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Goodbye Jesus

Spoils Of His War


OpenHeart

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There are all kinds of ways to get complex PTSD... Rape. Kidnapping.Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters… But for the sake of argument, and appropriateness in this case, let’s focus on the most well-known category of people who live in fear, who live with constant, uninterrupted threats on their lives: Veterans of war.

 

Myriads of things can kill you. Self inflicted, whether intentional or not - Eating the wrong food, drinking the wrong drink, taking a wrong step. Naturally occurring - Cancers, diseases, chemical imbalances, earthquakes, tsunamis… Being alive means being able to die, and death is inevitable. Soldiers put themselves in the most despicable of harm’s way… Being killed willfully by another human being.

 

Would you put a wounded veteran at the end of a loaded gun’s barrel? How compassionate would it be, to face a bleeding soldier with the same murderous instrument that crippled him? That can cripple him again? That can take more than a limb, but also his life? … The war that still rages in his head is no less substantive than the war he lost a limb to. The monsters are real - They stole his leg. They poached his livelihood. They spoiled his peace. They gave him nightmares during the daytime, and put danger in every shadow. They left scars on the inside as well as the outside, usurping his physical and mental health, for the rest of his life.

 

I was a good soldier, in the army of Christ. I fought for Him proudly, gladly, because He was all I knew. I rejoiced in my iniquities, because He was my everything, and I was nothing. But His war, my war, gave me soldier’s wounds. The comfort that I found wielding the cross now terrorises me. The joy I felt reading His Bible has turned rancid.

 

No less then, would you put me in a church, which was my battlefield, or under the cross that is its flag. I know His book; it was mine, and I loved it and let it define me. I know His songs; I sang their verses, and relinquished my voice to the hope of salvation. But they betrayed me. They gave me to my enemy, His enemy, before I could speak for myself.

 

The basis of my faith in salvation, the underlying current, was that I was a poor, miserable sinner, and on my own unworthy of love. I was deserving only of present and eternal torture, and death was the price I had to pay for my wickedness. My death is my fault, and original sin my undoing. Salvation is the second part of the equation, which rests first on the need to be saved. But one and one and one do not equal one, and sin is only a belief, not a truth... Judgments and facts are mutually exclusive, and sin and salvation are both the foremost.

 

My God judged me. I believed I was nothing, and I lost myself; My life was forfeit, and I died enslaved to His doctrine, and in the process of being His pawn. Had I not been taught that I was wretched from conception, I would not have held His message as truth. I would not have clung so desperately to salvation from the same monster that condemned me in the first place. I would not have fought in a war I could not win.

 

Comfort me now with anything but psalms and verses, because those do more damage than you can imagine. While the nature of the subject of belief and religion seems benign, the fountainhead of His message disfigures me at my core. It warps my innocent soul, steals my voice, and breaks my heart. It is unhelpful, to the point of being detrimental, and even degenerative. I can't be tormented with things that used to give me comfort, but now make me bleed. Monsters live only in the shadows created by the light. If kindness and compassion and salvation are what you preach, you don't need Christianity for that. Kindly, be compassionate enough to save me from hearing the religiosity that kindles your well-meant words, because they spear me through the heart, and cause me unrest.

 

Peace, for me, is a broken cross. I need to leave it behind me.

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