Church makes me cranky

It's true. I grew up in church that was not perfect, but I knew wonderful people there. They knew me and my family for the majority of my adolescent life. Even though I may not be on the same doctrinal page as most people there, whenever I sit in those uncomfortable pews there is a sense of being home, of being known (I guess having been known, in the past tense, I haven't been able to share much of my life with people there since I have been in Seattle, there is of course exceptions to this, hi Erin).
I have tried my round of consuming church and 'church shopping.' But that is all it has been, consuming, my commitments at school kept me incredibly busy (in a very not balanced way) and I was never really able to invest in a church. The idea of going to church and needing to form deep relationships seems exhausting. See, I have a wonderful faith community here at school. It doesn't take place on Sundays and there usually isn't dimly lit rooms with emotional acoustic worship music. I am in a class right now where we are learning about hunger, its causes and our responsibilities to it as Christians, this feels like 'church' to me. I have wonderful friends of deep faith who help me ask the hard questions and give me the look when I am being ridiculous and need to calm down. It is not Christians that make me cranky, it is something about what takes place on Sundays that I feel so much anxiety about.
I take church pretty seriously and I want to be in a place that I can commit to and share my life deeply with the people there. This doesn't happen after a couple of Sundays and I get nervous that I will start going somewhere and then realize something about their doctrine that I just can't be a part of. The way I know and experience God has changed in a lot of ways these past four years, and the journey has been a beautiful, painful, mess. I want to be in a place where I can experience and offer grace, where we are all working together to love the poor widowed and the orphaned, and we can honor the diverse ways in which we reflect God's image.

All of that to say, I don't have a consistent church yet, I've found a pretty great group of mennonites that I think are doing a lot of these things well. I'll let you know how it goes.