Proof Positive

Proof positive I wasn't always godless.

This is a picture of me as a child, just after receiving my first Bible from my church. I was a pretty typical WASP kid: very secure in being white, middle class, and Christian.

I was a member of my church choir, went to Sunday School faithfully (no pun intended), didn't separate what I knew from church from how I lived life on the other side of the stained glass windows, knew Catholics and Communists were evil, and wore white gloves at Easter.

Then, a few years later, I actually opened up that book and had questions.

The answers made it impossible to stay in my church.

Then, a few years after that, I learned I wasn't white and Anglo Saxon either.

Rather than being disheartened that my whole childhood had been built on lies, I have to look back on some of that naïveté a little wistfully. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss, and I can see how people are attracted to it.

On the other hand, it's a big, beautiful world out there, with more diversity and wonder than I could have ever imagined in the small little world I grew up in.

Isn't that what growing up is really about? Leaving behind the small, restricted and self centered world of childhood and seeing (and evaluating) the fullness of the experience of life?