Church, installment 1, My Early Years.

Hello again, dear Church.
It's been a while since we've truly communed.  You are such an interesting study.

I wasn't initially raised going to visit you, Church, except for infant baptism and the rare occasions when my mom would dress us up to take us to visit you on the odd Easter. You were like school, that is you smelled like school, only you were dressier, shorter in length, and you contained more adults than you did children. Like school, I felt that you were something that was required of and happening to me.

Like school, I still got grouped with children my age and in that group, we outnumbered the lone adult.  And also like school, I still felt shy, conspicuous and socially awkward among my assigned peers. Unlike school, you told more stories and you used felt dolls on a felt board to act the stories out, like a static puppet show.. so you were a bit more creative.  That bit of creativity was not lost on me.  It distracted me from your antiseptic, basement-y smell, towering adult in charge, and from the embarrassment of not knowing any of the answers.  Very much like school, I was glad when you were over.  I didn't think it very desirable that you were held on a Sunday feeling you should have been 'instead' of school, not 'in addition' to school.

I walked away thinking: it's not fun to come to church once in a blue moon.  You probably have to attend regularly to feel you belong.

(Next installment to follow...the years of going voluntarily)

Monday. Leap Year Day

SO, ever since people figured out you can make money blogging, I got messed up.  Of course I'd love to be one of those money-making people.  Problem is...to be one of those people you have to follow 10 steps, monetize, force yourself, etc....  you also have to self-promote.

  I'm so sick of self-promoting e-mails,etc. I have helped others promote.  But...I think I understand now that that is not who I (personally) want to be.  I'd love a readership, but not at the expense of being who I am: an erratically paced person trying to figure out how best to live my life.  People self-promote for millions of reasons, one of them being that they are trying to make a living and support a family.  I salute you if you are one of those people. Honestly.  That is very hard to do. 

I have the same need for money as everybody else, but my body has it's own ideas.  It's absolutely insisted that I stay small and private and keep my stressors at as low a level as possible (as humanely possible); if I don't stay within my limitations I have to spend copious amounts of time trying to recover from deviating. Those times are just terrible.

So I am blogging again, at my pace. For my enjoyment.  And once I say it once on Facebook, that will be the extent of my self promoting.  There's a real freedom in that, actually. This blog is for me, but it's public for those who care to visit.  A comment to let me know you stopped by would be just great, but I don't anticipate any. The web has gotten so huge. These days traffic comes from social networking.  

Speaking of social networking, I have downsized on Facebook.  GOOD GRIEF, it so political.  I'm so sick of politics I could scream. (Once.  Then I'd get exhausted or get a headache and regret the outburst, so NO.)

We started going to church again.  We attended a perspective member seminar on Saturday and both decided "yes".

Church.  That's another topic.  So, I'm going to post this and say adieu to this post and write one called Church.