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Ok so I know that my last post may have not seemed very cohesive in the subject matter. I do want to revisit some of the things I shared and go a little more in depth. If you haven’t read the previous post, no worries. Let me catch you up real quick. I started off by questioning my foray into Christianity. I briefly mentioned something about my ancestral history related to religion and Christianity and then ended it by saying that I believe that God was guiding me to expand my spiritual path in order to help others.

Wow! I did that a lot better than I thought I would.

What I want to go a bit more in depth with is the exploration of Christianity. I keep saying this but it bears repeating for a little while longer, but I did not grow up in the church. I had a yearning or a pull to go which I did when I moved out and became an adult. I tried out a bunch of different churches but never stayed with one for a long period of time. So when Spirit/God was guiding me to go to church I wasn’t sure what this was all about. I have to admit that I was a bit scared. And I should mention that I live in Atlanta which is black church mecca. I mean I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been driving and pass four churches within one block.

But something that I didn’t mention in any of my posts related to this subject is what was going on in my life around the time that God was poking me to get up in somebody’s church. Without getting too much into the details I had gone through a rough divorce. There were things that I was going through that I didn’t even expect or consider. Let’s just say that you don’t really know someone until they are angry, and more specifically angry at you.

The anxiety that I had each and every time I had to interact with my ex was intense and to make matters worse I was experiencing very disturbing dreams. My ex would often be in the dreams and each time I woke up I knew that it wasn’t just a dream that I was having. I had reached out to some spiritual folk for guidance and they confirmed my suspicions. My ex was had started dabbling in some things that I don’t even think they fully understood but in either case I was getting some heavy dark energy.

Not too long after the divorce I started doing some protection work. Nothing extreme or over the top, just some regular practices that I would do in order to keep my bodies (spiritual, physical inter-dimensional, etc.) home and even my children shielded from any negative energy. I quickly realized that I would have to step up my protection work. It was around this time that God had me reading the bible. I read the bible here and there many times before and since I had dabbled in church I knew some scriptures (not by heart) and I felt relatively comfortable diving into this. But it seemed as though reading in and of itself wouldn’t be enough. My dreams got progressively disturbing to the point where I wasn’t getting any sleep.

Around this time I had increased my practices to more than just reading the bible. I would pray first thing in the morning, like before my feet even touched the floor. I would read the bible for about thirty minutes. I would listen to sermons and audio bible verses throughout the day when I worked. When I got home before I did anything to decompress from the day I would get in my closet and pray for at least an hour. I would meditate later on and then I would pray again right before I went to bed. God was sending me bible verses throughout this time as well and I created a prayer board and posted scriptures up around my home to read when I needed some extra help.

I know this may sound like a lot but it didn’t fell like it. All of this felt effortless to me. I weaved in and out of these practices with the grace of a dancer. The last piece that was missing was to find a church. I won’t go through the whole process with that and the events leading up to it (that will be for another post) but I found a church that I liked and felt welcomed instantly. None of the messages felt judgmental, the pastor is sensitive to life outside of the church and includes a fresh take on old scriptures, the congregation is intergenerational and has all types of black folks across a vast socioeconomic scale. More importantly I felt safe.

Then I got baptized and for a moment y’all I was like is THIS my new normal? Going to church every week, doing virtual bible study on Wednesday, reading The Word daily, praying multiple times a day, listening to gospel music, not watching television. I mean I drank the Jesus Kool-Aid and was about to be bout that Christian life. But I didn’t want to deny all that I had learned through my New Age spiritual upbringing. In fact my pastor would weave energy work and even mentioned a chakra a time or two in his sermon. I never questioned God as to why this change was happening. I chalked it up to the fact that God knew that this was what I needed.

My dreams went away. My ex fell into the background of my life as much as could be possible and I had begun to feel God in a deeper way that I never had before. So was all of this for spiritual protection or was it for something else? Well at least for this post I’ll say that God (and my ancestors) knew that I was facing a formidable enemy. And this enemy had nothing to do with my ex and whatever they were trying to do through the spiritual realm. This had to do with breaking a pattern. My New Age spiritual work got me so far, but I was missing a vital piece, the church. The reason why the church was (and still is) vital to me is because my ancestors are linked to the church. Healing that I couldn’t get on my own had to come through the lineage of women who had come before me and endured struggles much harder than mine and what they had was church.

So a mending happened and I could feel myself being stitched up, standing taller and no longer bending to something or someone that was not God. This post isn’t to try and get anyone back to church if that’s not what they are called to do. What this post is about is sharing how through following God I found a greater healing than I could have ever known.