u/TheLifeAdjunct

Turns out it's trash on the beach.

Talked with some new people, spent some fun time as a fam outside, and made our community a tiny bit nicer. Asked the kids their honest thoughts:

Kid 1: This (trash) is way better. I felt like in church we talked about helping, but never actually did it.

Kid 2: I used to hate Sundays, Dad. Now they're great.

Kid 3: Trash!

It's crazy. Since leaving that church, my Sundays have been far closer to what that church teaches Sundays should be than they ever were when I was in it. I actually spend time with my family. We go to cafes, meet new people, enjoy the outdoors with one another. I'm allowed to relax and recharge for the next week.

In the church I would spend all day in Ward Council and other meetings while my poor wife struggled alone to get kids ready for a church service everyone hated going to. These meetings were largely a performance where nothing service-oriented was actually done or planned.

I realized early in my church experience that if we actually just left our meetings and went out and helped people we'd get a whole lot more service done. I also realized it was never really about service in the first place.

Once, as a Ward Mission Leader, I realized I had been in 4 meetings before 9:00AM and the block meetings hadn't even started yet.

Then my family would run around to vapid, soul-sucking gatherings like Sacrament (where speakers start by telling you how much they don't want to be there), EQ (where the recurring joke is that the teacher didn't plan anything and the time isn't taken seriously which pissed me off), or Young Womens (where my daughters were taught more about the sins of having second earrings or tattoos than about being good people who make the world better).

Which is all to say -- yeah, picking up garbage on Sundays, followed by sitting down at a cafe with your amazing kids and listening to their thoughts on life is a hundred times more spiritually fulfilling than church ever was.

I think I'm going to make this a weekly thing.

(Apologies in advance for the epic rant.)

C'mon. For Kolob's sake, that church was by far the biggest influence of my entire life, shaping everything from my friend groups to movie choices to my very perception of reality. I was a counselor in a bishopric, EQ president, Ward Mission Leader, Sunday School president, insufferable member-missionary who sent my inactive siblings BoMs for Xmas, blah blah blah.

And going into what I knew would be my final sacrament meeting, I thought the emotions would be strong. Anger or relief, maybe some nostalgia. And there was a little bit of those: Maybe 5 minutes of nostalgia and even good memories and 5 minutes of "Thank God I'm getting out of this."

But more than any of that, FAR more, was the same overwhelming boredom and pointlessness and urge to check the clock every 2 minutes that I'd felt in thousands of those meetings my entire life because IT WAS JUST SO BORING.

Seriously. Being angry or uncomfortable would at least have been entertaining. But no! All there was was that all-too-familiar banality and vapidness of a perfunctory, soulless meeting filled with people who ALSO didn't really want to be there for the most part, yet did it out of guilt or duty or social shaming. Those life-sucking meetings where a disinterested teenager gets up and mumbles out a talk yanked from Chat GPT only to be followed by 2 nervous adults who begin their talks by telling everyone how much they don't want to be there, while kids with runny noses mindlessly smear their fingers on iPads while their dads check ESPN on their phones and exhausted mothers zone out while trying to calculate just how little time in the upcoming week they'll have left to themselves once they're done with kids sports, temple trips, mutual, family night, ministering, school plays, scripture study, family prayer, geneology work, primary activities, Relief Society meetings, calling meetings, and Kolob-knows how many other pointless church activities will eat up their time.

By the end of the meeting I realized it was actually fitting, though, because THAT'S been the story of that church in my life: some good, some bad, but overall just a humongous heap of aggressive blah, overwhelming in its under-whelmingness. And that's actually what makes me angry.

I gave that church my heart, time, mind, and nearly $100,000, and what did it give me in return? An underwhelming nothing burger with nothing on the side except a second language I'm now bad at and a deeply engrained trepidation that God cares far more about boys touching their wee-wees than saving millions of people dying around the world.

I mean, how much better would it have been if I'd used that time for something productive instead? Or even just resting on the sabbath. Picking up litter would have been a better use of the time. Hell, memorizing the dictionary would have.

(No joke. At least then I'd know how to spell "soul-crushing beauracracy" without having to use Reddit's spellcheck.)

We talk about the bad in that church all the time (and rightfully so), but I think a major thing we miss is just how incredibly bland, superficial, and empty the majority of membership was.

(Note: I started this last year, but am just now finishing it. I haven't been back since that fateful, boring day. Life is so much better, my kids will grow up without the self-hate and religious superiority complex I've had to grow out of, and my Sundays now are the best of my life. My love to all you fellow apostates.)

Experiment - What's a more spiritually fulfilling Sunday: going to the COJCOLDS or just picking up trash on the beach?