I Was "Churched"

I found a new blog yesterday, through another blog I keep up with by a guy named Matthew Paul Turner. I started reading and found out that he had a new book out called Churched: One Kid's Journey Toward God Despite A Holy Mess. It just came out, this week, I believe, and of course me being a book worm, I started reading the synopsis, as well as the first chapter of the book and the first chapters of some of his other books. And I started laughing because for the first time, someone gets what I went through as a child.
To sum it up, or at least as much as I've read of Churched, it's basically about Matthew's life, starting when he was age 4 and his parents pulled the family out of a Methodist church to go to a very fundamentalist Baptist church. I was raised in a fundamentalist "non-denominational" church - which meant that we were basically Assembly of God without the fuss of actually BEING in the Assemblies of God. Matthew talks about being scared of church, of feeling like God was out to get him...at age 4. I can 100% relate. I was convinced from an early age that Halloween was Satan's night to romp; therefore, my friends got to trick-or-treat as awesome characters like Pippi Longstocking while I had to trudge my way to "Hallelujah Night" at our church and watch old Gospel Bill videos - and then look on the next morning while my friends tore into their Hershey bars and I got stuck with that candy in the red wrappers. I was terrified whenever I couldn't find my parents in the house and was convinced that I had been left behind in the Rapture, that smokers weren't necessarily going to hell, but would be in a separate "smokers" section in heaven, and that Catholics were evil and not really Christians. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my sweet great-grandmother was a devout Catholic - poor NaNa. Little did she know that her 9 year old great-granddaughter was in fear for her soul.
I can remember a deep conversation with my best friend in first grade. We were both 6 and she told me that her family was Lutheran. Knowing that Lutherans were definitely not Christians (because they were not Pentecostal), I told her that her entire family would be doomed to hell.
Seminaries were ridiculous schools that my pastor referred to as "cemeteries" that turned out men that were not filled with the Holy Spirit and didn't do cartwheels down the aisles of their church. Baptists were closet drinkers and also were not filled with the Spirit - so 90% of them would be eternally damned as well.
You get my drift. I don't know how many other people out there lived the early part of their lives scared to death of God and going through the prayer of salvation about 25 times a year because they were afraid that Jesus had up and gone. I know that it took quite some time to get over my fear of Christianity. It's nice to know that others have gone through the same things. Go get Churched. It's a good one.