Gratefully Disillusioned

Why is it that so many people seem to be going through the same thing that I am or have gone through this past year? Something’s happening. I just read a blog where a woman described how her many years’ journey in Christianity had taken her to a place of total nothingness. It reminded me of me.

I’ve attempted to serve God for over 30 years in many different ways and finally came to an end of it all. My serving left me empty, lost, and wanting for God. After trying to fix things for so long, I came to the realization that my abilities weren’t adequate. I had no answer. I finally gave up. Not feeling love from God or for God was the last straw. If feeling the love of God was not possible in this lifetime, then what’s the use. Where was this “abundant life” that the Bible talked about? I went on a search.

Last spring, I found a podcast that described life outside the institutional church as a path in which some people were finding freedom. To me it sounded like an interesting idea. We had been in the process of “looking” for a church for about five months. (We had left the church which we had been a part of for 12 years the previous November.) As we searched we found that each one we visited was not much different from the previous week’s visitation and that left us in a quandary. We could not return to the original church because of “oh, so many reasons” and after that experience we were left wanting for something with substance.

After dissecting the process and analyzing all the what‘s, why‘s, where’s, how’s, and who’s of my “religious” life, I came to a simple conclusion. God is different than what I thought. He is much different than what I had concocted in my mind. My religious tendencies had created a distant god who didn’t really care for me and was just kind of watching to see what happened next. He was separate from me. I wanted to believe different about Him, but up until this time I wasn’t able to put it together. I know now that He wanted a relationship with me on a minute to minute basis. He wanted me to know Him.

I believe that my “religious” life, over the course of many years, had taken my first love for God and mechanized it. As long as I was doing the acceptable things and showing the acceptable attitudes, I was doing what God wanted. My own feelings didn’t really matter. My own discontent with “church” didn’t really matter. I believed that if I put up with it God would honor my “so called” servant attitude. I believed it for a very long time. Religion taught me. It was a form of godliness with no power.

When critical issues hit my life thirty-three months ago, I felt like it was up to me to solve the problems. I was not strong spiritually. I came to believe, whether correct or not, that those around me weren’t strong either. Teaching Sunday School classes, never missing Sunday morning services, making sure my children were involved with children’s church or youth group, all these represented my ideas of what it meant to serve God. My husband was also very involved in the church we attended. He was on the board of directors, in the worship band, a teacher of classes, the "so-called" spiritual leader of our family… and he turned out to be the source of my greatest pain.

As my life collapsed around me, I was broken, devastated, lost. Expectations that I possessed caused me great anxiety when people I thought should be able to help me didn‘t. I became thoroughly disillusioned with God and His Church. Despite all this, God knew what was happening and what I needed from Him. Grateful disillusionment was on it’s way…