I will never forget my first Sunday back at church. I had prepared myself all week for that moment and still I had the jitters. As I curled my hair that morning I wondered if it was really worth it. It had been 10 years since I had stepped foot into a church by my own choosing and I wasn’t sure if this was the right time. We had just gone on a family vacation that weekend and had literally gotten home about 5 hours prior to me standing at the mirror, trying to make myself look a little more alive and less like a walking zombie. But I had made a promise. A promise to a God that I still wasn’t sure existed.
Truth be told, I’m scared to death of volcanoes and we had taken a family trip to see the one that has produced the deadliest eruption in North America to date. I promised God if He allowed me to live through the weekend without Mt. St. Helen’s blowing her top while we were there, I would be at church Sunday morning, no matter how late we got back Saturday night. The odds of an eruption are slim to none, and I’m not one to break promises, so as I was finishing the last touches on my make-up that morning I wondered if I had made the promise subconsciously as a safety net for myself in the event that I got cold feet.
No matter what the reason was, I kept my promise to the Lord that morning and if I’m being blunt, stepping through those church doors for the first time was more scary to me than being less than a mile from the infamous crater the day prior was. But why?
I have no doubt that the things that I felt that week leading up to that Sunday morning are feelings that every person feels when they’ve walked away from God and are trying to find their way back home. For those of us that walked away from God, for whatever reason, and decided to live life on our own terms, there comes a certain amount of shame and guilt when we realize that we must face our father and admit that we were wrong. But then when we decide to return to the church body, there’s a whole different land of fears that we must face.
Am I Going to Be Judged?
I understand how silly this sounds but hear me out. Human beings are not as quick to look past things as God is. We’re just not. I could go into a billion different scenarios that most of us come across every day in which we pass judgement but that is an entirely different conversation that doesn’t need to be had at this moment. For someone who has walked away from the faith and has been living in sin, this is the scariest thing to get past. When they’re at the point of walking through the church doors for the first time, odds are they don’t have a relationship with God yet. They’re just beginning their journey. This means that the minute they walk through the church doors, the first impression they’re going to get of God and God’s forgiveness is going to be through the people around them.
As humans we tend to view sin on a spectrum of level one to level ten. Level one consists of the “smaller” sins as we would consider them, such as lying or gossiping about your new co-worker. As the sins get “worse” the higher on the spectrum we view them. In the grand scheme of things this is not how God views sin. To Him it all falls on the same spectrum of SIN. To a person who has been living in sin for years, this concept is foreign, and they “know” the minute someone finds out the juicy details about their past it’s going to be all over. Once one person finds out that they stole from that store 15 years ago it’ll be all over the church and they’ll be kindly asked to never come back.
This isn’t the way that it is, but this is the picture that Satan paints for those that are lost so that they won’t ever even try, especially if the sins people have committed fall anywhere above a five on the spectrum that they’ve created in their head. For some, their past is easier to forget and they’re not worried about anyone finding out about it, because unless they themselves bring it up, how is anyone going to know. But for others it’s not as easy.
This was one of the fears that I had. I intentionally didn’t take my three kids with me that first Sunday that I attended. In fact, I half thought about never taking my kids with me because I knew eventually someone would start noticing that all three of my kids had different weekend schedules. I knew eventually people were going to find out that all three of my children had different fathers. Satan played on this fear and I was afraid to get close to anyone for the longest time. It wasn’t long before the truth did come out and I was met with love and support for myself and all three of my children and fear lost that battle.
Can I Really Change?
This fear is one of the most ridiculous fears I have ever heard, yet Satan uses other people to play on this fear day in and day out. We’ve all heard the phrase “once a _____, always a ______” . You can fill in the blanks with whatever you want but most people have either heard this phrase or even have used it themselves to describe a type of behavior that they think can’t be changed. To a person who is not living the life that God intended for them, this phrase is a shot to the heart and mind the minute it’s said, and it is a total lie.
With this lie embedded into the mind of someone who is a baby in their walk with the Lord, it is easy for them to get discouraged and wonder why they should even try to change when they’re always going to be the way that they are.
This was a fear that hadn’t really been present until the day before we left for Mt. St. Helens. I had mentioned to a friend that I wasn’t going to be available on Sunday because I was going to church. The response of “Oh, so you think if you go and sing a couple of songs and say a few words to a God that might listen, you’ll be fixed?” broke my heart. The thought never occurred to me that I wasn’t “fixable”. The statement, I later learned through my own experiences, was false and was just another way for evil to plant a seed of doubt, but it still caused unease in my mind.
Will God Really Forgive What I’ve Done?
If you’ve never committed a sin greater than being jealous of your neighbor’s new car, you will never understand just how real this fear is. I’m not trying to play the “my house is bigger than yours” card here (no pun intended) but because of how we as humans view sin (that scale of one to ten thing that I mentioned earlier), this fear is the final nail in the coffin. For someone who doesn’t have a relationship with Christ, the only example of forgiveness that they have is what they’ve been shown by other humans, which may not be that great.
These are the people that are the most broken. These are the people that didn’t just walk away to live their lives the way they wanted but bathed in sin daily. These are the people that Satan wants to hold on to. Fear and confusion are his greatest weapons, so what does he do? He plants seeds of doubt into the persons mind and he takes away their hope. With no hope, they will never take the first step.
I encountered this fear the week leading up to my first Sunday. There were things that I had done that my own family hadn’t forgiven me for. What made me think God, my creator, could forgive me? He hadn’t walked away from me. I had walked away from Him. Why would He even want to waste His time on me? God has shown me over the last two years that these were all lies. He has shown me through love, mercy, and blessings that I matter to Him just as much as anyone else that has walked this earth does.
We need to be mindful that these fears are out there. A person who lets fear control their life may let one of these fears be the difference between stepping foot through the front door and if they do step through the front door, it is important to remember that God led them to our church for a reason. It’s up to us to make sure that we show the same grace and mercy that He does and plant seeds of our own.