December 21, 2025

I went to church with my parents today, they go to this really trumpy rural Nazarene church. The kind of church that does a hunter's dinner gun raffle to raise money for missions or something. There's actually a taxidermy deer head in the youth room, and the white board today said "God Bless the USA!!".

Anyways, my dad lead Sunday School (it's been years since I've been a teenager, but still go to the teen Sunday School class because my dad leads it and it's usually just him and my brothers in there). He kept reading from Isaiah 9, which talks about God sending Their son to bring justice and peace to the world. He was talking about how oppressed the Israelites were at that time, and I spent the entire time just sitting in the disconnect. My dad likes to criticize "progressive" churches like the one I usually go to when I'm not visiting my parents. He says they focus too much on social justice and not enough on personal salvation. I'm too agnostic to really care about personal salvation right now, but I can't imagine reading the Bible and coming out of it with the impression that caring for people in need and taking up the cause of the oppressed doesn't take priority. Sitting in the disconnect, I thought a lot about Gaza. I also thought about ICE. It's weird to be surrounded by people who read the same texts as me and come out of them with such vastly different perspectives. It's weird to see the people who raised me to be compassionate withhold their compassion. I kept thinking about the Jose y Maria nativity poster. Or the fenced in nativities churches have been putting up.

Advent honestly makes me really uncomfortable. I can't put it into words right now, but it's something about how hopeful it is, and how helpless Jesus seems. And most of it probably goes back to the fact that I don't have a good explanation for why Jesus had to die in the first place. Probably the most difficult aspect of universalism for me. I keep thinking about Abraham and Isaac, and it just seems cruel and unfair. That's the point, I guess, but that doesn't mean I like it. In my dad's closing prayer, he thanked God that for parents who love us unconditionally, and a God that does, too. I don't know that my dad and I define "unconditionally" the same. Or that we even define "love" the same, because I'm still terrified to come out. And I don't really know how to trust God as a parent when they wouldn't save their biological (?) kid. I know I'm doing feelings and projection instead of theology, maybe I'll have better insight later.