Tag: religion

I have a battle that wars within me constantly. Its a battle between desiring to be the Christian that Christ wants me to be and to do Christianity the way I was taught to do it.

I believe football has more conditioning and training drills than any other sport. I’ve played all of the major sports in school; football, basketball, baseball, and soccer. I missed out on underwater basket weaving. Football has so many positions and each position has a different function depending on the play, so the training is extensive. If you are an offensive lineman, one play may call for you to run block while the next requires a pass block, then an entire new play may require that you perform a pull block to open a bigger hole for your running back. This process of training is often referred to as “Conditioning.”

When I got out of High School, I held several jobs. One of my greatest closing lines when interviewing was to assure the company that I had the skills to perform the job, but because I had never worked in the specific position or for a competitor, I would do the job exactly the way they trained me to do it, unlike career employees, I was not conditioned in any other method of doing the job, basically I was a blank slate. I was communicating that I had not been programmed to do it any other way, rather I would perform the job only in the manner that they conditioned me or trained me to do it in.

I struggle with this in Christianity. I grew up being programmed that a lot of Christianity was a duty instead of a relationship. Even though I know better, I find myself reverting back to this approach in my faith walk. Don’t get me wrong, some of my Christian conditioning was good for me, and I use the skills all the time, but then there are some areas that are toxic to my relationship with Christ. I don’t want to do Christianity, I don’t want to have a checklist to make sure I am not making God mad. I fight against some of the opinions that were taught to me as ‘fact’ and as ‘the Gospel’. I’m left questioning a lot, is this (particular issue) a non-negotiable or is it a mere opinion of a righteous individual? In the end, I guess God uses this struggle to keep me reliant on him during the times I have this war raging within me. Join the Conversation: Have you been conditioned?