Free Is You Okay? by GloZell Green Page B

about why “just going along” with what everyone else is doing is rarely a good idea. Faking it for other people’s sake usually makes stuff worse.
    Faith is important to me—but it has to be true faith. No matter which churches I’ve attended, no matter how supportive their congregations have been of me and my family (and believe me, we’ve needed it), it was always my faith that was my bedrock. People like Sheila the Prophetess shake that belief a little and bring the skeptical part of my personality to the surface because it doesn’t feel like it’s connected to a deeper faith—it feels like a performance. When you really want to believe, it hurts that much more to be deceived.

    If my skeptical side was reading this book, you know what she might say after reading the first few chapters?
    Yeah, all that’s easy for you to say. It worked out for YOU. But what about me?
    It’s easy to say that it’s okay to be different, that it doesn’t matter when you start, that if you don’t make excuses and work hard on what needs to be done, everything will work out in the end.
    But how? How do you do all that? I had no answers to those questions for a long time. I’m still not sure I do, if I’m being perfectly honest—I only know how I got to where I am today.
    And for me, it really did start with faith.
    My whole life I’ve been a Believer. I’ve had a personal relationship with Him. I’ve known the Word. I’ve had Faith. Actually, it started with Faith with a capital F (as in my religion), and then, as I got older and wiser, it turned into faith with a lowercase f (as in belief). It was when I found that faith that things really started to change.
    I’ve been going to church regularly since I was a baby.
    Churchgoing started with my parents, who were fairly religious and made sure my sister and I knew the Word. Being a music teacher, my mom taught me to play the piano and sing before I learned how to read, and the best place to develop that talent when you were as young as me was at church, so I sang in the choir at my mom’s church, and at my school church.
    When I got to high school, beyond being fairly religious, my parents also got fairly protective. They were always worried that the bad kids in the neighborhood would do something to us, or convince DeOnzell and me to join them in acting out, like we lived inside one of those antidrugs public service announcements. What this meant for us in practice was that if we ever wanted to do anything after school besides sit around the house and watch TV, it would have to involve the church. Church was where the good kids and the good influences were. (Plus they had snacks.) What more could you ask for as a parent? God was basically our babysitter, and my mom didn’t even have to get in the car—the church would pick us up and drop us off, too.
    Like any high school girl, I wanted to get out of the house as much as I could. If church was the only way that was going to happen, then so be it—I would take advantage. So I signed up to sing and play piano for any congregation that had room for me. Besides playing at my mom’s church and school, I played piano in the youth choir, and I found other congregations with good music programs, too. That’s another reason to go to a good church—those church members taught me more about music and performing and collaborating with others than anyone else. And they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.
    One of those places that helped me learn how to perform was the youth choir at a traditional Methodist church run by a man named Pastor Davis. His church was the first time I felt a real connection—not only with God, but also with the people and the pastor, and myself .
    I think what connected me to that church was the fact that I had found it on my own and decided to join it myself. I was a baby when I was baptized, so I