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Staying Orthodox

Jacque_Pierre22

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Haven’t logged in here in awhile, but this story hit the nail on the head for why I left the Orthodox Church. Been away for a few years now. Pretty much just ghosted everyone and the church itself… This is the first time I’ve admitted that... I missed the simplicity of the churches I grew up in- where people were not perfect either, but they were trying. And showing up. And while not perfect in love, they had a new spirit and new heart (from Ezekiel 36… Whenever I tried to talk to a priest about that new heart Ezekiel talks about, I’d get a blank or confused stare). The new heart was the evidence that they had truly come to Christ and not just following the old family tradition. While they didn’t believe the Eucharist was the real Body and Blood, there was a solid foundation of faith- and intense gratitude- in the shed blood of Christ (for them personally) to build on. They had generally turned their back on the world and the devil’s vanities and were walking the path of surrendering to Christ. They loved Jesus and were not afraid to wear their heart on their sleeve and talk about what Christ means to them. You didn’t have to fear walking into church and someone giving you the “evil eye,” telling you to “just shut up about it,” or someone else trying to blackmail you. People greeted you with a smile, a hug, or a handshake, and were truly interested in how your week went and how your spiritual state was. They offered encouragement, help, or just presence when you were down and celebrated and danced with you when things were up.

I am now finally finding “my first love” in honest openness in my prayers before God and hearing His still small voice replying and convicting in my spirit… but the trouble is, the Orthodox Church changed me a lot (I hated the person I was becoming, as Orthodox, and felt like I was losing Christ, my first love that I had since I gave my life over to Christ as a teen) and now it is hard to find my place in the world of churches. I still have never entertained the thought of going back East. It makes me shudder every time I think about it.

… It’s funny, my username is WanderedHome, but I never really felt at home in the Orthodox Church. That username was just me lying to myself, trying to make myself feel like I made the right decision. Wanting desperately for it to be home. The truth is I often felt like a foreigner in a strange land. Always keeping an eye open to find a small group of “expats” that I could relate to, and who understood my faith in Christ, who understood what things are like back in the homeland. I mostly got “expats” who had an ax to grind against “the homeland” and a bunch of uncharitable straw man arguments about why it was wrong or bad.
yea you sound like an "in-betweener" like me. I stopped going to the Lutheran Brethren at age 23 (I'm almost 40 now) because no one in those churches seemed to care about in depth study throughout my life or what anything meant. No one knew even the basics of Lutheranism when I was young, it was no different than a common evangelical church; the LCMS youth seem to be a lot more aware than the youth in the non high churches. this was just my personal experience as a young person. I'm sure the adults were more aware but the problem is that you should be learning in your formative years especially if you're father is also nominal and doesn't read the Bible with the family or anything. That's the dissapointing thing about church is most/many of the people are not into the theology or even look forward to the eucharist, it's just a social gathering for many. I was always a very serious person but the activities were always fun and games for the less than 25 crowd, or very basic lessons no different than an evangelical Baptist church; thus I gravitate to LCMS and eastern Orthodoxy because those are the most serious chuches with serious people; in Lutheranism Christ is supposed to be literally bodily present there and yet the people can be humdrum
 
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E.C.

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Wouldn't it just be easier to put an edit button on people's profiles so they can change it themselves?
I think under the older message board system (or whatever it was when I first joined in 2007) it was an easier-to-change feature. Naturally us Orthodox tended to kinda know who actually was Orthodox and who was just masquerading as one ;)

At some point CF probably had to make it a not-so-easy to change feature because of constant changing by a few trolls - at least that's my guess.
 
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