Finding God in the Waves

I’ve been deconstructing my Christian faith for the best part of two years. The process has been, at times, lonely, isolating and painful. My once sure and certain faith has slowly chipped away as I’ve walked down the road of doubt and deconstruction. It started as I began questioning little things, such as the teaching I’d been handed about LGBTQ relationships and sex. As I pulled at those threads, I suddenly found more were coming loose, and soon I was spiralling down the path of deconstruction as the answers that once made sense suddenly weren’t cutting it anymore. For a long time, I kept this to myself, feeling as if I was on my own, the only one in the church who was struggling with doubt and unbelief. I thought that if I tried harder, prayed more and kept reading my Bible, things would get better. But they didn’t.

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Believing Again – A Testimony of Unbelief

When I was eighteen, I was preparing to get baptised, and part of the service included me sharing my testimony. The testimony of how I became a Christian, how God had changed my life, and why I was choosing to get baptised. The purpose of this was partly evangelistic, to share what had transformed my life in the hope it might lead to a similar transformation in somebody else. It was also really helpful for me as a self-reflection, to enable me to work out for myself exactly why I was making this decision, and to give me a written record to look back at in the future. I’ve blogged a lot recently about the ways my faith has changed and deconstructed. But I still get a lot of people asking me what happened. What caused my deconstruction, and the changes in my faith and beliefs? This post is an attempt to answer that question, a ‘Testimony of Unbelief’ if you like.

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Liminal

As I mentioned briefly in my previous post, last month I attended a festival in Belfast hosted by author and speaker Peter Rollins, entitled ‘Wake’. I didn’t know much about the event when I signed up, my friend had mentioned it to me saying she wished she could attend and on a whim I decided to sign up. The festival explored radical theology and was designed to mimic a wake, for us to mourn the death of God.

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Life After the Death of God

Whenever I had struggles in life, my faith was something I could cling to. When things got tough, praying about them made it easier. If I needed guidance, I could look to the Bible. When I asked God to help me make an important decision, I’d feel like I was being told what I needed to do. My faith was a comfort in times of need, a hope amongst the hopelessness, a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. No matter how shit life got, God was with me.

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Exceeding Expectations

I’ve always been impulsive. I’m the kind of person who lives in the moment and follows my gut. That’s just the way I’m wired. I hate the idea of making plans in advance because, inevitably, plans fall through, and after getting myself really excited I will be left feeling disappointed and let down. Lately, I’ve started to find myself planning into my future more and more. When I look on Facebook and see SO MANY of my friends getting engaged, their dream job, or jetting off halfway around the world, part of me feels like I’m missing out. I feel I need to be working towards something more, that by now I should have more to show for my life. So I start making checklists in my head of things that I need in order to be content with life. An ever growing list of expectations; a solid relationship, a house, a stable job, a car, a driver’s license, the list goes on and on. My eyes are set on the perfect life, and in my head this is only possible once my expectations are met, once I’ve got through the endless list of things I need to do.

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Don’t Doubt

The story of ‘Doubting Thomas’ is often used to portray doubt as something that is wrong. We’re told that it is something we must fight against, Thomas is portrayed as somebody of weak faith and if we doubt, we need to strengthen our faith so we don’t become like him. Because nobody wants to be a doubting Thomas.

Well nobody except me.

You see, right now I can see a lot of myself in Thomas. I’ve been doubting a lot over the last couple of years, and it’s been a real struggle. But I’ve slowly come to realise that doubt and scepticism aren’t things I should avoid or run away from, but are in fact totally normal and should be embraced.

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Struggling to Sing

A huge part of church life, at least at the church I attend, involves singing. Every service or meeting we have involves some form of “worship”. Singing songs, usually with an acoustic guitar, about or to God. I used to love this, worship used to be my favourite thing to do. The songs filled my iPod, I played the drums in the band most weeks, and when I wasn’t I was in the front row of church with my hands raised high. Worship was a way I connected with God in a really intimate way, I loved it.

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Jesus the Atheist

For a few months now, I’ve been having huge doubts in my faith. If you’ve followed my blog at all during that time you’ll know all about it, I’ve been pretty open. Growing up in the Christian Faith, I’ve seen and encountered God in undeniable ways. I’ve felt the presence of God being with me, I’ve seen and experienced healing and miracles as a result of prayer, and I’ve seen people’s lives transformed when they’ve encountered God. However I’ve also experienced times when it has seemed like God is absent, times when my prayers have not been answered. These last few months I’ve experienced the latter. My faith has crumbled piece by piece and the God I once knew feels more absent than ever.

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Standing in the Ruins

I’ve never really felt like I fit into a box. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been different. The odd one out. The person that didn’t quite fit in. This has been a huge insecurity of mine for years, as a coping mechanism I often purposely push myself out of the box in one aspect of my life. Something that I can control, in order to feel like it’s my choice rather than just who I am. In school I was really involved in music, and was quite outspoken about my Christian Faith, in college I had a multicoloured mohawk, and more recently I’ve grown an outrageous beard. The theory is that if I define myself by these external things, it distracts from the interior insecurity that I don’t fit in.

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Just A Book?

I got my first Bible pretty much at birth, it was a big story book with lots of pictures of people wearing leaves, animals hanging out on arks and white men with beards. Years later I got my first “proper” Bible, one where nothing was missed out and there were a lot less pictures. However I didn’t really start reading the Bible properly until I was in my teens. Up until then it was a story book, it didn’t have a huge impact on my life and I don’t know whether I believed it held much significance to me. It was just a book.

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