It's my church...the lie that became truth

With seasons pretty much everywhere open now…I’ve begun to hear a phrase I myself used to say so much I started to believe it as truth.

It’s my church.

I mean no offense by this and sorry if wading into the waters of religion for a moment makes you uncomfortable …but it is the most important aspect of my life so rather than be fake, I’m going to be incredible real for a moment.

It’s my church.

Those words, I think encapsulate the biggest lie I hear many hunters make each year besides maybe how big the buck was they saw or shot.

I’ve said them myself and at times in my life quite often. As many of you no doubt know God’s creation is one of the greatest refuges for a man’s mind, body and soul.

Often times it is our escape from our daily stresses which seem too big, our demons which are closing their grips on us and is the one place our problems for a moment seem left behind.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has a quote however from one of my favorite books that warns us about fleeing from the community of the church for solitude.

“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone... Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.”

The excuse we utter of the woods being our church, is merely an excuse to flee into the abyss of vanity and selfishness so deep it no longer resembles the heart of the Christian God we claim to be finding in it.

It steals us from our families, our loved ones and the thing God time and time again in his book to us says our faith causes us to desire besides him: our church community.

We want our self made “god” of hunting to have somewhere within it this version of god that we read about in the Bible so badly that we continue to whisper to ourselves, this is where I find him…this is my church. Over and over again until we start to believe it to be true.

When the actuality of it all is it isn’t our church, it is merely our god, not the God, the woods have become.

How long have you slowly pulled this veil over your own eyes that, even now as you’re reading this all you can think of are comebacks and ways to refute and defend against the conviction of your conscious?

How long, like myself have you tried to make God fit into the passions of your life rather than your life fit into your passion for God?

God bless brothers and sisters, and may you hear the calling of God more than you hear the woods calling to you.