Prodical Son Returns. It's Party Time!

I have spent the last several years trying to decide about my self.  I have a long history as a Christian and I choose to leave the church several years ago.  Just like most folks God did not leave me, I left God.  I have never had any doubts about that. But I took along journey in between.  My issue with church of course boiled down to my pride, nothing else really.  I told my self that is was the other folks pride and prejudices, and yes they may have been a contributing factor.  But other folks behavior does not dictate mine.  Here is a brief history of my journey.


Early 1970's: My Mom started attending Church.  Strangely my Step Father did not.  As some folks may know this is a common condition.  She was baptized in to Christ and at the age of twelve I followed in her footsteps.  By this time I was starting to grow and really believe.  By the time I was 17 I wanted to get a little rowdy in a good way.  I attended a Missions program called Adventures In Missions (AIM - At Sunset International Bible Institute).  It was a great program. At the time it was through the Sunset School of Preaching.

I sojourned in Lesotho Africa and it was a great experience.  There were challenges but over all I would do it again in a heart beat.

After I came home things started to change for me. As is somewhat normal the congregation welcomed me home and quickly started treating me like a 14 year old again.  For young people coming home for foreign religious service this is a common occurrence. You come home they welcome you home and between an inflated ego on my part and a lack of the ability of my fellow Christians being able to see my spiritual growth and desire to serve.  I was not able to continue to be the person I wanted to be.  I acknowledge with all humility it was my pride that assisted me in loosing my patience.


I had an incident happen at my home congregation.  I am not saying my reaction was correct and  I am not going to name names or go into any details except to say it was race related, and it shocked me no end.  this was the Nth time a racial issue in the church had shocked me and it was the last straw. From having to be asked if I could live with a African American    during school in Texas, for the harassment that both me and my Room Mate endured just because he tanned better than I did. And the last straw being the incident here in San Diego CA that tossed my patience over the edge.  I later fell completely away from the Church.I married a non-believer in 1986 who 'till this day is my wonderful wife.

I actually through a period that I did not believe God even existed.  If anybody asked me I would say I was an atheist.  Now some folk might not understand how I could go from Mission Work to Atheist in about 7 years,  I only have to say is I could not "sort of" believe in God.  It is all or nothing to me.  It is not fair to God if I pretended and and I felt it was disrespectful to the church to just show up and pretend to be Christian.

Some years ago I started fight severe clinical depression.  I just started getting treated for it and some things have crossed my mind. It all started wit the Moral Majority and the some folks in the Tea Party. I love the core principles of the Tea Party movement and continue to do what I can to support a re-founding of our Constitutional roots. And having said that, as with the Moral Majority of the 1980's, there are strong religious undertones.   I started to write a book, If it is ever published I will let you know and I had to do a lot of research.  The core concept of the book is how the bible teaches us to interact with non-believers.  There was a lot of reading of the scriptures.   That caused me to re-think me position on God.  I have spent the last two years thinking and studying .  Now I have come back to Christ.

I am continuing to study. I will be posting some musings here and hope folks will comment and help become even more grounded.

Feel free to post comments or if you think I should show your blog because you disagree or agree.  Yes Christ and God have welcomed me home. But this is only a restart of a journey I started some 37 years ago.

Phileo