1 like = 1 good thing from my experience growing up Seventh-day Adventist
1) We had a food called haystacks that was a delicious customizable taco-stack. Start with a base of chips, add beans, cheese, lettuce, and any number of other delicious toppings and sauces. Great potluck food because everyone could bring an ingredient.
2) I have four+ close friends that I've known since gradeschool, a couple of them from first grade. We all went to the same church school so we got to know each other very well over many years.
3) There are 10+ friends I stay in touch with, talking at least every year, who I knew from childhood. Some of these are my parents age and are my only friends in this age group.
4) We had a co-ed, SDA version of boyscouts that was a lot of fun. The weekly meetups were okay but the campouts were amazing! Pacific Northwest camping is the best.
5) My church school was so small I could basically do all the things. Choir, band, bell choir, every sports team, after school gymnastics, etc. (Many but not all of these at once)
6) Everywhere I traveled as a kid had Seventh-day Adventists we could stay with who would show us around. US west coast, US east coast, Germany, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, etc.
7) I got to see and hang out the same friends at school, church, and youth group. I didn't always love the church service but I loved passing noted and playing written games on the bulletin with my family and friends.
8) I got to practice some weird skills, like giving sermons. Have you ever given a sermon? It's an interesting kind of public speaking challenge!
9) I got to celebrate Sabbath and also look forward to the end of Sabbath. Both were good! There is something about taking a day to rest, explore, and hang out with family that is awesome. I use more of that now... 🤔
10) I learned tons of songs! It's funny because I don't sing them anymore, but occasionally I'm jamming with a friend who was raised really Christian and we can shock everyone in the room with our extensive Christian library of songs! @Aella_Girl
11) I'm not sure how much I appreciated it at the time, but in retrospect it was awesome to be a part of a community of a lot of different age groups that interacted with each other. Very different than my circles in the Bay Area.
12) I grew up Knowing that Good was real, and that I could be a force for Good in the world. I didn't always know what was Good, but I knew there was a right answer. This really helped me get my bearings as a person, even though I now have a much more complex view of good.
13) Because SDAs do a lot of missionary work, I was exposed to ideas about international development and egalitarianism pretty early. I'm very glad I was taught that we have a duty to help those less fortunate then us, both here and abroad.
14) Because SDA has elements of a persecution narrative, I was raised with a balance of distrusting the state and appreciating the state. It was helpful to get both perspectives.
15) My SDA community had a lot of stupid rules. I'm grateful I had a training ground for learning how to break stupid rules without getting caught. 😈
16) I really like the belief that everyone is valuable and good in some deep sense, yet also can do bad things and be on bad paths. This means you can love people and still recognize that they have flaws you might need to protect yourself against.
17) Mythical religious beliefs are underrated. Look, I've now studied evolutionary biology and I know humans and dinosaurs didn't live at the same time. But the mythology where they did is awesome.
18) I learned to love stories growing up, because religious stories were so important to my community. Stories in books, stories around a campfire, stories about one's own life with spiritual meaning weaved in. I leaned to compose my own with an eye to what mattered.
19) I learned to distrust arbitrary authority through theological dispution. Of course there were limits to this, but I didn't have to trust someone else's interpretation of relation. I could read the Bible and reason from my own experience and figure it out myself.
20) Growing up, I had access to a lot of mentors from various walks of life. A doctor or two, a carpenter, an engineer, an ex-techy & former drug dealer youth pastor... It was great!
21) My dad was the general contractor who built our church, and he also managed the facility. As a result I knew where every secret closet and tunnel was. Lots of fun times exploring the lesser known parts of the big building.
22) I often helped with child care for events growing up. Helping take care of younger kids was sometimes taxing but usually pretty fun. I didn't think about the parents' perspectives at the time but I imagine it was nice to have free child care!
23) Basically everyone I knew growing up was either SDA or went to the SDA school. This was nice because my parents were usually friends with my friends' parents! The parents could hang out and us kids could run off and do our own thing.
24) There's never ever ever ever ever been a show like VeggieTales.
25) Vespers is a kind of evening servive with lowlights, praise songs, and a short high emotional tone speech. It really hit the feels for me. Also something romantic about it. Great outlet for teenage angst. The first time I held hands with my highschool gf at Vespers... wow
26) Seventh-day Adventists believe they are the only remnant of Christianity that still follows God's word as written. I feel a little embarrassed about this in retrospect, but growing up it felt real cool, like I was in a special club with true knowledge amidst the darkness
Called Pathfinders
27) One belief from Christianity that I still hold dear is summed up in Philipians 4:8
"In conclusion, my friends, fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honorable."
"In conclusion, my friends, fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honorable."
28) Just as it's important to fill your mind with good things, it's important not to fill your mind with bad things! My parents didn't have TV and I'm very grateful for that. I turned to books instead, which have a much higher ratio of content to info warfare (ads)
29) I don't really like sin as a concept, because it can be used to reinforce mental self harm and guilt spirals. On the other hand, the concept of a God that loves you no matter what is awesome, and picked me up many times when I felt unloved or low self worth. 💪⚡
30) My church community had many large social gatherings in the summer with lots of kids to play with, like the church campout or outdoor after-church potlucks down by the river, or church swim night where the kids battled the adults in giant-inflatable-octopus king of the hill
31) Not specific to SDA or Christianity, but one of my favorite things to do with my friends was walking and role playing fantasy games. I think it helped that I had some of the same friends from 2-4th grade through highschool. <3 @brandt_i_am @KatLohman Matthew & Jonathan
32) Traditionally, Seventh-day Adventists believe in a strong separation of Church and State (due to worries of persecution as a fringe new religion in the 19th century). While I've changed many political beliefs, this is one I've held constantly from childhood. Still holds up.
33) This one is hard to say or admit. I genuinely liked the mission of Evangelical Christianity. Help everyone find Jesus and find their way to an eternal awesome existence. If I still thought Christian theology was True, I'd still be out doing this!
34) Imagine you were a wizard and could harness an ancient power from a distance and help people recover from sicknesses and heartbreak. That's what believing in prayer is like.
35) During the church campout, we'd play a game where we would make Bible story scenes on the beach using drift wood, shells, and sea weed, then guess which story they portrayed. 💭 🐚🏖️📖🏃♂️🕳️🦁🦁🦁🙏
36) Pathfinder badges were so satisfying to earn. Knot-tying, archery, wilderness survival, fancy march and drill, etc. Like a videogame but irl.
37) The list of things I learned and enjoyed but never expect to use again includes Fancy March and Drill in Pathfinders. We made our own fancy marching routines. The memories are all coming back now 😅 "Column right... march! ... Left... Left ... Left right left ..."
38) There are a lot of different dimensions to religion and music. One of the simplest though, is sheer number of musically inclined / skilled people! I was never the best musician or singer around, but I benefited a lot from having tons of musicians around me.
39) Christian rock music is a great foil for real rock music. It was nice to have some garbage music in my life so I could appreciate the real thing. 🔥
40) I went to the same school from 1st grade to 12th, with ~200 kids total. Plenty of downsides, but some upsides included: mostly stable friend group, student government was easy to game, lots of cool parents would help out and take us on cool trips, low student:teacher ratio
41) SDAs believe drinking is not okay, so their social events are all sober. While I do enjoy alcohol, I actually think sober social events are great and much healthier than ones with lots of drinking. Turns out you don't need alcohol to get crazy. 🎉
42) SDAs encourage people not to eat meat, and all their events are vegetarian! I never ate meat growing up and because of that it's been easy to stay a vegetarian. If you want to attend some amazing vegetarian potlucks, go hang out with some Seventh-day Adventists. 😁
43) Growing up it was very clear to me that racism is wrong, because God loves everyone equally. There were even nursery songs about it. "Jesus loves the little children of the world" Obviously this doesn't require religion to get right, but I'm still pretty happy about it!
44) Growing up Christian, there were moral beliefs I held deeply despite literally false reasoning behind them. Later I realized there were also epistemically sound reasons for them. What's weird is that the fake reasons seem better for a certain kind of moral uptake. 🤔
45) One of the most important "correct beliefs with fake reasons" was the belief that everyone is worthy of love. Christianity made this easy for me to believe at a deep level.
46) Another awesome thing about prayer is the power of *praying with someone else*. To be struggling with something, and to have a close friend or mentor reach out and ask to pray with you... It means a lot!
47) One of the most valuable lessons I have learned is that one's beliefs can be deeply mistaken. The earth is not 6,000 years old. Humans share common ancestors with all life on Earth. If you don't remember ever breaking out of the matrix, you're probably still in one.
48) One of the wildest parts of the realization from 47) is that the realizations *didn't stop* after the first set. I could have paradigm-shifting belief changes and still be deeply wrong about much of the world!
49) I really liked having youth pastors in our church and school community. They were usually college-age students who would hang out with and mentor the high school aged kids. Some were only okay, but the cool ones were great to have around and catalyzed a lot of cool stuff!
50) I went to Thailand in highschool on a mission trip. Abstractly, I knew about global poverty before that, but it's different to see it. The lesson I took from it is the same as I hold now. The world is not whole, and there is much work to be done.
51) My first mission trip was to Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina to help clean up people's houses. The food we ate was just-expired grocery store donations. There was a whole pallet of lukewarm mountain dew. I drank so much of it. 😳
