Time to Stop Being Lazy

Hi. My name is Nicolette Kiss. I call myself a Christian, but I've found that in the past few years I've been drifting away from God, rather than growing closer to him. Before I tell my story, and state the purpose of this blog, I wanna say that I think this blog could be both interesting and helpful to both Christians and non-Christians. I struggle with the kinds of doubts that non-Christians use to 'attack' Christianity. Because quite frankly, I often find that they have good points that I don't know how to respond to. So I think that both people who launch those arguments and Christians who struggle with them could benefit from my journey to explore and hence deal with them.

Ok, so here's my brief story. As a kid my parents casually attended a church which spoke their language - Hungarian. My bro and I were occassionally put into sunday school where the language was simple enough for us to learn some stuff, but most of the time we were stuck with the old people in the adults church and I was bored as hell. I remember just staring at my watch and observing the hour drag by very slowly. The good part was the food afterwards, and the park in that suburb...

So as a young kid my understanding of this whole Christian business was very vague. I knew about the major Christian stories, but I didn't really know what Christianity was all about. I also wasn't sure if Jesus was real or not.

Later on my mum turned learning scripture into a boring chore by making my bro and I sit with her for say an hour after school and read old language bibles in both English and Hungarian teamed with some Hungarian narratives or poems. That wasn't the way to get a kid's interest. I remember tuning out and playing my gameboy when it was my bro's turn to read...

Ok, so it was only in high school that I really came to know what Christianity was really about and actually got interested in it and believed it myself. I attended voluntary lunch time bible studies and learnt heaps. At some point in high school I also discovered that from a historical point of view Jesus was a real person. A guy named Jesus actually existed! And that was really important because Christianity 100% depends on this Jesus figure.

And then about mid high school my mum wanted my bro and me to get Confirmed - in Hungarian!! Yeah right? I wasn't about to do something I didn't understand. So my mum yielded to the rebellious teenage me and we started going to a local English church (St Lukes Liverpool) so we could get undergo the Confirmation in English. So began my journey of learning heaps more. The young mind is like a sponge and throughout those high school years I was really quite challenged and fascinated by all the interesting things I'd learnt about Christianity. By the end of high school I felt quite familiar with the main Christian ideas and felt I understood what it's really all about. One thing that I hadn't expected when I started out was to discover that Christianity is not just a Sunday thing. That it demands an impact on your whole life. In case I've lost any of the non-Christian readers, what I mean by that is that the Bible tells us that we need to surrender our lives and wants up for Jesus. A quote about taking up your cross says it all...

It seemed that things would go on as usual once I'd started uni. I attended church, church and uni bible studies, and the 2005 and 2006 MYC (mid-year conferences) - which were all very useful in advancing my knowedge of Christainity.

So what happened? Well, when a person goes to university they're encouraged to question what they believe. In terms of Christian beliefs, I didn't really do that back at school. I kind of just went with it 'cos my family was already kinda Christian and all. But a few things popped up during uni years that awakened the skeptic inside of me.

Well I guess that one force that's existed before uni is my bro-in-law and my fallen-away 2 oldest Christian siblings. Time and again, usually around Christmas they've launched their missiles agaisnt Christianity. They have their share of interesting points worth exploring.

One of the things that first struck home for me was, alas, 'The Da Vinci Code.' With its seamless blend of 'history' and fiction, a few scary but reasonable possibilities came out. Most important was 'could Constantine have really invented the whole Jesus being divine?' idea.

I bookmarked the issues of concerns, and wrote down my doubts on a contact card at church. My minister got back to me with a stack of articles that rebutted 'The Da Vinci Code." I confess I never got through them all (but I still have them), but the rebuttal to the Constantine thing seemed quite reasonable - that the churches had already agreed upon the biblical truths and preached them long before Constantine was ever born.

Aside from that, my fallen-away oldest bro leant us a non-religiously motivated documentary that basically crushed most of Dan Brown's so called facts as BS. I was content with that, and I was too lazy to bother with the issue any further.

Then in 2006 I did a correspondance subject with Moore Theological College called 'Intro to the Bible' which really showed how the Bible goes together and how the same message flows through the whole thing.

And then in 2007, I did a 'Science and Religion' general education course at uni, and through the online forums and debates, as well as from the lectures, a whole bunch of 'new' dounts surfaced. And I didn't do anything about it. I got lazy and they've been knawing at my brain for over a year now, such that I've forgotten what most of the doubts even were (though I do have my notes and could - and will - find them again).

So where does that leave me? It has left me divided in a battle between the skeptic and the believer inside of me. Because there's a chance that Christianity is real and of all the consequences that follow, the stakes are too high to just let the doubts cave in and be victorious. Similarly, I can't just ignore the doubts because they're very reasonable and need to be explored and solved before they can be buried, etc.

This all basically means that I've been feeling like a rather poisoned Christian. Every time I hear a sermon, read a bible passage or even watch/hear about other people's experiences in their Christian walks I wonder if it's real. I wonder if we're just deluding ourselves. But at the same time, I wonder how the Bible written over so many centuries could fit so well together if a single divine author wasn't guiding it all....

All this is really no good, and I can't progress if I don't do something about it. I'm the kind of person who can get really good or 'smart' at something if I really want to and apply myself to it. I've been pretty lazy with this Christian gig, and starting from this year I've decided that it's gotta stop. In order to be healthy physically, mentally and spiritually I need to deal with these doubts.

And so begins my journey. I encourage you to share your thoughts, point to resources you might think are helpful, ask questions or just out right challenge anything I say or discover. Bring it on!