When I was younger, I used to place religion at a higher hierarchy in my life. It was essential, or so that was how I was being brought up to believe. My parents, my Sunday school teacher, the religious and the elders made me believe that God and religion came as a package in life. Without it, you lose yourself in the society we live in today with all the pain and trouble it offers. 

Yet as I grew older and became more absorbed into the global society, I am painfully more aware that they both do not come hand in hand. That they are not interdependent as how I have been led to believe, but INDEPENDENT of each other. Realized, that the combination of both comes from man’s integration of the two together. To what purpose? I don’t know nor understand, and ever so increasingly lately don’t want to understand.

I see no purpose to making the effort. I see that my relationship with God does not depend on my affiliation to the church nor any religion for that matter. Yes, I still pray to God the way I have been taught as a child, but I find it more like a conversation and sometimes a litany of things running through my mind. If someone were to ask would I mind praying in another religion’s place of worship, I would say no. I believe in God, religion to me nowadays seem more like a sense of conformity. Different they may seem, but getting down to the basic all of them lead back to the same purpose - God.

I don’t have anything against the religious and elders. I still welcome the advice they preach. But I see it more as an eye opener. Things to ponder on but not a lifeline to which my life depends on. My reaching out to God does not depend on all this but how I open my heart to him and welcome him into my life.

Maybe it’s because I see church groups becoming more and more like an exclusive club. That it requires some sort of membership application rather than a place you can step into. I hear the youths talk about religion and their relationship with it recited like a broken record; rehearsed without any in depth meaning. Do they even understand it, or has it been so ingrained into them that it seems like brainwash instead. I don’t know. Still I feel free walking away from it all, because to me God places higher than religion.