Hello 2019, Goodbye Christian Whore!

​In November 2018, I released a book titled Goodbye, Christian Whore: Seeking a Heart for One Love. While the title might imply that I have found the whore and it is now gone, that is not actually the reality. Goodbye is more of a lifestyle commitment than a command.
 
Last year, I realized that I wasn’t seriously committed to God. God was there when it was convenient but I was not committing my life to him. I began wondering what it meant to actually be committed to God. Did that mean I had to pray and fast for thirty days? Did I have to wake up and pray at the same time every day? Did I need to serve in every ministry the church had to offer?
 
To commit to God, I needed to love Him. I needed to understand what pleases Him.
 
When I got married, I made a commitment to my husband. That I would love him through good times and bad times, through sickness and health, through anything that comes up, until we die.
 
However, when I made this commitment, I’m not sure I fully understood what I was committing to. How could I? I had never been married. All my ideas of what marriage should be were formed from other people’s marriages, and of course marriages portrayed on television shows and movies. So, after we got married, I began to go through a checklist of what it meant to be a good wife.
 
A good wife:
-has children, stays home with the children if she is a really good wife
-cooks meals, good homemade meals not the boxed dinner kind
-balances the checkbook
-and so on and so on, I’ll spare you all the details
 
However, by going through this mental checklist of everything that I thought it took to be a good wife I began to find myself miserable. And after talking to my husband, I found that he had the same kind of checklist that was making him miserable as well. If I had to work, he was failing me. If we didn’t own a house, fail. If I wasn’t getting pregnant, fail.
 
We soon realized that we had to chuck the checklists and find out what worked for us. I realized that Jacob liked to cook and was really good at it. He realized that I enjoyed working and wasn’t set on staying at home with the kids all the time. We began talking more and learning what passions and dislikes each other had and how we could make our commitment unique to us.
 
Saying Goodbye, Christian Whore is all about chucking the checklist. I’m realizing that I need to spend more time with God (reading the Bible) and less time worrying about religious checklist.
 
A good Christian:
-attends church every Sunday, and special nights if they are really good
-serves in at least one ministry every Sunday
-leads a Bible study group or attends one, or more
- and so on and so on
 
None of this stuff makes someone a good Christian, and not doing this stuff does not mean that someone is a bad Christian. Seeking God. That is what Christ did and that is what we also must do. Jesus (God in human form, the Son of God) prayed and spent time talking with the Father. He spent time listening to God. He spent time serving others so God would be seen through His life. That is the example that we must follow. That is what should be most important to us.
 
Our relationship with God might look similar in some ways to other Christians, but ultimately it is a unique relationship between us and God. There are Christians who excel in the business world, there are Christians that teach, there are Christians that travel, there are...fill in the blank. Each of us is unique, God wants a personal relationship with each one of us. Maybe praying first thing every morning works for you and God but your neighbor down the street reads a devotional every day on their lunch break. We are all going to have different ways that we seek God. The important thing is that we are seeking God, without checklist.