Auto Mechanics

After I realized I was welcome no longer at church as teenager and skateboarding had run its course in my life I decided to learn how to fix cars. I took auto shop in high school and my friends parents gave me the 1974 olds 98 that was dead in their driveway. I paid to have the transmission rebuilt and I still had to replace the rear end, rebuild the carb, and many more projects to get it road worthy. I started to learn parts interchange between the different gm models and had fun going to the junk yard to get parts. As the years would go by I would grow in knowledge of auto mechanics and really take it to the next level when I finally got a house with a garage in 2005. This allowed me to get air tools to do front end work and welder to restore an old mustang a friend gave me. I can even repair new cars without fear and think they are easier than the older ones fix sometimes. I get mechanical things and can see schematics in my head and troubleshoot problems easily.

Once I had enough of my old church's theology in 2009 and I started to read lots of books, I found it easy to systematize theology. I still had trouble disconnecting myself from the emotional part of it and looking at it objectively. Each time I read something that confrimed my bias I was too eager to believe it and seprarate fact from opinion. Also when you know nobody that yoy can talk to and when you try you just get blank stares you start to think something is wrong with you. In reality I had outgrown my old church and I would have to muster the strength and self confidence to leave that place and pull my family out of there.

I was good at doing things on my own as a mechanic and could escape from larger issues. The challenge now for me was to confront something that would effect my entire family and I would have to sell them on it. The success I had as a mechanic was awesome but when it translated over to the theological realm more was being asked of me that was way out of my comfort zone. I could even retreat to work and make major operational changes that my family never knew about. Why was it so hard for me to push my own agenda at home?

I think it was due to the spiritual abuse I endured at the church of my youth. They plant ideas in your head that youre not good enough in certain areas but it never effects your ability to make money and put offerings in the plate. It usually causes rifts in your family and allows for disfunction that they magically have a seminar or a book for. Its like they set you up to fail so you can turn to them to have more control over you. It keeps you from being able to socialize without a prayer before and after and with a Pauline focused sermon in the middle.  Everybody around you has defense mechanisms built in to chastize you if you start to question things, kind of like a self protecting mechanism to keep the belief system going.

If this is your only exposure to Christianity you start to think that no belief is better st this point.