Advent for those deconstructing their faith - Day 7

God, my emotions are all over the place. First, I feel shocked. I feel completely undone by my own examination of my beliefs. I never thought I’d end up here. And now, there are so many voices in my head vying for attention….

On one hand, I feel scared… afraid to turn my back on the faith that I have known and loved for years. I feel scared that I am somehow becoming one of those who have fallen away, I am becoming one of those who Your Word warned about as being lost to false teachings. I am scared that I will never find my way back to the security and comfort of You. You and Jesus have been my hope, my confidence, my guidance, my friends for so long now that I am scared of what life will be like without You. And I am scared of what I will be like without You. What if my faith was the only thing keeping me in check? Without my faith, will I become an evil person? Selfish? Angry? Cruel? My faith guided my decisions and my actions and my attitudes for decades… I am afraid to face who I am without You to tell me how to behave and how to think.

But then…

I am angry. I am angry at how ridiculous this all sounds now that I can look at it from the outside. I am furious that I held such toxic beliefs for so long. Believing that my amazing friends were going to hell… that my partner was inferior, somehow, because we had different beliefs. I am angry that I ever saw and treated people as things to be saved or lost, instead of recognizing and valuing the complexity of the human experience as being far more dynamic than some game “God” wants to play. I am mad that it’s taken me so long to get to this place, when I now realize that college students and teenagers seem to have far more wisdom than I do at this age. What happened in my life that I seemed to miss this whole stage of growth where you question authority and start thinking for yourself?!?! I’m angry that I’ve been pulled out of my comfort zone and cast into this…. I don’t even know what to call it (though others have named it “deconstruction”), where I can no longer belong to or relate to my friends and family, and feel like an outcast in my own home.

But then…

I am so sad. I find myself crying for no reason at all, or for the stupidest reason, like being unable to listen to my favorite Christmas songs. O Holy Night? Mary did you know? Joy to the World? I can’t even listen to them this year, let alone sing them. And what radio station do I listen to now? All the mainstream christian ones make me feel sick to my stomach… but the non-christian songs feel so empty and meaningless, so I just end up driving around in silence. And it is so lonely. I find myself wanting to text old friends from church, but wonder what I would say to them or if we could even still be friends? What would they say about me if they knew I didn’t believe in their God anymore? My heart hurts. I miss my beliefs. I miss my Bible. I miss the ease and comfort of prayer and scripture. I miss the songs and the way they made me feel – like anything was possible, like everything was going to be ok, like there was someone up there listening to me and working everything out for my good. I miss the fellowship, the sense of being in a group of people who hoped and thought the same way I did. I miss belonging to something, to Someone, bigger than myself. I miss believing that You are in control and that You are watching over me and loving me.

But then…

Do You even exist??? Doubt screams loud and annoyingly under and through all these other thoughts and feelings. While I am feeling angry, I feel stupid for believing You are there. When I am sad, there is part of me that questions whether this whole thing was ever real in the first place. I wonder if I am crazy – how can I be feeling sad or angry or confused, but also still hear that frustrating whisper that I’m an idiot for having faith at all, or that critical voice reminding me that none of this matters anymore because God isn’t real and it’s all just a big crutch for weak humanity….?

I don’t know what to think or how to feel or what to believe or what I’m even doing here. It feels like my whole life, my whole identity, has been kicked out from under me and I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to do without You.

And I think that is what bothers me the most… that my whole life has been built on something that can be stripped away. You are – were – my everything. So much so that I don’t know who the real me is. And if I’m wrong about You, then what does that say about who I am?

Words to contemplate:

Room to Grow
My life is like a page on which so much is already written:
hurts and joys and the
tumble of fears and uncertainties.
What You want of me, God, is
that I clean the slate, emptying
it of all this to make room for
the freedom of nothingness,
where alone, You, my God,
have room to grow.
Meister Eckhart, “Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul” (as collected and translated by Jon M. Sweeney & Mark S. Burrows)