Church is not just a social event

I don't want to give the impression that I just want to go to church so I can have friends.

The other part of the puzzle is the desire I have to do something about the suffering in the world. This is an impulse I share with my father, who had a heart full of compassion and no way to express it.

Pretty much everyone in my family lives to achieve comfort for themselves. They do not have causes, they don't support charities. My father would put a few dollars extra in his electricity payment during the winter to help poor families pay their bills, and my mom would get angry.

Most of my family (other than my mom) are all Republican Rush-Limbaugh-listeners, and they have that callous disregard for suffering that is too common among the FOX News commentator types. The poor are poor because they are lazy and weak-willed. "We don't have to feed the hungry. Our wealth will eventually trickle down."

Well, I just can't agree with that. In fact it pisses me off when I think about it. There are huge needs in the world, and the right thing to do is to try to address them. I have come to believe that Jesus saw the same needs and felt them deeply, and that's the main reason I feel attracted to Christianity.

I guess in looking for faith, I'm looking for a family whose values are more like mine, and come from a source of spiritual energy, not from the marketplace or tv or magazines. A family that encourages one another to rise above our own comforts to a higher purpose. A family in which there are many many more people at the table, and not just people "like us" but people of all nationalities, races, creeds.

We live in a country with the abundance to feed the world, and the technology to help improve education, health care and the use of the environment on a global scale. And we aren't doing it. I hope to find a community of faith that wants to take on these issues from a spiritual perspective. We'll see.