Dear God: Are you angry?

I stood in the dim hallway, unable to take another step, but I had to go to the restroom.

Taking a deep breath, I ran. 

Both hands out in front of me, I barreled into the bathroom convinced God and his wrath were just waiting for a chance to smite me. 

What had I done to make Him so angry? 

Was it because I didn’t listen?  

I called my father a witch last week. That’s probably it. 

Humming, I washed my hands to ensure I didn’t give Him another reason to drag me to hell.

I had been taught to fear God.

In my lessons he was a wrathful leader, one who would not hesitate to send your soul to an eternity of damnation for disobeying him.

One must not break the rules! 

We must always strive for perfection. It is the only way to spend eternity upstairs rather than down, with the other one. 

Even before my mind could fully comprehend what an eternity of punishment would be like, I wondered why God would set me up for failure. 

He created me, he knew every step I would take in this life.
 

He gave me free will and then seemed determined to punish me for it. 

Questions were not welcomed.

Individuality did not fly. 

Choosing not to worship? 

That wasn’t an option. 

I attempted many times to discuss these things with someone who might have an understanding of what it all meant, but I learned quickly: no one had an answer.

It seemed as though we all walked on Christly eggshells to keep our souls intact, even the priest. 

As I got older I began seeking the answers myself. 

I read the Bible cover to cover twice before I graduated high school, studied the Deuterocanonical texts in an attempt to understand the question that loomed so largely in my mind. 

Who was I giving my soul over to? 

Instead of finding the God I had been warned about, I found contradiction, poetry, context, human intervention. 

Page by page, the monolithic, angry figure sitting in the dark hallway began to dissolve. 

Slowly, my fear was replaced by a strange, liberating realization: the people who claimed to speak for God had clearly never read the fine print.

There is a profound shift that occurs when a child stops running down dark hallways toward the light.

Studying the texts never provided a clean set of answers, but it gave me something infinitely better: sovereignty.

I realized that my curiosity was not a sin, it was the very thing keeping my spirit alive.

God was never waiting in the shadows to smite me. 

He is the reason I was brave enough to ask the questions in the first place. 

The more I studied religion, the further I drifted from the pews.

It turned out that asking real questions in a place seemingly built on silent compliance makes people uncomfortable, 

but by the time I had closed the book on my second reading, the lingering dread finally quieted.

If God was angry, it wasn’t at a fourteen year old humming in the pulpit or calling her father a witch—

it was at a system that used His name to make children afraid of the dark.