I punched a wall.
Again.
I was a volatile mix of disbelief and anger, some of the anger being directed at the bits of belief that clung to me no matter how much I tried to fling them away. The rest forced itself out through word vomit and the aforementioned fists.
It was a time of contradiction. Oxymorons.
I longed for disconnection and connection at the same time. I was angry at a God I claimed I didn’t even believe in.
There was a brief stint of unhealthy substances. A bottle given to me of something I could barely choke down when attempting to consume, and something resembling the smell of a barn that I was instructed to light and then inhale deeply.
The offer was there for something much stronger, along the lines of Timothy Leary and a promise of a much better time, but after asking my chemistry teacher what the actual effects could be, I chose to say thanks but no thanks.
I had grown up in the church, and for so many years just assumed what my family said was true. I knew the right answers to the godly questions, and could even ask good, insightful questions that an authentic believer might ask to understand God and Christianity even further.
Yet it wasn’t until I let go of it all, when I chose to drop everything and start from as close to zero as I could actually get, that I was able to objectively decide what I believed to be true.
It wasn’t a fun time. My sophomore year definitely wasn’t pretty. I put my parents through unthinkable agony and scared my friends with the nonchalant thoughts I shared with them. I was a gross mess, and I got into a lot of trouble doing a lot of wrong things.
But in between all the rage and despair, I was committed to figuring out the truth. Even if that something I sought for turned out to be nothing, at least then I would know for sure.
In a pile of philosophy and religion books, I researched, studied, discarded much, and ultimately decided the world actually made too much sense for God not to exist. Well, $#@%!
I could no longer deny there was a God out there, somewhere. He had to exist, at least in some sense, in some form. Despite everything I thought or even wanted to believe, that was the most logical explanation, regardless of how I felt about it.
So I prayed to this concept of God and said, if He was really there, if the conclusions I made based on the research I did were actually true, I needed to know.
Over time, He slowly revealed more of Himself to me. I grew to believe He not only existed, but He was also actively involved in the world.
And I needed to know Him.
Then one night a few months later, there was something of Him that ventured on tangible. Actual. Real. I could not explain it, but I could not imagine it away.
He broke me, softened me, assured me, and I was able to reach out for Him, and for the faith that had refused to fully let go of me.
I accepted it.
I swallowed it completely and it became my own.