Hitting Walls with God

I am just now beginning to come out of this wall I’ve hit in my faith.

Months ago, I found myself swiftly becoming not just apathetic towards God, but completely and utterly resistant and rebellious.

All of my 17 years of pent-up rage towards Him that I had reframed from expressing started to unfold - instantaneously.

It started from a moment as fatuous as a girl from my school flipping out on me over eating one of her Nerd gummies. It continued as I stopped talking to people about how I was doing. It intensified even more when my therapist announced that she was ending our sessions. It continued to worsen as I allowed the enemy to feed me lies about myself and my life.

There are so many ways to describe the Christian walk of faith.

“Easy” is not one of them.

I’ve always been aware that there are highs and lows, hills and valleys in the journey of faith.

Yet for some reason, I hadn’t expected to get to the low point I found myself in.

I began reverting back to my old ways. I fed into my fleshy hatred towards God, and I allowed myself to start molding back into the image of the world.

I stopped wanting God. I stopped chasing after Him. I continually told Him that I didn’t want anything to do with Him anymore. I told Him - or more accurately, passive aggressively showed Him - how mad I was at Him.

I still have a lot of anger that I hold towards Him that I know I need to allow Him to heal. But recently, I’ve started seeing how God has been gently pulling me back towards Him.

With the place in my faith that I was in, I didn’t know how to get back to where I was - I had never experienced being in this dark of a season in my relationship with God.

However, even in the darkest moments, I knew that I didn’t want to go back to exactly how things were between Him and I.

Like with all of my other relationships, the one I have with God has a thick layer of walls that I still hold up.

I never felt like my relationship with God was 100% raw and authentic. I wanted it to be, but I didn’t know how to change it - and for some reason, whenever I thought about concepts like “surrendering my emotions” and “lamenting my grief and anger” to God, a strong surge of resistance would always immediately accompany them.

Eventually, I gave into the resistance, and I stopped trying to fight it. I wasn’t sure why I kept feeling it, but all I knew was that it was strong enough to keep me from moving any further in my faith. It started convincing me that my faith wasn’t worth keeping.

A while ago, I spoke at a small ministry event for Good Friday. Once I wrote out my message, I sent it to a few of my mentors so they could double-check that it was biblically accurate and coherent. They all sent back really encouraging and uplifting messages - however, the one that stuck out to me was the one that my Amped leader sent me. She had so many beautiful words for me, yet the ones that I couldn’t get out of my head were these: “you so accurately depicted God’s love for me”.

I’ve known for a while that writing is a gift that God’s blessed me with. This is one example of how I know - because the fact that someone thought that I was able to articulate God’s love in such a clear way through my message was from a power that was outside of myself… because when she said those words to me, I realized that I didn’t feel like I was speaking from experience.

By the sole power of God, someone was able to understand a piece of God’s love through my words - but I felt like I had yet to experience it myself. As this realization set in, it only deepened the anger that I was holding towards God. Yes, I’ve had moments of taking deep comfort in His presence, and I’ve seen an overwhelming amount of evidence of His goodness, just in my own life - yet somehow, I still didn’t feel like I had an understanding of what His love for me truly felt like. Though I had many words that I would use to describe my relationship with God, “good” was never one of them.

A few months later, I was talking to a close friend of mine about some of the hard circumstances she was going through. Somehow, we ended up talking a little bit about God, and at some point as she was telling me about her perspective of Him, she asked a rhetorical question:

“Why does God hate me?”

I’d heard the question asked before. But it had never hit me like the way it did at that moment.

I realized that I felt the exact same way. Though I’ve learned so much more about the Bible, theology, and the character of God over the years, I was still struggling with the same question. Though I never admitted it to myself, it was always in the back of my mind. Eventually, I stopped asking the question and started turning it into a statement: “God hates me”.

This statement that I started to believe about God and about myself only pushed me in my resistance towards Him. I got to a point of being so lost in my faith, though I was still blind as to why. I found myself resenting the church, becoming more angry, and dreading going to the club I had started at my school, simply because I knew I would be having to lead a group of girls in a discussion about God and His supposed “goodness”. The thought of talking about Him disgusted me- it felt so fake and disingenuous. I didn’t want to pray in front of them, especially since I knew how much I had refused to talk to God for weeks by myself. This club that was usually one of the highlights of my week began feeling like an annoyance and a sort of “curse” that God was using just to taunt me.

Whenever I’ve thought about the ways of coming back to God after a while of drifting, I’ve always thought about things like prayer, solitude, and reading the Bible - the more commonly practiced spiritual disciplines, simply put.

However, recently I was hit with the idea that instead of just trying to do things to motivate myself into seeking God again, maybe I should try a different approach. I felt God nudging me to seek out connection to Him in a different way than I was used to - by serving other people.

I won’t get into the specifics of what serving others looked like for me - the details are irrelevant, and are not a requirement to explain in order to show God’s goodness that I am currently writing about.

However, throughout the service project, I began feeling His peace again. Not only was it present, but I started feeling it more frequently than I had ever experienced. I’ve always thought that having a deep feeling of God’s peace was something that you only experience every once in a while - now, I’m questioning that belief.

God started bringing me to places of isolation - literally (I tested positive for Covid and had to quarantine in a dorm room for 5 days that was 8 hours away from home - long story for another time). He started changing my circumstances in ways that began pushing me more to surrender things that I had been so fearful of losing for a long time. He started putting me in situations where I was hit all over with the conviction that depending on Him isn’t simply a preference, but a need. He started reminding me of my passions and the things that spark joy in my soul - one of those things being worship services. He started bringing back to memory past displays of His faithfulness in my life - in circumstances that paralleled the ones I was currently struggling with. I had fallen out of the discipline of doing nightly Bible study, but I started picking it back up again. Though I’m not as “deep” into it as I used to be, I’m appreciative of the new reset. I started praying again - short ones at first, and then slowly stepping into more vulnerable ones.

My relationship with God is starting to come alive again. It looks a lot different than how it used to be. It’s not as rehearsed and predictable. It’s not as regimented and “by the rules”. It feels a little odd and confusing. I’m just now beginning to see how He is slowly stripping back all of the performance anxieties I had, and starting to push me into a more vulnerable place just between me and Him. I still have so many walls up, and I know it’ll probably take a long time for Him to bring them all down. However, I am beginning to think that this is just the start of a new journey towards truly finding and understanding this love He has for me.