The last church I went to made a box out of being out of the box. It was the strangest thing I had ever experienced. They were so hung up on being out of the box that it was a trappier box than any other box!! They wouldn’t even let people use certain words in their church because those words came from churches “in the box”. The whole thing is quite ridiculous! If someone was to ask them why we left they would say “They couldn’t handle life outside the box”… when really we couldn’t handle life inside the LOCKbox spent staring at the other cardboard boxes, making sure our box didn’t look like their box.

This is turning into a tongue twister…

Seas2sea

Seen that one heaps of times. Outside the box/inside the box… it’s all the same, just that you see the other side of the walls.

When I started exploring life outside the institutional churches I quickly realised that I’d created a box for myself by attempting to live life differently from what I’d experienced. I found myself asking ‘what would they do in a church setting?’ and making sure I did something differently. I was fighting against what I had known previously. In a way my churched experiences were controlling me just as effectively in my ‘post-churched’ experiences.

I found that it was only once I became indifferent about the box and stopped affirming or fighting against it that I was able to live free of it. That’s when the box effectively disappeared.

We can make a box out of anything. The ego longs for attachments and will create them with what we often consider to be “spiritual” ideas, all the while being oblivious to the notion that the attachments, not the objects of them, are the problems.