Yesterday I was digging around looking for an application for certification that I had misplaced. (Because there is nothing that makes more sense than being a housemommywife with credentials that I won’t actually be using.)
I found the application, along with (a quarter, yes.This is a small portion) of my hand-written notes from back in the day.
At the time they were written, I had made the big move from being an apathetic, empty, angry, deity denying, God-loathing person, and had moved somewhere closer to believing that there could be something or someone more.
I wasn’t ever a passive person and being sober didn’t change that. There was no way I was the kind of person who was just going to accept that this Jesus, who I had heard so much about, was real or that the Bible was “truth”, just because other people told me to believe it. I was a thinking person. (Yes. Even people who think can get addicted to drugs. True story.) I was not a person who was going to be pushed into believing something unless I actually believed it.
Although Jesus’ words were already penetrating through and touching some of the darkest, most hidden parts of my person. I didn’t just want to feel it for myself, I wanted to ‘know’.
I needed to know.
I was filled with hope and wonder, and doubt, fear, and uneasiness. But instead of running away, I chose to find out more. So, I followed where my ego led, and together we stepped out in ‘faith’ and fact checked God. I spent a fair amount of my free time analyzing, over-thinking, over-analyzing, intellectualizing and learning.
And as I Googled the absolute shit out of every single version of Christianity and other world religions, and as I studied and read and wrote and compared and contrasted core beliefs, missions, and their histories, something incredible happened.
God used my doubt and reluctance.
He waited as I sifted through all that I felt like I needed to, and he patiently and gently answered all of my questions. He took it all and he gave it back to me shiny and new and bigger than anything I could have dreamed of. I felt in awe when I heard and read more of His words, and they did feel so so sweet and refreshing to my soul-like no other advice or motivational prompting I had ever endured encountered.
This is where I realized that on my quest, I had somehow actually developed faith in God, through the words and life of Jesus. I came out of the other side with pages full of notes, facts, practices, and miscellaneous information; with belief, hope, and a faith to call my own.
I don’t believe for one second that God is against education or thinking people or people who have questions or doubts. Not at all.
He knew that I needed to come to my own conclusions, so that I could see for myself that there is a difference between knowing and feeling; between probing, comparing, contrasting, and memorizing facts, and experiencing your own, personal, true faith through Jesus’ words.
So. After I reminisced and took some time to laugh at the older, younger, version of myself, I let my toddler stomp all over my notes. He played & crumbled them up before he proudly carried them to the trash can like a big boy.
Like with several other components that I have picked up along my recovery journey, these notes served their purpose an it was finally time to let them go for good.