Good News or Bad News?

 

Growing up African meant religion had to be breathed down your neck. The propagators of the good news back then didn’t really give us good news. It was threat after threat after threat. And so instead of coming to love God, we just feared going to hell.

I mean never once were we told about the God who watches over us when we sleep, the God who is so concerned with every detail of our lives he ran out of things to do and decided to count the strands of hair in our head, that He loves us so much that He died for us, that though the world is already messed up if we cry to Him for help He will come to our rescue. A God who loves us and cares about every decision we make. A God who wants me to know that all I need is to trust Him. A God who wants me to do nothing out of the ordinary for me to attain my desires but to just keep doing what I am doing. A God who doesn't want me to try so much to please Him coz He already loves me as I am.

Instead we were told of this moral monster. We were told that we would be eaten by the demon under the bed if we didn’t pray before we sleep, we were told that the food we ate would rot in our stomachs if we did not pray for it. We were told this is a sin and that is a no go zone. We were never told what was right but always what was wrong. So we grew up fearing the wrong and never really focusing on the right.

It was so bad that we can’t even write God’s pronouns in lowercase!

When we grew up and realized that most of these things were lies, a huge majority left church, another lot started compensating for the time lost and the remaining became members of the heaven jury.

Anyway, now that we have known that our predecessors exaggerated religion, do we throw the baby out and the bath water or do we find the true religion? I want to believe we do the latter. I am, however, not here to tell you what to do, you go and find out for yourself.

Personally, I am learning to know Christ for myself and unlearning all that religion told me.