We, and Jesus Leto, want to hear your stories of growing up in the Church.
The Commandments:
Keep stories under 5 minutes (that’s about 700 words) and about one incident–no trailing stories of your entire life. We’ll link to podcasts that do those type of stories.
No trauma. We are looking for quirky, odd, funny stories since we aren’t equipped to help or guide anyone in any way except to let you know we love you and hope you find a community with us.
Stories must be true. Don’t be a liar, ya liar.
Let us know if you DON’T want your name, or others in the story, to be revealed. Otherwise, we’re outing you. And we don’t want your mother calling us. Or your pastor.
See the EXAMPLE story below.
*Complaints and irate justifications for why we’re wrong and you’re right about faith, post here.
Example
To make your story something podcastable, it needs to have components of a beginning, middle, and end. Read a true example from Karen’s church files.
The Set Up. Time/place:
In the late eighties I attended a Southern Baptist college. While other college kids were going to parties and playing beer pong, we were arguing over if Amy Grant’s crossover to mainstream music was what God wanted, and attending house Bible studies.
Get into the story:
I knew this cool older girl who wanted to start a Bible study at her house off campus. It was going to be just for women, and in those days, that was almost a novel idea.
I’d just broken up with a guy and I was in that phase of telling myself I really needed to just be by myself for a while—work on my identity and all those things we tell ourselves to deal with our insecurity of not being in a relationship.
My roommate and I walked the ten minutes to her house off campus and found about four others girls there. We sat on the floor and opened our meeting with prayer, asking God to direct us and all that. Then we read some Bible verses about being holy. Being holy is all about what you say and think and how you dress and treat others and, you get it. It’s pretty all-encompassing and daunting. But we all earnestly desired it.
But then the study took a little detour. One that was so predictable, I got mad.
The leader and other women began to discuss how being holy is important because then you’d attract a holy man. I could feel myself getting, well, righteous.
“Why do we always have to focus on guys?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we be holy just because it pleases God?”
They stared at me.
“The end game doesn’t need to be about attracting a holy guy,” I went on.
I guess this would now be labeled as Christian feminism, but at that moment, I thought it was just a rational way of thinking.
On the walk back to the dorm, I was fired up. “That’s it,” I told my roommate. “I’m swearing off guys for a long time. It’s just going to be me and God. I mean it. No guys. NO GUYS!”
The twist or lesson:
Our path back to the dorm was along a main road. Although it was well-lit and safe, there wasn’t much traffic on it. About halfway home, a bus slowly approached and then stopped. The door opened and a young man jumped out.
“Excuse me. We’re supposed to be in such and such a town by 9. Can you tell us where that is?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s about an hour back the other way.”
The guy looked stressed. I told him the fastest way was probably taking another route. Then he asked if we could tell that to the bus driver. (Don’t worry, this isn’t a kidnapping story. We felt safe, although writing this makes me worry about how naïve we all were back then.)
My roommate and I go up the steps of the bus and look to see a whole lot of guys. A literal busload of them. And they were hot.
Then the guy says, “We’re the Chippendales.”
My roommate gets giddy, and while I’m giving directions to the bus driver, she’s halfway down the aisle flirting with them all.
They were super nice and thanked us as we sent them on their way.
My roommate and I stood back on the sidewalk and looked at each other. Did that really happen? Then we laughed at the whole thing.
In our minds, God was showing us his sense of humor about the whole swearing off guys thing.
Yes, we believed the almighty deity cared so much about little me and my statement about putting men aside, that he steered a whole bus of Chippendales an hour past their show obligation just to give me a chuckle. I told that story for years, chucking it up to God’s hand in my life, even when he just wanted to show me love.
Awww, God. You’re the best!