Christ is Risen! Truly he is risen!
A long time ago, when I was 7 I was baptized into some non-denominational church. I remember nothing about this than besides my parents believed that I was ready to be baptized. When I was 14 I was baptized again through a church that baptized in Jesus’ name. This was fine until 2020. I was young, able to think somewhat well, and started to question everything. By the middle of 2020 I was an Liberal An-Cap who held generic Christian beliefs. Eventually I started to (both on my own and through a class) study various religions. This started with a deep dive into Christian Apologetics (that mostly was based around disproving every other belief though not disproving nihilism/atheism very well) and then into world religions. This started with Hinduism which I laughed at, then Buddhism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, Paganism, followed by a very charitable look into Judaism, then Islam. We worked on three projects in this class. A deep dive into Hinduism, a comparison of Islam and Christianity, and then a project where we could either compare Kabbalah or Scientology with Christianity. I decided to go with Kabbalah and was disgusted with the Zohar, so much that I just decided to take the easy way out and just laugh at Scientology for two pages.
Then I got into that one biblically accurate angel’s meme (they’re not ) and then focused on the “weirder” parts of the Bible. Then I learned about the supposed lost books of the bible, followed by the seven deuterocanonical books. Which I read. Now I will admit that I think the only reason I did what I did for the next two years was because I wasn’t sleeping well. I came to the conclusion that these books must be forgeries or modified by the Catholics or something. Which makes no sense. I was young, dumb (I thought I was vert smart), and believed that the church was lost (it wasn’t) and I believed that it had to reconstructed. This lead to me to add to the canon of scripture Tobit, 1 Maccabees, 1, Baruch, and Sirach, the Didache, the Shepard of Hermas, the first section of 1 Enoch, several other Greek/Hebrew expansions of parts of the Old Testament, 3 Enoch. I had rejected the book of Jubilees and Jasher (Sefer Hayashar) because for Jasher I thought it was obviously not scripture because it was written in the 1500s and Jubilees appeared to be written by a sectarian Jewish community to justify their sun based calendar. Then I tried to argue against the Cepher group’s inclusion of the book of Jubilees in their version of the bible (to myself but still tried to argue against it) and I couldn’t. Why was I right and why were they wrong? I couldn’t say.
Thus I began to desire to try and find a church that was as close to the original church as possible as at the time I believed it was lost. This lead me to three possibilies. Baptists (cringe), Lutherans (Marginally less cringe), and Orthodoxy. I considered that a rare possibility because I didn’t understand it at the time. Around this same time I developed feelings for a girl I no longer know. This feeling was new to me and confused me enough to where my parents were concerned. I threw them off by claiming that I wanted to convert to Orthodoxy which at the time I was coming around on the historicity of Orthodoxy but was still unconvinced. This threw them off, and they questioned it and appeared to defeat this “desire”. Regarding this woman, I eventually decided I liked her, and focused on it for awhile.
Eventually I became convinced of the use of imagery in church and tried to argue against something my church was doing with the student group there. That part used penguins in a lot of its branding and when I started going there the offering bowel just had a penguin on it, then it was a small toy penguin bowel, then it was a golden statue of a penguin. Which I believe to be against the teachings of scripture. I brought up my complaints about this and also made an argument for why we should have crosses or maybe images of Christ in the worship space. I was promptly told that nobody cared. I stopped going there and started to turn more towards Lutheranism. I was convinced of infant baptism and real presence. But not on episcopal polity, the Theotokos, or Saints. Eventually I was finally able to be given the words I needed to where I could say that I was going to an Orthodox Church. After what I would describe as a demonic attack, a Prayer to Christ and finally a request to the Theotokos to save me. That morning I learned there was a service the next day which is when I started going. I liked it a lot and started going regularly. I will not get into every detail of what I did over the next two years but the gist of what happened is that I realized that my opinion doesn’t matter and what is true is indeed true and I finally came to terms with my own thoughts about love and woman in general.
The process of getting baptized happened very fast. A reader asked during a lesson who was going to be baptized on Lazarus Saturday and several people raised their hands, I didn’t know. I approached the priest, I got answers. I quickly picked a Patron Saint (St. Nathan the Prophet), found a Godfather, and prepared for life confession. 34 Catechumen were baptized and Chrismated, small compared to a lot of parishes but still a lot of people. I will say that even if I believed that the bread and the wine are literally the body and blood of Christ, after communing I defiantly agree.
On Good Friday near the end of the Lamentations Service procession, it got quite stormy. A friend of mine said “That as we mourn the crucifixion the creation mourns with us” or something to that effect. Not my thought, I just thought it was neat and wanted to share.
The following projects are things I’m working on. 1) what is effectively a Bluetooth worm that I am creating for a school project. 2) A video about this minecraft world my brother and I used to play on just because I think its neat.