I Left the Faith / Part 2
I want to tell you about a mountaintop experience… perhaps with a burning bush… Something flashy, something for you to gasp at, to tell your friends about. But…
This is part two of “I Left the Faith”. If you haven’t read/listened to part one, start here.
Here’s where I tell you about *the moment* where I was restored into relationship with God and found peace.
I want to tell you about a mountaintop experience… perhaps with a burning bush… Something flashy, something for you to gasp at, to tell your friends about.
But…
I don’t have that kind of story.
There wasn’t actually one moment.
I hate letting you down like that, I’m sorry.
I could try to spice it up, but I like the truth, so I’ll give it to you straight.
My experience of reunion, or perhaps, my first true relationship with God has been slow and quiet and has taken place over the course of years.
Instead of a flash of lightning, it is more like He’s helped build my faith, stone by stone. Slowly.
Did you know the beautiful Cologne Cathedral took 600 years to build?
I love an overnight success story just as much as the next person, but there is something enchanting too about things. that. take. time.
I just don’t ever want to be that thing. I want to be an after story. I want to be a shining success and be done with all the messy parts of growing and learning and changing. (Ha.) But I’m not living in an after story. I’m living in the middle.
I think however you’re raised, you have to grow up and take personal responsibility to make sense of it, fill in the gaps, relearn or unlearn things, and that’s what I’ve been doing and continue to do as I think and write.
Before confronting these things in myself, I kept my life loud, busy, working hard, partying hard.
I gave up on hope for real relationship God and wanted the noise to drown out any questions I had.
Insecure in His love— let’s throw a BBQ!
Uncertain if I really believed in Jesus anyway— let’s travel! Where can we go next? What productive thing can I busy myself with?
I ran from my heaviness, instead of looking my despair right in its eyes.
We were raised with such a heavy emphasis on our appearance, and on the other side of it now, I can say confidently: following rules so your family looks like the right kind of Christians does not draw your children nearer to the ultimate heart transformation of faith and relationship with God.
I do not subscribe to the idea that getting your child to submit and obey or modify their behavior so they act Christian actually teaches them how to be Christian.
Living “rightly” because of fear of consequence isn’t the same thing as living rightly because you love God.
Because I had to carry the heavy burden of “Christian appearance” on the outside, I assumed that’s what God wanted on the inside: a happy Christian looking version of me.
I sang at church about the endless, boundless grace and love of God, but then wrestled with the bulk of our Bible teaching painting a picture of a God who you earn favor with by living rightly, a God who opens you up for harm and pain when you don’t get it right. A punishing Father looking to hurt you into loving Him rightly.
And because this was the bulk of teaching to all the parents in our conservative circle, they worked hard to get us children to live right, so we’d have God’s grace and favor, so we’d be in relationship with Him.
Please hear me: You cannot and will not draw a young person to Christ through shaping the outside of their body to look more like the kind of person that follows Christ.
Me misunderstanding God’s character in this way — not believing He wanted the real, fully feeling and definitely flawed version of me— created a divide in my life.
There was a difference between my inner and outer life.
At some point, internally, I stopped performing, stopped trying to connect with the God I thought valued appearance and sinlessness and punished me when I didn’t get it right.
In the quiet, I felt raw, a bit scared, and wondered if people knew me, really— would they still like me? Love me?
Nobody every told me I needed to divide myself to make Christianity work.
But I was told it was only right to look a certain way, to listen to certain music, to have certain words on my lips, certain attitudes and behaviors.
None of my Christian looking outward self came up from a genuine connection or desire to love God.
It is numbing and scary to not be one whole, united person. To be playing a part in your life, instead of living it.
Even after giving up on internal performance, I deeply desired to unite my divide. I wanted to want God.
I believed I would have to clean myself up and get myself more right before God would want me though. I would need to become better at upholding more outside standards.
If I could get this stuff down— read my Bible, quit wine, be more selfless, then I could enter relationship with Him.
The older I got, the more terrifying this chasm became and the more I hated myself.
I believed He must be so far, and must be so disappointed.
There were many 3am moments: laying in the dark next to my husband sleeping soundly, my mind racing with hateful thoughts for myself, and God’s
gentle words would meet me there, speaking love and grace over and into me.
My thoughts were loud and harsh. As I berated myself for poor choices, He spoke love. I won’t tell you the mean words I had for myself, but I’m sure you can imagine them as you hear the kind words He gave to heal me.
You are wanted. You are whole. Your life matters. You aren’t a no good piece of trash loser because you keep making the same mistakes. I love you, and I know you, and I still love you.
I was surprised to hear that voice of the gracious and gentle true God, not the voice of a God I thought hated all my terrible decisions, but a loving father who saw me all the way through—and wanted me anyway, had kindness for me anyway.
Try as I might, I couldn’t hate myself into better living. And God didn’t want that for me or expect that of me.
✨He desired to meet me in my brokenness, not on the other side of it.✨
It was the love of a gentle God that called me into freedom and life.
Spiritual life, yes, but also a renewed delight in this physical life that I was specifically created for.
God wanted to heal my divide, wanted to give me the freedom to live wholly with a united inner and outer life; not with checklists to look like I loved Him. He gently guided me into real relationship not out of fear, not out of performance. Instead, connection.
He called me into living presently and, for me, literally soberly, so I could know Him again and find delight in this world.
Never, never did He meet me through the law, through rules, through shame.
He did not leave me to suffer.
His voice is gentle and kind.
I know now, God doesn’t separate himself from me in my sin. He stays near. He desires restoration, relationship, true freedom for me. Oh, if you only knew how much God loves to meet a person in bondage and free them.
If you haven’t heard this before, it would be my honor to be the first to tell you. If you aren’t free, if you are despairing for your soul, Jesus already paid the price to buy your freedom from sin. To restore you into relationship with the God who delights in you, right now.
I have to say this again because its impact on my life has been so profound: l had to accept that He hadn’t separated Himself from me because of my sin. He was always near.
He wasn’t crossing His arms and frowning at me.
God was with me and loved me in the middle of my mess. He wasn’t disgusted by me and turned away by my sin, questions, misunderstandings of Him, and my increasingly scary wine habit. He never turned away.
God healing this in me brought the first fruits I saw in my life. Fruits I could recognize came from love for God, instead of desire to perform.
What does it mean for me these days living in faith? I think that’s the question I’d be asking if 19 year old me was peering ahead and realizing I found peace and was wondering how it happened.
I am resting in the love God has for me.
Not achieving, not earning it. Not making spiritual commitments to earn blessings.
There isn’t division between my inner and outer lives. Not because I finally got my insides to perform right, but because I gave up on rules and performance altogether.
I’m not dressing myself modestly enough to earn his love.
Not being obedient enough to earn his love.
Not trying to keep bright eyes and a happy heart to be salt & light to earn his love.
I just rest, rest in His love.
In 2021, I wrote about my salvation for the first time and I titled it: Through a Thousand Moments of Redemption.
Because that’s what this has been, a thousand tiny moments of grace and God meeting me with his kindness, in nature, through people, in literature, in the quiet.