What do I believe? This is the question that has been on my mind lately. Growing up I knew of God because everyone around me believed. I didn’t question his existence. I was told he was real and accepted it as fact. I imagined this big guy in the sky holding the earth in his hands. He witnessed everything that was going on, and he was there listening when I would pray.

I never thought about the details of how things came to be. Things just were. I never thought about why we do the things we do. We just do.

I believed everything I did was being recorded, and I would lose or gain points depending on my behavior. I would move up or down the rungs of this ladder located between heaven and hell with my life’s choices.

“The Bible says you reap what you sew,” my grandmother preached, “So plant good seeds.” This was one of the many scriptures that I was raised to pattern my life by and for a time it worked for me.

Little by little life’s troubles and my “rewards” for doing the “right thing” started to chip away at my faith. I was going through my life losing more and more to people who were not interested in pleasing God. These people sought to please themselves and I was being used. Once they got done using me I was discarded or at least relegated to the back of the crowd.

This marriage that I am working to heal from has done what I didn’t think possible. This experience has made me question if there is a God? I’m trying to reach inside myself and find that faith that I’ve held onto for most of my life to no avail. It pains me to say it but I don’t feel it like I did before. The woman that I am now will not accept any semblance of forgery. I need truth. I need to be truthful and I cannot accept anything that doesn’t feel genuine. Religion and most religious people that I know have issues that cause me to question their authenticity. I realize human beings are not capable of perfection. My search and rescue for my faith must be made with authenticity. I cannot accept it because everyone else is doing so. Is the big guy in the sky real?

There must be a divine source for all of creation. I can’t entertain the Big Bang theory. That seems like somebody just gave up looking for answers and said maybe it all just boomed and there you go! No. That can’t be true. I think about all that I learned in Biology this semester. The human body is crazy! Did you know that there are messengers that carry signals back and forth between the brain and body? These messengers called afferent and efferent neurons act at a speed and ingenuity that makes the Internet look primitive! Imagine when you touched something hot how quickly you removed your hand from the heat? Those messengers were working in that moment to relay the information to your brain from your hand and back! That happened in how long?🤔

No, there must be a great and terrible force that set the world in motion. I’m just trying to figure out how to get to the place and where to land in my faith. I don’t believe that the church has it all together. In fact I believe it has a lot more to do with what is wrong then what is right.

I don’t claim to know it all, but religion leaves a lot to be desired. God is love. Agape love. That’s a love without condition. Ok I accept that and in the same moment I think about someone that I love dearly who is now damaged. He is damaged because he hurt himself trying to medicate the pain caused by his shame. His shame was that he was attracted to men and not women.

He is now completely dependent on the care of his aging mother who by all accounts needs someone to care for her. He is unfortunately a child again in his mind, although his body is in its 50’s. I cannot rectify the situation. Where do you begin to work towards a solution? Why do we even have a problem?

Brokenness is rampant. I don’t think you can meet someone older than 25 years old who hasn’t been broken somehow. I don’t know what to do about this place I find myself occupying. Somewhere between healing and purgatory. Does my healing require God? If so, how do I get there from here? I been searching for the truth and I’m beginning to think that I’m not going to find it. Maybe the truth will find me.

I pray that we meet up soon. I pray that it brings with it my wholeness and one day I can tell the story about how I made it over.

Signed,

troubled on every side but not distressed