by Roman Del Bosque

Created on: December 12, 2009

My understanding of God now is extremely different from what it was when I was young.

As a teenager and young adult, I served as youth vice-president and president of a Pentecostal church.  During those years, my life revolved around serving God by participating in church activities and spending much of my free time with other like-minded Christian kids.  Sadly, I cannot say that was the best time of my life.  On the contrary, it was the worst.

I grew up in a family with a non devout Catholic father, and an overly devout Evangelical mother.  Two extremes, one world, and one boy hopelessly trapped, within its walls.  That was the world I lived in back then, and many times it was not a pleasant one at that.  Being pulled apart daily in two separate directions (between serving and not serving God) would eventually lead me down a dark path of deep personal confusion not only about life in general but also about myself, and more importantly God.

In my world back then, the God I knew was one to be feared.  Probably thousands of times growing up, I must have heard my mother tell me, "Don't do that because God will punish you for it!"  Not exactly the kind of words that would lead the average kid to fall in love with God.  And that is precisely what happened with me.  I didn't love God back then. 

Not only would my mother often warn me not to do something or other because God would punish me for it, but church preachers also would often preach sermon after sermon on how God could be both just and vengeful and very much willing to send "sinners" to an eternal lake of fire for not doing what God had expected of them.  In time I came to realize the reason for such fear-inducing sermons.  (Since most people don't really want to go to church to begin with, the way to get them into church is to scare them into church through preaching this sort of thing.)

Sadly, in the end, that is what happened to me.  Through subtle verbal threats of a punishment at the hands of a just God (which were so often made by my devout Christian mother), coupled with the fear-based sermons that back-then preachers so often delivered with a precision that easily reached a young child's conscience, in time I was eventually coerced (through religious scare tactics) into religious servitude.

Once having been coerced into being baptized, my "religious path" was quickly laid out for me.  Soon thereafter, I was out with other

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