The Greenhouse

Growing up as a Christian was like growing up in a Greenhouse. All of us Christians inhabited our little house of warmth and sunlight where we were firmly planted. Everything was taken care of. We had our food, our sunlight, our water. We were planted in this Greenhouse and here we would live forever. Why would we live here forever? Well it was really quite simple. We could not exist outside the Greenhouse. If we were yanked up by our roots and tossed outside we would shrivel up into raisins. We could not bear the heat, the reality. We could not bear the atmosphere on the outside. The conditions were not right. It was only in this bubble that we could exist. Everywhere outside of this greenhouse we would die a slow, inevitable death.

When I was in middle school and early high school I remember what it meant to be a good Christian. I went on mission trips, went to youth group, sang all the right songs and believed all the right things. I went to church 4 days of the week at least, sometimes more. From the time I exited my mother’s womb till the time I graduated high school I was always at church. First it was Sunday school and Vacation Bible School. Then it was Cornerstone Club-an afternoon elementary program. In Sixth grade I was homeschooled by my own choice and every Friday there was a common co-op homeschooling day at our church. This was a day when all the homeschoolers from the my hometown, Bailey mountain area would join together to go to church together to learn from other moms and play games with other people’s kids. I found it somewhat ironic that homeschoolers met publicly and learned in a public setting. I guess this meant that the real problem was not public schooling, but rather secular public schooling. It also meant that us mountain people were too poor to drive to Faith Christian Academy in Denver where most good Christian parents enroll their spawn. After one year of homeschooling I called it quits. I was bored as hell and wanted to hang out with more than just three people a week. This was one of the best decisions of my life, though I can’t imagine I would ever be a homeschooler forever because that comes with the condition that you must also be socially retarded which I am not. Seriously, have you ever known a normal person who was homeschooled? I have friends that were for a few years and they turned out all right, but the lifers are just weird. They usually wear glasses glasses and read Spider-man comic books. They cannot have a normal conversation with you unless you talk to them like their mom but who wants to do that. If homeschoolers were characters in Star Trek they would be Spok. Really smart, but socially handicapped. From an early age I lived in the Greenhouse. On the weekends I would go to Christian conferences. These conferences had “Christian” skateboarders, football players, rappers and musicians. They spoke to us about standing up for our faith.

They reiterated the fact that being a Christian did not mean we were un-cool, which was a relief because most of us were. Very un-cool in fact. We were so un-cool we made computer nerds look like Brad Pitt. These conferences passed out a cornucopia of Christian material. Christian CD’s, movies, t-shirts, stickers, patches, water bottles, skateboards, hats and Christian literature on how to separate yourself form the world. They handed out information on churches, bookstores and any other Christian store we could hope to go to without leaving the Greenhouse. There was nothing you could not buy in the world that was not Christianized by some location. There were even Christian granola bars and Christian vitamins. There were Christian ties and Christian insurance companies. The only thing that is still missing and we need to get on it, is a Christian grocery store/mall. Here we could go get all of our supplies for the next month and never have to run into any one who wasn’t a Christian or support Atheist companies like Safeway. We have Christian amusement parks and Christian museums, why can’t we get some mall action going on. I don’t want to buy my Strawberries from some pagan at checkout four. Next we could make Christian Wal-Marts and employ only white-middles class Republicans to run our sore for us. That way we wouldn’t have to deal with minorities or liberal either.