Editorial: What I Miss About Being Adventist
It has been a few years since I’ve regularly attended an Adventist Church. A lot has been written about about why people leave, and those points all still deserve thought.
But yesterday I was missing a very specific Seventh-day Adventist thing. I mentioned it to my husband, and he had never even heard of it.
The thing I was missing: Rook—that substitute for playing cards that entertained so many of us.
Being Adventist was being part of a culture. I left that culture for many reasons, but there are a lot of cultural things I miss. I miss potlucks. I miss singing. I miss feeling like I had a global family. And I miss Rook.
I have new friends, new habits, a new culture now. But I haven’t found community in the same way I had in church. Being a part of a group of people who meet regularly, participate in ceremonies together, eat together, work together, and share a collective belief system—there’s just nothing else like it.
That is part of why I continue to write for Adventist Today, and why I still invest emotional energy trying to get the church to change. I am not an Adventist anymore, but I still believe that this church could see where it has strayed from the message of Jesus. People shouldn’t be put in a position where they are forced to leave their community in order to be themselves, or because they asked too many questions.
Now I find community in other places: pockets of the world, friends who care about me, family who accept me despite our differences in beliefs.
But I miss Rook—and other things. Maybe I’ll have to teach some of my new friends how to play it. I’ve already introduced them to haystacks—so what’s one more Adventist cultural quirk?
Lindsey Abston Painter
Writer & Editor, Adventist Today
27 July 2024
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