Confessions of a Sinner

(About a 5 min read… if religion ever pushed you away from God, stay with me.)

I was desperate enough to look for God anywhere…

even if it meant avoiding Him…

Not because I didn’t believe…

but because the people who claimed to know Him had hurt me the most. The Bible says that if we seek Him… we’ll find Him… if we seek Him with all our heart…

What no one told me… is that you can be sincerely seeking God and still be looking in all the wrong places… a seemingly easy feat for me… I always thought seeking meant searching harder… trying more systems… finding better answers…

What I didn’t understand back then… was that seeking Him with all my heart didn’t mean seeking Him through the world… It meant seeking Him

where He had already revealed Himself… But I didn’t know that yet.

Time passed… and 2008 was cruel… and I was unprepared… Life didn’t taper off… it collapsed… We went from having much… to having little…

to having nothing… In about two months…

The business folded… the money disappeared… the plans evaporated… Before I had time to emotionally catch my breath… we were homeless…

Living out of our car… on the beaches of Lake Michigan… and the irony of it all still stings… our car was only six months old… still smelled new…

still felt like security… however, we weren’t just living in a car…

we were living in a car that was about to be repossessed…

Fear lead us in those days… quiet fear… survival fear… the kind that wakes you up early

and keeps you awake late… I had a hard time even imagining tomorrow… but something inside me refused to let me hit bottom…

I lived an inch from the surface

for about six months… not necessarily drowning… but never breathing deeply either…I picked up whatever work I could find… handyman jobs… small construction gigs…

Back then, when the market crashed… the big companies downsized and survived… the one-man handymen survived…

But the middle ground companies like mine… folded… and many people like me were out of work…

I’ve always been a seeker of truth… but repeated hurt from ministry people… the kind that smile while cutting you… slowly  skewed my image of who God was… not because I hated Him… but because I couldn’t reconcile Him with the people who claimed to represent Him…

So I searched elsewhere…

World religions… ancient systems… structured spirituality…

I hoped… desperately… that there was a better solution than the Christianity I had experienced…

Looking back now… I can see how much of my perspective

was shaped by survival… by loss… by a quiet victim mentality… This isn’t a story of blame… It’s a story of understanding… earned the hard way…

My late wife and I decided to try something new… An ex-Baptist… and a Pentecostal…

Walking into an Orthodox Catholic Church… it sounds a little like the beginning of a bad joke…

But, what an experience that was… we didn’t know what to do… everything had rules…

regulations… expectations… It was all liturgical… and every movement mattered… every posture meant something… and we knew none of it…

We felt watched… Not judged exactly… but noticed… The priests wore long garments…

tall hats… everything felt ancient… ceremonial… heavy… dead…

It reminded me of how the Pharisees must have looked

through the eyes of Jesus…

Systems everywhere… no relationship… at least not on the surface… then came the confessional… a long line of sinners… nearly two hours long… and to put insult to injury… if all the days we could have chosen… we chose Easter…

And I was one of them… a sinner… a broken man who didn’t yet know how deeply the Lord loved him…

When it was finally my turn…

I sat in the small booth… The priest’s voice was calm, yet short… and carefully measured… “How can I help you?” he asked… I swallowed hard… “I’m not sure what to do…” I said, “This is my first time…”

I shared my woes… my failures… my “sins”… I confessed… I chose my words carefully… like fragile glass…

afraid that if I said the wrong thing it would shatter what little hope I had left…

What I received fell flat… I was given tangible superstitions…

ritual responses… and empty instructions… and then I was sent on my way…

Still empty… still hurt… still carrying everything I walked in with… I felt alone…abandoned… and heavy in my chest… because something was missing… and I knew it…

What I didn’t know back then…

what no one explained to me is this: We weren’t given a High Priest only so we could confess our sins… through Jesus, we were given access… direct access to a loving Father… not a distant judge… not a system… not a checklist…

We were given access to a Father who wants us for His own… A Father who invites us

to cast our cares on Him…

The fear… the loss… the exhaustion… the weight of survival… So He can remove them… Spirit… soul… and body… and that discovery changed everything…

Learning who God really is…

Love… acceptance… presence… and the inheritance that comes from being part of His Kingdom far outweighs the emptiness of any confessional booth… God doesn’t want your performance… He just wants you…

He doesn’t want religion… He wants relationship… And He wants you to know His love…

Thanks for listening…

Michael

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