My Relationship With Them
My relationship with God did not start in the best of terms. Since the day my sister was born, my parents have encouraged all of us to maintain a relationship with God. What I found interesting though was that maintaining a relationship with God, one has to go mass every Sunday, something I found a lot to ask as a toddler. Throughout my first few years of life, I always had something against going to church, and what bothered me most was how my mom forced me to go. I see now that my mom wanted the best for me and help me establish a relationship with God, for the time that she forced me to go to church drove me away from my relationship with God spiritually. Because of this, I found myself without the need of having this type of relationship for the longest time.
Without this relationship with God, I grew up without anything to cling onto when I did not want my family’ support. This especially was the case during my adolescence and start of middle school. These were the years I started to realize who I truly was, and discovered my sexual orientation. It was a difficult time because I had to juggle my struggles of self identity without letting others know about it. As a result of my struggles with self identity, I began to have a lack of confidence. When people around me started to notice my lack of confidence, I had no other person to cling onto to keep me afloat. I had no one, and because I had not formed that relationship with God I felt truly alone.
It was not until high school I started to form the relationship my mom had encouraged me all my life with God. My relationship with God formed in the most cliche way, through a school retreat. There I learned about how accepting God is, giving love to everyone regardless of how different they are from everyone else. Here I discovered the love God has always had for me, all I had to do was open myself to it. It was this retreat that encouraged me to admit to my sexuality publicly, beginning the build up of confidence I lost so long ago.
While many within my own religion may feel a certain way about my sexual orientation, I discovered my relationship with God is more important than what others think of me. This meant I was able to become the person I was meant to be, a more social, confident, and happier person.
Today, I continue to identify as a member of the Catholic Church, not because my parents raised me into it, but because my high school’ retreat opened my eyes to see the good in the church. Many confuse religion with a set of rules, but I believe it is so much more than that. Religion is the spirituality that helps all of us through our lives, guiding us to do what is best for ourselves. That is why I continue to believe in the teachings of the Catholic faith, because like them and many other religions, spirituality is important in becoming the person we aspire to be.
Even though I am not the typical Catholic, I believe I am content and closer to God than I have ever been, because I have been able to accept myself entirely. I have learned it does not matter what other people think of me, it matter how I think of myself only.