I may have written before that I’d reached a point where it felt wrong to go on attending Bible study group meetings without some action on my part. Either I had to come clean and tell them that I doubted (optional to tell them I’d been dating a non-evangelical for almost a year), or I had to make up some reason to stop going altogether. Continuing to attend and sit quietly, to listen to things I only half-believed with people who thought otherwise, had always felt dishonest, and this great lie of omission gnawed at me every other Thursday in the church nursery.
You know, if I had met some of them outside of church, removed from the context of believers banding together to study the Bible, as simply one human being sitting across from another, we would have become friends naturally. The very simple fact that I liked them and had something in common with some of them was what kept me going. But the fact that they met as members of a group with an agenda, to encourage one another in a faith I didn’t quite share, and not merely as human beings hanging out with one another, meant that there were minimum requirements for continuing to hang out with them that I couldn’t meet.
I’m thankful that I got to meet them and doubly thankful that I didn’t have to lie. When I told the group leader that I had to stop going because my schedule had changed, it was the truth. Since T’s injury, we haven’t spent as much time together because of his new scheme to make mobility as easy and inexpensive for him as possible. Some days he’s in town, to teach his classes. Some days, he’s not. The few times I do get to see him happen to clash now with group meetings, and when it comes to priorities, T trumps everything.
While knowing that I no longer have to pretend to church folk is a relief, the act of saying I could no longer go felt neither good nor bad. It was as clear and painless but also as necessary as a haircut. A simple snip-snip, and my last ties to evangelical church life are severed. We sweep up the cuttings and carry on.
