Unshackled Moments ~ October 4 ~ Just Keep Seeking - or Why I Believe

I am a felon, a convict, and have been arrested more than once. It doesn't mean that I am evil, but it does mean that I was selfish and wrong and disregarded others, society and the law in my quest to survive the pain and misery of human existence. I lived far too long thinking only of myself, my pleasure, my need to be distracted, to enhance or escape, living as though there were no God, because I lost my faith and had no hope. I am also an addict, a junkie. I stole money from the collection plate, and I was the kind of jerk who would steal his best friend's stash and then help him look for it. Not a joke. Still, I considered myself a good person, more or less, when I wasn't totally drowning in self loathing. I have some time under my belt now clean and sober, and I no longer consider myself a good person, neither more nor less, but I also don't spend much time sinking in self pity and nearly drowning in self loathing any more.

I do spend a lot of time questioning what I believe and why. My wonderful wife and I were talking last night about the different reactions to God we have because of different backgrounds. She was not raised in the church and came to truly believe and follow Christ later in life. She saw the crappy way far too many christians treated her and others and believed God to be the intolerant, uncaring, uncompassionate, perfection demanding, hypocritical jerk who could never and would never like nor accept her that the christians she came across seemed to be. How she moved past that point to belief is her story to tell, but I am grateful for the reality of her spiritual journey that is so very evident.

I, on the other hand, grew up in the church, the oldest son of a preacher man, my first word was hallelujah. I believed it all, everything I heard about God, for a while, anyway. But I was the opposite of Leah. I expected christians to act like Jesus. I expected them to show the love and compassion of Christ, to live what they said they believed, and I expected them to be right about God. For my formative years I wasn't exposed to many non-christians, so of course the fact of my history is that no one has caused me more hurt and damage than those who claimed to follow the Christ that I believed was supposed to keep me from being damaged. So I began to waiver, to question and to doubt. I could never consider or claim my parents to be hypocrites, and what they said in public and from the pulpit is what I saw at home and everywhere else. They were pretty much the exceptions to that rule though, and by the time I was ten I realized that I didn't see much of the person people said Jesus was in the people who claimed to follow Him. And then I slowly started moving toward Leah's side of the fence. If the people of God hated me so much and didn't care how much they hurt me, then I must be either hated by or insignificant to God as well.

I saw far too much two-faced living, saying one thing in church settings and living differently. I didn't see broken people trying and failing but hypocrites who tried to look good and pass inspection by their christian peers while living as they wanted in the world. I also became exposed to more people and churches and realized that christians couldn't much agree on anything. They definitely didn't even come close to believing the same thing, so they couldn't all be right. If they weren't all right, were any of them right? Did I believe what I believed because it was true or because I had been taught and raised in it and exposed to little else from birth?

I despaired of life before I was even a teen. My life had fallen far short of my hopes and dreams and expectations. I didn't see much benefit in belief. By the time I was 13 I honestly believed my father's life would be better, and by extension mine, if he were not a Christian, much less a preacher. I began exploring other beliefs and non-belief. My life was easier if the church folks weren't on my back or snitching on me to my parents all the time, so I became quite adept at putting on that mask where I looked like a believer, acted like a believer, and even spread the doctrine I thought I knew so well as I sat in the pew high and or hung over. Outside of church no one suspected I was a christian. I was the hypocrite I had judged others to be.

I looked at many other religions. I tried to practice a few. I tried to ignore religion completely, because I had come to hate it and not really believe any of it. I believed in God, I just didn't believe in christianity any more, nor did I believe God loved me or could or would help me, protect me, care for me, or make my life any better because I was defective. I couldn't be like my parents. I could never be faithful to live what I believed. I wasn't good enough, strong enough or really believe enough.

Multiple suicide attempts and decades out of control left me a mess. I had little to no power to refuse any impulse of my natural instincts, nor the ability to go any length of time without feeding the addictions that consumed me. I destroyed pretty much every relationship I had and hurt everyone I claimed to care about, and ended up in prison for 7.5 years. During those years I began to seek again because I needed something and I didn't believe God would let me kill myself while I was locked up. I believed that  He had saved my life from my last attempt, a month before my arrest, so that I would have to suffer the sentence I received.

I sought God and truth and hope and belief. In those 7.5 years I read the Bible completely through over 35 times in multiple translations. Sounds mighty christian of me doesn't it? I also read the Wiccan Bible and many books on a variety of pagan beliefs and spirituality, the Quaran, books on Native American spirituality, Buddhism, Hinduism  and anything else I could get my hands on. I officially documented myself with the prison as a non-christian about half way through my time.

It was after I got out and began to find recovery that I finally began to find the answers that I had been looking for three decades for. I was nearly 40 before I realized that what I heard most of my life when my father tried to tell me things about God belief and faith and grace wasn't what he had actually been saying. I believed Christian spirituality because of experience and thought and searching and trying everything else and not because of what I had been told or what anyone else said. Today, I am a preacher, a licensed minister. It doesn't make me good, and it doesn't mean I'm smarter than anyone else, and it doesn't mean that I am always right. I don't know everything there is to know about God, nor do I listen to anything that anyone who claims to know everything about God says.

God is beyond our understanding. But there are a few things that I know that I know that I know. I know Jesus is the answer, the truth, the way and Lord. I know that because I tried everything else that I could find to try. I know that because I am different now than I used to be and I have not only not gained the power to control myself and be good, I have quit trying to be good at all. I surrendered to God and let Him do the work, and He has done it. I am not perfect yet, not even close. I can still be a selfish jerk, but I have learned how to access grace more and more to lay that selfish jerk on the altar and use the power of God to help me live, walk and love differently than the self centered, narcissistic hedonist that I naturally am.

I find that I don't trust people much who don't question or never questioned. If someone claims to believe something and that belief hasn't faced the elements and the pressure of life yet, I usually dismiss it. If you believe your car's brakes are in good condition because you just bought your car, I question that. If you believe your car's brakes are good because somebody pulled out in front of you this morning, you slammed on the brakes and didn't hit or kill anyone, that I trust. Spirituality is the same. I don't trust people who tell me that I can trust God to catch me unless I know that they too have fallen or jumped from the cliff. It's a flaw in the character of my wounded and scared heart that has heard too many spout things that they have been told but not experienced or believe that they are supposed to believe but don't really.

But I do trust and have experienced that if we seek Him, we will  find Him. We will find more reality and truth that is based on experience and doesn't depend on other people and can't be shaken by other people. It may take 40 days or 40 years, but there is such a thing as truth, and it is possible to find and experience some of it. We won't know all of it on this side of eternity. None of us will. Don't believe anyone who says otherwise. There are things I could be wrong about. But I believe with all my heart that as long as we put our faith in the God that says, "Come to Me. I love you just as you are and not as you should be," and not the doctrines or the followers, that we will be all right. We can continue to seek and to find and experience on a personal level a God that really does love us, and He will confirm those things we believe that are true and He will correct those things we believed in error. Most of all, He will heal and restore and comfort our broken hearts. This I believe because I have experienced it.

My life is finally worth living. I have had years without wanting to die, and that never happened to me before, not after the age of 9 anyway. I have found some peace and joy and stability of soul that has nothing to do with circumstance or other people. You can have freedom, joy and peace and love and hope as well. It's not found in self discipline, or in religion or refusing to look closely at the hard questions, or blindly following anyone or anything. It is found in the One who created us and called us and made it possible to have relationship with perfection and who is big enough to take our questioning and our doubt and love us though it all. It is found in Jesus.



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