One student’s answer to the question, ‘Why don’t you go to church?’
by Chelsea Hoag
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A girl trying to find emotion.
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I mastered the act of bottling up emotions around the same time I learned to ride a bike. See, my parents fought to the point that I think they secretly enjoyed it.
Not three months after she graduated from high school, my Mom packed her things and married my Dad, only a junior in college. Five years later, I came along, and soon after, they divorced. But I did not cry.
Mom dated Greg for seven years before finally saying, “Yes.” My entire childhood consisted of me trying to impress him. If it went fast, we rode it. If Mom wasn’t looking, we would jump off of it. He taught me how to play drums, shoot a gun, and he took me to get my first ear piercing. He allowed me to experience a part of life I rarely got to know, fun. The relationship he had with Mom however, proved toxic. But I did not cry.
Dad remarried when I was 5, to a woman in Oklahoma he met on the Internet. The marriage shocked me, because he failed to ever even mention his well-planned wedding to a woman I had never met. “Here,” he said, as he pushed in the VHS tape. I did not cry. Emotionless and confused, I simply refused to watch the ceremony. I disconnected from him.
Speaking in tongues
My junior year of high school, Greg tried to kill himself. He next went to rehabilitation for abusing various types of drugs: a blunt of marijuana in the morning, a handful of Lortab at noon, and dinner washed down with a 12-pack of Bud Light. But I did not cry. I yearned for an escape.
A new church called New Song clawed its cold fingers into my life through a friend I met playing golf. My fellow church members and youth leaders wanted the best for me, to find God and to speak in tongues. I pleaded with them to stop forcing me to lie to myself, to give into ideals and beliefs I could not grasp.
“This is all happening for a reason,” I would say, squeezing a gold necklace between my thumb and index finger.
The necklace
My grandparents gave me the necklace when I was eleven, a gleaming gold cross with a small pink rose in the middle. I wore it every day, until the summer before leaving for college. Not once did I think about what the piece of gold hanging around my neck symbolized.
Mom could care less about the necklace. She hates what the church stands for just as much as I do. The youngest of three, she went to a private Christian school with her siblings, where the principal beat her. They told her she was dumb. Perhaps most tragic is the fact that her own mother was a close friend to the people beating her and did not do a damn thing to stop them. Understandably, my poor Mom cannot let go. She hated New Song and asked me to stop going.
New Song assigned me a 20-something-year-old mentor who had a similar past. Autumn, ordered me to cut all ties with “temptation.” So I stopped spending time with my friends who I have known since kindergarten. The old me did any kind of drug in order to escape reality. I wasn’t someone of whom God could be proud. Following Autumn’s orders, I did not go to a single party, bonfire or football tailgate my entire senior year. I met autumn every Tuesday that year for coffee and one-on-one Bible study.
The Tuesday night I told her I wanted to go to spring break with all of my friends in Florida, I knew everything I was living for was bullshit. And after her reaction of pure disgust and judgment, I knew I needed to sprint out of the door and not look back.
Since then, I have not stepped foot into a church. I told myself that finding God on my own terms will be more fulfilling than having people convert me into a little “Christ follower.”
But on a day like today, I smile as light reflects and is amplified by the polished gold dangling from my rear view mirror as rhythmic music pops through my speakers. That cross has pressed my chest more often I have been hugged. Finally, tears come to my eyes as I whisper, “Thank you, God,” because for the first time, I feel in control. Taking a deep breath, doubt no longer gnaws in my gut, eating away at my happiness. I feel free.