Thinking

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about church, specifically going back to church. I was one of those people who grew up in church and dedicated my life to it up till about 7 years ago when I just quit cold turkey. For the past year, the desire to start attending church has been on my heart and in the last 2-3 months the desire has seemed to have gotten stronger. I really think God has put this urging in my heart for a reason, so I will be making some changes soon.

Monday Madness Vol 1

Happy Monday people. While doing my daily blog reading rounds, I stumbled upon a post over at Awesomely Lovie that just thew me for a loop! If you are a church goer–specificially a black church goer, you are all too familiar with praise teams, step teams, interpretative dance troops and even the gospel rappers…but I am willing to bet real money that you have not seen POLE DANCING FOR JESUS! Yeah, you read it right. STRIPPER POLE DANCING! Some YouTube dude by the name of MrPhatLips is working the stripper pole all in the name of the LORD! Other than utter ridiculousness…I have no Words for this! I’m done! Check this out for yourself:

Welcome to Madness Monday!

Journey to Me: Entry #16

Entry #16 (click here to read entry #15)     

At 19 years old, I had been through more than some people twice my age. I had lost my mother, and 5 years later, I lost the aunt who raised both me and my brother. By the time I was 21 my father passed away and at 25 I lost my paternal grandmother who I adored. Life had not been a cake walk, but for some reason I was never knocked all the way down. There was always something in me that kept me going. My life at this time consisted of me holding down a part time job and going to college. My social life, for the most part was 90% church related and 10% everything else. I dated here and there, met some awesome dudes now that I look back on it, but dating was never that important to me. It was something to do…nothing more.

I spent a lot of time with Precious who basically became my stand in mother. School, shopping, and church related activities are what our time together usually consisted of. Once summer in particular, Precious was the young adult teacher for a national youth convention. This convention lasted about a week and since she was the teacher, we attended every session. It was actually a lot of fun spending the summer meeting people who were my age that were from all over the U.S. I hit it off with one girl in particular…I’ll call her VS. She was from Atlanta and was in Houston preparing to attend Rice U for graduate school. She and I became fast friends and since she didn’t know anyone in town, I became her tour guide for the remainder of her stay. VS went back to Atlanta for the remainder of the summer and we talked every single day. My long distance bills were outta this world at the time. This was before email, text messaging and cell phones were popular. We wrote letters and sent them thru what we affectionately call snail mail these days. Our talks/letters mainly consisted of religion, life, school, family and a little girl talk.

Nine months passed and VS was back in Houston for graduate school. The friendship that she and I developed all those months before continued once she moved to Houston. She became a part of my family, she joined the same church that I attended….wherever you saw one of us, there was 99% chance that the other one was close by. VS adopted Precious as her godmother and we all spent a whole lot of time together. Our friendship blossomed over the years: we ended up sharing an apartment, taking vacations together, visiting family together…doing almost everything together. I can say at this point that VS was truly my best friend…the best friend that I ever had. Graduate school ended for VS 3 years later and she told me she was moving back home for law school. I was devastated. I had this feeling that with VS being gone, my life would be boring and sad. I pondered whether or not I should go to Atlanta with her. I had always wanted to live there anyway and this would be the perfect opportunity. I didn’t go….I didn’t go at the time she did, It was one year later when I told her that I was gonna move; and move I did. VS and I were back together again…living the same kinda life we had in Houston. It was all good once again.

VS and I loved each other and it was 100% innocent. The line between friend and lover was never crossed. Frankly back then I didn’t know what or where that line was because sexuality wasn’t something that was discussed or even explored openly. Although VS and I never had a physical relationship, there was intimacy between us that no one ever knew about bout except she and I. I never had feelings for a woman until VS became a part of my life. At the time, I didn’t know that I was/ we were in love with each other. We went on like this was for nearly 10 years until our friendship dissolved.

My friendship with VS sparked something in me that I didn’t want to accept. Could I be? Nah…that’s not even possible.

Journey to Me: Entry #4

Entry #4 (Click here to read entry #3)

My parents broke up midway through my 10th year of life. As a kid, I always thought that my parents were married. After they split, I found out that they had never been married. Back in those days’ people would use the terms shacking and common law marriage as a way to describe couples who had lived together for a while and had kids. This is what my mom and dad were: common law married. When my parents split, my mother, brother and I moved in with my saved, sanctified, Holy Ghost filled church grandmother. Needless to say that this was a major culture shock. To go from having your own room and space to sleeping on the floor with a pallet was a major change. In addition to the three of us living there, my mothers 3 dead beat brothers lived there too. So in a 3 bedroom; 1 bathroom house there were 2 kids and 5 adults. Needless to say we were stuffed in there like sardines. I recall my mom and grandmother arguing very often about various things: one of the main things being my mom’s lack of church attendance and her habit of smoking. As I mentioned previously, this grandma was a church matriarch…spent 4-6 days at church for prayer meetings, revivals, and other church functions and she of course wanted us right there by her side. My mom grew up in these circumstances, but once she became and adult she vowed that she would not force her children to endure what she had endured when it came to church.

After this major change in my life, I realized that my dad was a major deadbeat, but I still loved him. I can recall my mom struggling to make ends meet. Dad hardly ever came around and when he did, he had the gall to hand out $5 to my brother and I like that would erase all the other crap that he did, but I still loved him. We eventually moved out of my grandma’s house once my mom had been approved for government housing assistance. We moved into a yellow 2 bedroom wood-frame house in a marginal neighborhood, I hated that house. It never really felt like home, but there was nothing I could do about that. As a kid I believed that things were ok. I had a lot of friends in the neighborhood and we would run and play without a care in the world. Looking back, I can see that my mom was a total rock through all of the things she endured raising my brother and I. My dad sucked for the entire decade of the 80’s. He came around when he felt like it. He never really contributed to the well being of his kids. He believed that dropping by on the weekend and taking my brother and I for a burger was acceptable. He would give my mom a hard time when she would ask him for help on bills…it was a total mess. I can recall many times where our lights got disconnected and we would have to sit in the dark with candles until mom found a way to get them reconnected. Our gas got disconnected from time to time as well…and my so called father never stepped up to help unless it was convenient for him. To this day I think that they only way he would help my mom out was if she slept with him. I recall him coming by the house and the two of them would be sitting in the living room talking about stuff and he would say to my mom: “come step into my office” meaning the bedroom…they would be in there for hours and then of course, the next day the lights would be back on.

Around the age of 13 my mom started to date this dude named John. He was a chef who on the surface seemed to be a good dude. He was nice to my brother and I and he seemed to make my mother happy. After about 6 months of dating, somehow this guy ended up living with us. I couldn’t believe this shit. Why does this dude have to stay here with us in this little ass house? Despite my pleas, he moved in anyway and within 2 months he was standing over my bed in the middle of the night looking down on me. I awakened and he put his finger up to his lips and said shhh as he began to pull my covers back. What John didn’t know was that I wasn’t about to let him crawl his nasty ass up in the bed with me. I began to scream to the top of my lungs and my mom ran to the room and caught his ass standing there with his dick out. He tried to diffuse the situation, but mama wasn’t hearing that. Back in those days, people would raise their windows and would have to put a stick of some sort under the window to keep it up. We kept our stick right in the hallway outside of my room…mama grabbed that stick and whacked John in the back of the head and threw him out in his drawers that night. From that day on, my mom was my HERO.

Aquarius.Soul © 2009