Letter 61

Dear God,

It's been a long time since you actually heard from me. I was probably a little musketeer then, hmm… No. It's been years since I went to the Catholic Church; some months since I attended the Christian Church. I think about you sometimes as a subject, and then I always ask myself if I'm doing wrong for being like this. I don't know where to go from all these paths in front of me - I'm a lost soul. There are those rare times I wonder about so many different beliefs from so many different places in the whole world. If you can read this blog, can you tell me what's going on? You can call me; I can't call you, I don't have your line. But we can Skype too :) I'm sure you've been waiting for me to contact you somehow.

God, I'm confused. I avoided that fact but I keep coming back to it. Why do you have to make things so complicated? :-O What are your plans? When I came to this world, I learned to believe in you; feelings were so strong to trust in you, respect you, and follow you. There were times when I forgot about you; prayed hard when I was in pain; thanked you when I was in so much joy. Do I really need to choose a place to belong from among these groups when it comes to faith? I probably wouldn’t write this if I didn’t have a twinge of faith in you. I never saw you, never even read the “Holy Bible”, but I grew up with faith in your existence.

I have so many questions. If I read the Bible to search for answers, how do I know I can trust what’s written in the book somehow? I talked to you a lot of times way back then; I want to know why people have to have different faith when they all believe that there’s God. I have respect to those beliefs, but I just want to know why they vary – I mean where could they be coming from… is it from you, really? Or just people making up everything and starting the Holy stories? But why would men start up nonsense like that if they never had any motivation? There must be something.

Then, there are people who don’t believe in you at all. They have their own points of view, their own theories, their own explanations, and indeed Science is ingenious. I’m lost for words to defend you when I’m confronted with that probably because I never knew much about my own faith. It got me thinking why I believed in something I never even knew much about; or why I believed things that was never proven. Some people would tell me that’s why it’s called “faith”; others would say I need to desire it, desire to know you, and desire to look into the different aspects to eventually discover where I truly belong.

I’m writing this letter not to disrespect any faith. I only wish to let out my thoughts about religion. I was a Catechist in school before, I taught children about Christian living. And now I realized I never actually practiced what I preached. Although, I was teaching them more of the basic ones that was taught to me in my first grader too, Genesis or the beginning. To be honest, I did not understand why Catholics had to do confessions of their sins through a priest; I did not understand why we had to be forced to hear the mass on first Fridays; I did not understand why people of different faith debate about the graven images and other Catholic practices; I did not understand why others aren’t open about all these differences… and they fight cold war, they ignore each other, they think they’re all right. I got tired of these, God. And I’m no longer hesitant to admit that.

If you’re indeed the God that you are, you’d know exactly what’s in this brain, and you’d see all questions and confusions aboard in it. In fact, I don’t need to tell you all these, but I needed to let it go. There were times I got pretty close to you; times that I felt like you answered all my prayers. There were times I neglected you; times I felt like it was pointless. And right here, right now I don’t know my stand. They tell me I need to make one, they tell me it’s better to believe anyway and I think I still do, but at times when they tell me I need to know what kind of faith I believe in I start to question why it has to be like that. And then I end up letting it all pass me by and be better this way – the confused way, the I-don’t-care-anymore way. Still, I don’t feel that it’s right. I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.