Where the story begins...

This will be an interesting exercise for me, and hopefully a worthwhile 'get to know me' time for others. The reality is that most of my struggles, the place that I need to "start" in identifying the problems, is prior to when most of you knew me. It begins the year after high school, but before college. Let me describe myself during my last two years of high school.

I was an extremely involved student leader in our church youth group, I mean extremely involved. Outside of playing soccer in the fall it was my only extra curricular activity. I was a head over heels Jesus fanatic. I had a t-shirt that said "Jesus is Lord" in big bold letters on the front and "Duh" on the back, and I even wore it to school. I got up early in the morning to have my quiet time, read the Bible and pray. I loved sing worship songs, even learned how to play the guitar junior year so I could play songs on my own during quiet times. I'd say I had a strong emotional connection to God. Singing songs and praying were a chance to be in the presence of God and I felt that. I had no plans to go to college, I was going to be a missionary or something similar. That probably more or less summed me up when I headed off to Colorado for a Discipleship school.

And then everything just stopped. It was like all those feelings and emotions, this 'spiritual connection' was just gone.  I wish I could pinpoint it on something specific, I'll dig in my old journals and see if I wrote anything around then.
But that's where it begins.

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Published:
at 12:57 PM on Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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2 comments:

  1. Unknown October 7, 2009 at 11:32 AM

    So when the feelings and sense of connection stopped, you pushed through and chose to believe anyway. Would it be correct to say that now days you are just having a hard time generating enough willpower to actively believe and practice (spiritual discipline-wise) what you no longer feel or experience?

    If I'm not correct, how would you describe your experience from that point until now? How do you see things differently today then you did when the connection first stopped?

     
  2. author October 8, 2009 at 5:34 AM

    I'm going to have to dig up my old journals and really try and recall some of my thought processes.

    I don't think I really "pushed through" though. I really struggled for a bit.

    The summer after that experience I did two things that I think had a great impact on my decision to continue the course: I read the gospels through and I read Mere Christianity.
    I think I only made it through the first part of Mere Christianity, just the first chapter or so, but it made so much intellectual and philosophical sense that I think that was what kept me from probably seeking elsewhere (different religions, etc).
    And reading the gospels, I realized how much of the teachings I really resonated with, found radical and in line with how I thought humans we're meant to live. So, spiritual connection aside, I found those teachings a good guide for life.

    But, there is probably a lot more mixed in there too.

     

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