Kailey’s Story

I grew up in this church. My mom worked here when I was young, so I was at the church all the time growing up. I always had a bit of an issue believing in the Bible, but I accepted it because everyone else that I saw did. As I got older, I was kind of “adopted” as a child of the church, which has made a lot of things easier for me, since I have a plethora of smart, wise adults to give me advice and help me out. Lately, though, I have had some serious changes in my stance on Christianity. It has nothing to do with my spiritual leaders or any sort of misdirection from the church; it has really been a personal discovery. I have noticed a lot of hatred and judgement being passed on others under the guise of Christianity. I’ve seen a lot of discrimination and even oppression because people are so strongly loyal to their religion. This really speaks to me, as it is my goal in life to be as loving and accepting of as many people as possible. I realized that people use their religion as a way to defend their personal beliefs, and that’s not okay with me, because I feel that religion is supposed to help you be the best person you can be, which helps everyone around you by default. And there are some people that feel they can do that without religion, which I think is perfectly fine, as long as they are respecting one another, because after all, isn’t the goal of Christianity to love one another? Because I see people forgetting that goal, I had started to lose faith in faith, but then I looked around our church and I realized that we don’t have that problem. Our church is filled with loving and genuinely kind people. And it is a church that, even though I don’t necessarily agree with everyone about everything, I am genuinely glad to be a part of.