I’m gonna keep it real with you guys. It was Easter, so I took my kids to church. We don’t go regularly, but my kids do have a solid foundation in terms of our family’s faith in Jesus and God, and all that we believe in. You may or may not agree, but I do believe one can be spiritual yet not necessarily religious. As a child I attended our Catholic church way more than my kids do…I even thought I wanted to be a nun one year but as you can see, that didn’t happen. In my conversations with God, I let him know that I do love Him and believe in Him and I know that my relationship with Him doesn’t depend on how often I attend church. While I don’t take my children to church regularly throughout the year, I do like to maintain certain traditions such as ensuring we attend church on Easter, especially.
Well it turns out I just couldn’t make it through the entire Easter mass this past Sunday. I saw two things that didn’t sit well with me and I had to leave before mass ended. There were two women of different ethnicities sitting in front of us, one with her mom, and the other with her family. One of the women kept staring at the other woman and her family in such a despicable way that it bothered me. I almost wanted to ask her what her problem was. She was looking at them with absolute disgust and I couldn’t help but think to myself, aren’t we all here to love God and aren’t we all supposed to love one another? I could feel some of the hate that this one woman felt towards the other and it didn’t sit well with me…it made me feel uncomfortable.
I prayed, having one of my many daily convos with God, and just as I was explaining to Him that I couldn’t stay, something even yuckier happened. The woman that I felt bad for, the one who was the object of the other woman’s disgust (totally because of her ethnicity, no other reason as far as I was concerned), sneezed into her hand, looked at it as if she had grossed herself out, and then proceeded to rub her hands together as if she was rubbing some type of sanitizer into them – EEWWW! What da?! So here were two women sitting in front of us displaying different kinds of nastiness, one utterly hateful, the other utterly unhygienic! I had to get outta there before it was time to wish each other “Peace be with you” because the one woman obviously didn’t have any peace in her soul and the other, well heck no I was not touching her snotty hand nor letting my kids do so! It just was a sign from God saying, “You may leave my child, it’s okay”.
Disclaimer: I do not intend to offend anyone, I certainly believe in God and the Holy Trinity; I just don’t believe I must attend church weekly in order to deserve His love.
