the table

I feel like there are two types of Christians: those that were raised that way from birth, and those who, in the grip of tragedy or shame, found themselves saved by the grace of God. Well…to my middle school mind’s discouragement, I was the first kind. I wanted to have a dramatic story of loss and triumph but instead was stuck with the fact that I accepted Jesus when I was five and never really knew that there were other options available. Ugh, what a huge buzzkill that I was raised in a loving home, you know what I mean?

Nevertheless, my childhood was full of Sunday school lessons, memorizing psalms, and those “NestLearning” Animated Bible Stories (which were high class, by the way, and I’ll fight anyone who says differently). As I grew up, the Bible was my resource: for any situation I found myself in, I knew it had an answer key to tell me what to do, and if I closed my eyes and flipped to a random page, God would send me to the exact verse I needed in that moment. At least most of the time. It was kind of awkward when I was trying to find a verse about a serious life question regarding 6th-grade social struggles and flipped to verses like Deuteronomy 1:24:

“They left and went up into the hill country, and came to the Valley of Eshkol and explored it.”

…..

Ya, I struggled to find the relevance too. But you better BELIEVE I kept flipping until I found something even remotely relevant and rested in the fact that God probably needed a couple warm-up rounds. It was like every “infallible” word held enough weight to guide me through my life unscathed by the world around me…if I could just figure out how to mold it to my circumstances.

I knew in the grand scheme of things, I was raised the right way. I had just gotten extremely lucky. My parents figured it out before I was born, and I could trust that I would one day go to heaven because of it. Because that was the goal, right? But however convinced I was, I was always frustrated that I could never hear God the way other people could. I could fake like I had the answers all day long, but my reality remained: I would beg Him to say something, and be left in deafening silence each and every time.

In college, things got a little more cloudy, as they usually do. But unlike many people, I went to an insanely conservative Christian university (which I loved, by the way, go Golden Eagles), and instead of being more convinced of my faith, I could not have been more confused. After my freshman year, I was met with a LOT of questions…my brothers, being extremely intellectual people, had gone through there own version of spiritual puberty in college. And my family loved to argue about the validity of all things biblical and scientific. It was the parents versus the brothers, and I was the awkward in-between.

I realized I didn’t want to believe in a god that would forgive any sin in the world except having too thick of a skull to be convinced of a book written thousands of years ago. I wasn’t super interested in serving a god who demanded attention because of his own insecurity, and even less concerned that that god would sentence me to eternal torment because of it. If that was the case, I didn’t really want to be stuck with him anyway. For all I knew, the world was too complicated a place to have all the answers, and once I let my mind wander outside our atmosphere and under our feet, I realized that whatever answers we think we have are shots in the dark at best.

For a year, I was freely wandering around in limbo…I had no answers, and no way to find them. Because every time I reached out to whatever god was out there, I was vastly underwhelmed by the response (or lack thereof). And frankly, I had no more energy to keep trying. The only thing I knew for certain, was that we could never know for certain. My intellectual sailboat, caught up in the winds of American Christianity, had officially shipwrecked. And let me tell you—it causes quite a bit of an identity crisis when a girl named Faith finds out she has none.

But it’s chill you guys. Because this is not a sad story. This is a story about how I’m so glad I don’t believe in the god I used to believe in. It’s a story about the God who was revealing Himself the whole time. And over the last few years, He’s had to weed out a lot of deadly ideas to get to the good stuff. (It’s also a thank-you letter to my brothers. Thank you for challenging me to think it through. I would still be stuck without you).

So that’s what this blog is about. I figure as millennials, we all have the right to start a blog and find endless ways to incorporate avocados into our diets.

So that’s exactly what I’m doing! Also because I’m much better at articulating things in writing than in real life words, so if you want to have a conversation about these things, prepare for me to stumble my way through it and give a very confusing version of what I’ll be writing about on these pages.

So…I hope this is for those that may find themselves stuck between two different worlds. In that sweet space between.

Between saints and sinners.

Between rebels and patriots.

Between the head and the heart.

And I hope in the end, we all find ourselves a little more mischievous, and a lot more loved.