Off to Camp

I'll be leaving for camp soon. I don't know how much I'll be home over the summer - for the most part just on weekends, if anything. It feels a little strange to be doing no counseling (basically I'll be on maintenance and dishes), a result of being deemed too unorthodox to talk to kids. The camp where I spent the majority of the last two summers doesn't even want me as a chore boy.

I'm not at all angry or resentful about this. It's not that I love counseling so much (in fact I usually find it quite challenging and discouraging) and it's not that I think I'm too good to wash dishes or pound nails, because I often enjoy that kind of work, but I can't shake this feeling that the church views me as some kind of spiritual invalid, with nothing to offer but my body. I don't mean that the Christians I know think of me that way. (Well, maybe they do - how could I know? But they're nice about it.) But I'm feeling more and more like the church has little use for me, or like I don't belong in the church.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have no complaints about my Christian friends, my church leadership, or the people at my camps. Believe me, if I had a problem with them I'd talk to them about it, not whine about them in my blog. My people are great people, but we're different. Our beliefs are different, our mindsets are different, our goals are different. It's not that they won't let me counsel, it's that I couldn't counsel. I couldn't do what would be expected of me. I couldn't say what they want me to say. We're just different.

My church has a communion service every Sunday morning in which anyone can stand up and talk about anything, so long as it's related somehow to Jesus and the whole atonement thing. Sometimes I love this service, because people can be real and share what they're thinking about stuff, but other times I don't understand what people are saying. I'm trying to articulate what kinds of things I don't get, and I think it's basically anything about Christianity having a practical impact on our lives. (Our lives, mind you. I have no problem with someone saying "Becoming a Christian changed my life in this or that way." But I have a hard time with "Isn't it wonderful how we [collectively, as Christians] are different in this or that way!") If there's one thing I've learned about Christianity, it's that it affects people differently.

I suppose the problem with Christianity is that you can only really be a Christian if your beliefs and experiences fall within certain parameters. I guess everything's like that, right? The difference is that Christianity thinks it's for everyone, or to put it another way, it thinks everyone's beliefs and experiences can be defined in it's own particular way. Depending on which Christian circles you move in, you may be able to get "in" to a certain point while still being a quite different, but you'll never totally fit.

It's like hanging around with a group of people who have all known each other for years. They may be great people, they may know how to have a good time, they may be deep and real, they may do a good job of including you and making you feel welcome, and yet they'll always have a deeper connection between each other that you don't have, and you'll always feel like a bit of an outsider with them.

I've gotten fairly good at fitting in. I don't try to hide my differences, but I try not to shove them in people's faces either. I'm used to checking up with whatever ministries I'm in to be sure they're aware of who I am and are ok with me doing what I do. I speak in communion service when I can and I try to keep my mouth shut when I deem my thoughts too radical. I do my best to encourage and help others in their Christian lives even when I can't relate to them. And it hurts me to express discontent with my little Christian world because I dearly love these people and I believe they love me too. My friends are good friends, and I always hate to see any of them go. I'm not sure what I'm saying here. Maybe I don't need to get out of the circles I'm in so much as I need to get into new ones. I want to connect with a broader range of people and find places to serve where my convictions and beliefs aren't a hindrance.

I don't know how I'll do this. I might go searching for a crazy-liberal church or a secular place to volunteer or something like that. Maybe I'll become really outgoing at school and make lots of philosopher friends. Or maybe I'll do nothing.

Anyhow, I think what I meant to say in this post is that I'll be going off to camp tomorrow. I'll be back now and then, mostly on weekends, but I don't know how much blogging and stuff I'll get in. Hopefully I'll be able to do weekly updates like I did last year.

A couple more things:

Now seems like a good time to plug bloglines.com. Sign up (It's easy! It's free!) and they'll notify you each time a blog you read has new content. This has the twofold benefit of saving you the need to check various blogs for new posts and boosting my ego when the subscribers number above my blog goes up.

In the middle of writing this post I came across an article on leavingfundamentalism.org which addresses precisely this topic. If you're interested, here she is.