Faith
KAT LAND
My name is Kat. My daughter Raven and I found our way to Imago Dei in early 2019. It was a time in my life when I felt lost and I wanted to find a community where I felt like I was a part of something. I quickly found that it was not what I had expected to find. I would sit and listen and feel these giant emotions I didn’t even realize I had, and I started to heal a little sitting in those pews.
I never really had a lot of faith. In fact, one of my first conversations with Josh was after the InterFaith group talk on Humanism where I told him I didn’t really know if I believed in God, but I liked going to church, and his response was all I needed. He just welcomed me and told me to come back. We even ran into one another later that evening and he and his friends invited me to join them. I had an amazing time and can say that that was one of the first times in my life when the word “Christian” didn’t feel synonymous with judgement and feeling less-than.
I still don’t have a lot of faith. The current climate in the world is making it harder to even have hope, much less a true faith in anything. Every day during the pandemic has been a “what next” type of feeling for me. The anti-LGBTQ sentiments and the BLM movements have pushed me further away from anything resembling faith. It is hard to see past all the negative that is out there in the world right now.
I have found faith is seeing the people in my life at marches and posting about changes that are needed in our world. Seeing children marching with their parents. It made a bigger impact on me than most things do. I have been lucky during the pandemic, as I was never furloughed or laid off. I have continued to work, in a different fashion and from home, but I have had that feeling of something to do every day. I think that has allowed me less stress and worry about the pandemic.
