All? — April 7, 2025 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Church⛪
Immortal🎶
Disruption🏗️

THE DAILY UPDATE

I went to church again yesterday. This, for those just joining us, comes after a tough talk with Boy The Younger about why I haven’t been going to church and after a first-week return-to-church that got me questioning what forgiveness is really all about.

This week did nothing to make me feel any more comfortable inside the confines of a Christian church. So much of it seems like a meme or a cliche. So many people seem to be playing a role, whether it’s the stereotypical arm raiser or the person who falls to her knees or the clapper or the communal prayers with lots of “justs” and “in this place”s. It’s like someone control-c’d an evangelical church and control-v’d them all over the country. So much of it seems more like a performance than genuine worship, whether its those aforementioned roles that have to be filled or the camera person running hither and yon to get that perfect shot of the worship band or the fog machines pumping out smoke into the stage lighting to provide that perfect mystically holy ambiance when the pastor talks.

I have no doubt that there are people in there who aren’t performing, Wifey Poo being one of them and the rest of the Fab Five being four more, but I think that number is much smaller than those who would say they are there honestly worshipping. That means there are people there doing holy things and filling holy roles who can’t see their own theatrics.

The pastor seems like a good, honest dude. He’s earnest about what he believes, and he delivers a good sermon that, unlike other evangelical churches I’ve been to, doesn’t put the focus on him. It’s rightly on God.

But.

The sermon this week was about genuine worship. It dealt with the story of Jesus coming into the temple and flippin’ out because people had corrupted it with shady commerce. The pastor made a point of mentioning that the commerce right outside the doors of where we were sitting — where they sell church-logo-emblazoned T-shirts and sweatshirts and books and sweatpants and the like — isn’t what Jesus was referring to because that commerce is honest commerce and not marked-up commerce to swindle people, and I guess I can buy that.

During his message, the pastor talked about Jesus saying the temple is where all people should be able to come and worship, and I was 100% down with that. Heck yeah, it should be a place where all can come. The pastor’s “all” involved the Biblical all of the blind and lame and beggars and the like. My “all” involves Christians and those like me who leave open the possibility that Jesus might not be the only way to salvation, that that whole exclusivity thing just might have been added by a corrupt early Catholic church seeking to grow its coffers by putting the fear of hell into people and, more importantly, into their wallets.

His “all” and my “all” are vastly different. In basically the same paragraph, he limited his “all” to those who seek or who have found Jesus. I’m there not seeking anything beyond what I already believe, which is that Jesus might well have been who he says he was, but there has been a whole lot of rewriting and additions and corruption of the OG message by corrupt early-church leaders that makes it impossible to know exactly who Jesus really claimed to be and didn’t claim to be. That is the OG sin of the early church … seriously screwing with the teaching of who, by even skeptics’ accounts, was a pretty amazing dude and leader. Diddling kids and covering it up didn’t come til later.

The sermon ended and, again, I wondered if I was really welcomed there as who I am and not who they want me to be. Sure, there are people who greet me. I was targeted by one of the Rovers (these are the people whose actual task following services is to find unfamiliar faces and be friendly to them, to meet them and greet them and shepherd them into the flock, and they exist in all evangelical churches, I’ve found) whilst waiting for Boy The Younger and Wifey Poo to return from their respective bathrooms. His name was Don. He was an older gentleman. White, of course. Nice. He asked how long I’ve been coming here, what brought me there … the standard Rover questions aimed at sussing out my connection to Jesus. I gave him friendly, short, honest answers because, Don, if you really want to get into why I’m there and where I am in my walk, we’re going to have to reserve a room and a lot longer length of time than my family’s bathroom breaks before we headed off to Home Depot to pick up the supplies I need to replace our aging, leaky mailbox and rusted post.

Don tried his best, but my answers thoroughly confused him… my son and daughter-in-law are on the worship team, my wife and other son have been coming for a few months, I’ve been there only twice, I didn’t have a previous church but my wife and younger son did … He wanted to press to figure it out, I could tell, but thankfully Wifey Poo and BTY returned and we were off to the Depot after a friendly handshake.

Listen, I have nothing against this church or any church. I think Don is probably a pretty good dude. But I’m not a buyer of what any Christian church is selling. I’m not a lost member of any flock. I’m someone whose church left him by getting all political and that doesn’t have room for him because he’s not willing to condemn others’ souls for not believing something fully that isn’t provable by any standard under which I would want to be judged anywhere ever.

When I say “All,” I truly mean “All.” Blind, deaf, lame, beggar, Christian, Jew, atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Native American, Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Murican, non-Murican … whoever. No one has to buy 100% into what I believe for me to think they are just fine how they are as long as they try to minimize their douchiness and regularly use their turn signals.

When any church says “all” and then immediately limits that “all” to only those who believe what they believe, which by its very definition excludes a huge swath of the population, well, that’s not really “all” to me.

I’ll go back for a third and fourth week. I promised that to BTY. But I don’t see the Christian church as having open arms for a guy like me.

Something I’m grateful for today: Sunshine

Something I’ve (ghost)written: Designing for Disruption

Song In My Head When I Woke Up: Wasted Time, by Skid Row

Meaningful Lyric From SIMHWIWU:

Is it all just wasted time?
Can you live with yourself when you think of what you’ve left behind?

Song of the Day: My Immortal, by Evanescence

Meaningful lyric from the S.O.T.D.:

These wounds won’t seem to heal, this pain is just too real
There’s just too much that time cannot erase

Something good from today/yesterday: Spending a half-hour in my massage chair reading the book someone got me.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: DnD night on Friday with my party of adventurers.

Fat-Ass Update:

Starting weight: 230.6 on 2/12/25
Goal weight (for now): 199.9
Today’s weight 221.7 (-8.9)
Fat-ass burn-off remaining: 21.8 fat-ass pounds

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All? — April 7, 2025

THE DAILY UPDATE

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