Thinking for yourself can get you into trouble...

Just before I turned 9 my mother graduated from college and got offered a job in Florida. We moved to a small town outside of Tampa and started attending a new Church of Christ. Here we found people who knew our grandparents in Kentucky. (That was no surprise. Small churches in small towns have an amazing ability to keep in contact.) When they learned that my sisters and I were children of divorce we were immediately treated slightly different. We were to be pitied. We needed more guidance. We needed more help to grow in God because we were from a broken family and thus were partially broken ourselves. 

I was quickly deemed ‘weird’ by the other kids and mostly just stuck around my older sister. I asked the questions during Sunday school that the teachers didn't like to answer. I answered their questions logically but somehow they were the wrong answers. My Sunday school class was once asked that if we had lived 2,000 years ago, when Jesus was alive, would we had followed him. The entire class answered ‘Yes’ one-by-one. 

While they were automatically answering I was thinking. By the time the question was posed onto me I answered ‘No.’ You would have thought I had dropped a bomb in the class. No one moved. The teacher looked stunned. My sister had her head in her hand. (She was used to my antics) I knew what I was supposed to say. I knew that, to move on with the lesson I was to say ‘yes’, get a gold star, be right, and live forever blissfully ignorant and happy with the answers I had been fed my entire life. My reason for the ‘no’ was that if today a man came around and said that our religion was wrong and we needed to follow him and his way to receive everlasting salvation I would not follow him. That’s exactly what Jesus was doing to people 2,000 years ago. He was saying the religion that 90% of the current population was following was wrong, that he was a incarnation of God, and that he was the true path to salvation. It must have been a hard pill to swallow and if the people of 2,000 years ago had any of the trust in their religion as we did then I would expect them to say ‘no’ as well. So, that was my answer for this Sunday school teacher. It was the most logical answer I could come up with. It would be what I would expect any of my classmates to say had they not been so brainwashed to blindly answer the way they were taught to.

I, however, was immediately placed on the Elder watch list.