How Dare You Call Me A Sinner

-A Puritain citizen who has lost touch with God and their religion.

     Today in church, Reverend Edwards delievered a sermon that slowly peeled away the layers of my skin. He stood before me saying that, "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart....it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God.....being made drunk with your blood." (pg. 154) It is after sermon's like this that I question myself, yet again, if God would truly be angry with me. Have the small curses and foolishness that I commit truly cursed me to all damnation?
     My elders always taught me that God is a loving and caring being. That I was pure enough in spirit to have it ensured upon me that God would grace me with His hand the moment my heart seized to beat. And I believed in my faith, and held my faith like a child clutches a blanket to their breast. God was a beautiful dream that filled me with enough contemptment to sing me to sleep in the coldest, darkest nights.
     Then, as I aged, my luck fled from me. My crops refused to grow and as my elders left me, one after the other, I felt myself sinking into a bottomless pit of dread. I would sit alone, trapped in my thoughts, and wonder if I would still be graced with God, if he was only testing my faith. But how can someone (God) be so great in His mighty and not turn his head as I pleaded on my knees day and night for change?
     So today, I unlocked myself from my only shelter and sat awkwardly in the back pew of the church. Somber faces walked past me, staring in a confused fashion in my direction. My chin lifted, for how dare they not accept me! I sat tall, my backbone stiff as brick, and gazed forward as Reverend Edwards centered himself at the front of the room.
     "We find it easy to tread on and crush a worm that we see crawling on the earth; so it is easy for us to cut or singe a slender thread that any thing hangs by; thus easy is it for God when he pleases to cast his enemies down to hell...", (pg.153)  preached Jonathan Edwards.
      I looked around in bewilderment as faces remained stilled and children sat silent. How could these people not react? How could they possibly believe that we would be victums of  the "fierceness and wrath of Almighty God..."? (pg. 156) Was this some kind of horrible game, that a speaker of God would be throwing words like flames at us? The God that Edwards was preaching of would surely never be cruel to the young children that sat, wide eyed, in the pews! He would never judge so harshly and He would surely never want His name to be one that made people cower in fear! A sudden rage flamed in my chest and it took all of my will-power not to storm down the aisle of the church and hollar what a sham and what dishonor was being preached!
     Instead, I sulked in my seat, my shoulders brushing my ear-lobes in an attempt to cover my ears without bringing attention to myself. And every time "hell" was spoken or "wrath", I felt as if I were being stung by an annoying wasp. By no means could I believe, even for a moment, that what was being said may possibly be true. By the time Reverend Edwards exclaimed "O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell."(pg. 156), my head began to spin and my stomach churned. The room was suddenly to warm to bear and the last thing I heard before the large, splintering wood doors  swung behind me was, "It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity." (pg. 156)
     Loose rain drops splattered my forehead as I crouched on the front steps of the church. In that moment, I vowed that I would not return to church until Reverend Edwards bid his eternal fairwell. His God was not the same being that my God was and until people saw His light as I once did, I would no longer feel His grace at all....