By the time I turned nineteen, I didn’t discuss my spiritual life with anyone.  I was fairly certain my family wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t have many friends that I felt comfortable being honest with.  Just a few years ago I was the one leading the prayer groups, I was the one leading the Bible lessons, I was the one answering other people’s questions.  A spiritual crisis seemed like the kind of luxury I couldn’t afford.  The friends who did know that I’d given up on church mostly commiserated.  We were a rag-tag group of kids who had often had our faith questioned because of our appearance, or our choice in music, or the friends outside the church walls we chose to keep.  But I didn’t really even talk to those friends about what I was doing to keep myself going.  Studying Buddhism?  Taoism?  Wicca?  I was the one who may as well have had “Jesus is my boyfriend” tattooed on my forehead for most of my life.

I wasn’t sure that anyone could understand what I was going through.  I didn’t even understand.

I would practice yoga.  Not just the exercises, as was quickly becoming fashionable, but the spiritual lifestyle as well.  Focused thought, strength of center, guiding your bodies internal energies.  It made sense to me.  It seemed to be working.  Day by day I wasn becoming less scattered and panicky, more in control not just of my body but of my emotions as well.  I would meditate on nothingness.  This was an interesting practice, as my brain is hyperactive, and clearing myself of all conscious thought has always been nigh on impossible.  But I would light a candle and focus on the light inside the light.  I would sit, for hours, trying to empty myself.  It was my time alone, my secret.  I really didn’t even talk about it with my husband.

And slowly, over the course of years, I learned to be quiet.  To listen.

In the meantime, I worked on my relationship with God.  I wanted to trust him, I wanted to trust Jesus, I wanted to walk into a church on a Sunday morning and not feel horribly out of place.  Yet the times we did go to church I still felt like a charlatain.  I didn’t like other Christians, and it bothered me.

In the quiet of the morning when there was no one in my world but myself, I would become empty.  I would become the flame within the flame, pure potential.  In this place of silence I would feel something that I had never before felt so keenly:  Love.  Love in its purest and simplest form.  Love that exists for no other reason than itself.  Love, which like God, proudly proclaims “I am that I am.”  End of question.

I became absolutely sure of three things:  God is love, Jesus is the embodiment of that love, and those who live in that love serve God.

Yet I couldn’t seem to conquer the pain that was eating me alive.  I couldn’t find the words to express it, but I felt betrayed.  Broken.  Misused.  I had given God my life out of bitterness and despair, and up until that point my relationship with him had been defined by that.  I felt no joy- I felt hope, but no joy.

(to be continued)