't have to live numb.