I watched a movie entitled “The Perfect Stranger”.  I’m not sure if you’ve seen it but I’m guessing that not a lot of people have seen.  It is a movie about a girl who had a conversation with Jesus Christ when she went on a trip to get away from her parents who were “nagging” her to believe in Christianity.  I’m not going to narrate the whole movie but there was this interesting part of their conversation where “Jesus” told her that he hates religion because it made things appear as rules to its believers.  Just like going to church, for some religion, it is a rule that you go to church in a certain day of the week.  For some, its Sundays while others it’s on Saturdays and etc.  For my religion it’s a Sunday.  I watched the movie on a Saturday so the next day as I was preparing to go to church, it suddenly struck me.  Hey, I don’t really have to go to church every Sunday.  God never set the rule that everybody should go to church every Sunday. The important thing is you believe in Him.  So I said to myself, I’m not going to church today.  I’ll go when I want to go.  But a little while later, I realized that things only become rules when we start to consider them as rules.  It’s like setting a rule that your black pants should be hanged on white hangers.  If you consider going to church or believing in God as a rule then it becomes a rule.  If you choose to go to church because you believe in God then that’s a completely different thing.  See this is the common mistakes of some people.  They are too religious that they tend to see the word of GOD as rules which have to be followed.  And in turn they miss out on a lot of things.  They stick to the rules of their religion that they end up making decisions that makes other people suffer.  Like for instance, there are religions that prohibit blood transfusion.  They said that blood is very sacred and we shouldn’t be putting other people’s blood into our bodies for that will impure our blood or something.  And whatever happens to us is God’s will, which is really outrageous.  Why then did God impart this knowledge to man? Why then did man discover this knowledge?  Isn’t it because God wants us to use it to preserve the life that he has given us?

Having watched the movie I realized that I too thought about the things that has to do with the church are rules.   Like the Pharisees, I looked at the bible as a book of rules. A book of what is to be done and things that we shouldn’t do.  But it is not a book of rules. It was supposed to be a declaration of God’s love to his people.  I guess this is the reason why I stopped attending the religious affiliation that my mom and used to belong to.  I wasn’t really clear about it before but now I know why.  It is because they are imposing a lot of things to their members when it shouldn’t be.  Just like setting the rule of tithe giving and the sharing of your problems.  It may good for people sharing their experiences because that will help other people in certain ways.  That will give other people ideas on how to handle situations that are similar to the situations that other people have faced.  But the imposing of tithes and rules on how a member should act in the society? No.  I don’t mind giving the tithes but you shouldn’t force people to do so.  I can understand that some people only make enough income for their needs.  We shouldn’t make other people suffer for the sake of the rules.

So now, I no longer go to church on Sundays because the people in the church said so.  That people are supposed to go to church on Sundays.  I now go to church on a Sunday because I want to offer and spend an hour of my life listening to God’s words.  Because I’m not there for the people of the church but because I believe in God and I want to spend time with him.