Skip to main content

The weight of eternity has been lifted

By Amy --

April 29, 2010. The day I took a deep breath and googled "losing my faith". After many years of deep questions and frustrated doubts, I finally decided to look at it from the other side. I waited for so long, because deep down I knew what would happen. I knew I had been walking the tightrope for too long, and I was very close to falling. I had been for years. So I googled with a strange mix of trepidation, excitement and guilt. My search led me to this blog entry: http://myspeculation.blogspot.com/2006/04/losing-my-faith.html. It was like my thoughts had been put on the screen by magic. It was me! My hidden questions, my secret angst and anger. And in the comments section a visitor logged off with this phrase: "SM- who still feels watched, even while I type this, by the God that I used to know and can’t stop talking to." I cried. I knew it was the beginning of the end, an end that had been forming for a very long time, and an end I had avoided with so much effort. I cried for the loss of innocent faith, for the loss of a friend that is always available, for the false promises that were vanishing as I wept. I cried for the loss of much comfort in my life, and for the breaking of a bond that holds my family together. I cried myself to sleep.

The next morning I woke up, and felt free. I felt like a thousand tonne wall had been lifted from my shoulders. I stared at the ceiling and marveled. My best friend, one of the lovliest people in the world, was not going to hell simply because she had been "born into sin" as all the rest of us had. My uncle was not rotting there now in eternal torment, simply because he was unable to reach out to God, which is impossible for us to do. All the people of earth have not been created for a strange and twisted experiment by a God who is in full control and had full knowledge of the consequences for His creation, even as He "lovingly" created them!

As I drove to work, I suddenly realized the plight of our tiny struggling church wasn't directly caused by my lack of faith. The empty pews weren't because I had not prayed often enough, read the Bible every morning and didn't visit someone every day to offer encouragement. The failure of my highschool Christian Group wasn't because my faith was faulty, despite my sleepless nights in prayer and pleading for a miraculous revival. In fact, I realized that the eternal fate of all who were around me did not depend directly on every action I took, or did not take. What an immense and profound relief.

As I spent my day at work, I would inexplicably smile as I realized that the ill tempered comment I had just made to my colleague was my own unseemly action. Not Satan and his demons buffeting me with unseen arrows. Not my all consuming battle against unseen forces. And most of all, not an action that may damn that poor girl to an eternal hell because I was a "bad witness". And I apologize with a genuine, uncontrived and unhindered apology. An apology for an action that was all mine and did not have eternal ramifications. A sense of true responsibility has started to develop, and it is lovely. Doing good simply for the sake of those around you, with no hidden agenda. What a beautiful concept!

All my questions: Why does God stay hidden when the stakes are so high? Why would he create sentient, feeling beings knowing he is creating most for an eternity of torment? Why do I see Christians around me, and they look no different than non-Christians? Why is my pastor still struggling with depression and control issues when he has completely dedicated his life go God for over 50 years? Where is the victory? We are supposed to be living supernatural lives, why don't I feel supernatural? Why, when I pray with heartfelt tears, for more faith, do I feel further away? These questions melt away as I read this website. All my questions have been asked. All my doubts have been felt by countless others. And there is peace on the other side.

What kept me on the tightrope for so long, the one thought that held me to Christianity for so many years was this: "When I pray, I feel Him. I feel Him there." But, on April 29, 2010, the thought occurred to me (and it was about time)that Muslims feel the same. Buddhists, Hindus, Aboriginal faith all derive an emotional connection from their beliefs. Why would mine be valid if I don't consider theirs valid? If this is all I am clinging to, it is a very flimsy "truth" to be basing my life on. And so, for the first time, I looked at the other side with open eyes.

More questions: Do I tell my kids? Do I tell my parents? My siblings? Thankfully my husband is not concerned with my sudden reversal of faith, the roots of Christianity do not go deeply for him. But my loved ones will, of course, fear for my eternal soul. And that is grief I do not wish to cause. My heart clenches just at the thought of it. These are questions to be answered at a much later date, I think.

I am very young in my de-conversion. I still find myself asking God for wisdom as I face a difficult co-worker. I still find myself reading into some random coincidence God's divine working. My lifetime within the Christian family was overwhelmingly positive. My leap away from faith was not out of injustice or anger at my Christian experience. My falling away was not to justify some big sin I am anxious to do. It just simply did not make sense, and I couldn't ignore that forever, no matter how hard I prayed. There will be loss for me. Yet the loss is far outweighed by the freedom I feel.

I do not know the day I "became a Christian", I was too young. But I don't think I will forget April 29, 2010. The day the weight of eternity was lifted.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

How to come out to your parents as non-religious

By Marlene Winell ~  A fter going through your own deconstruction of religious belief, it can feel like a challenge to reveal your change to your religious parents.   You might have a lot of fear about their reaction – anger, hurt, disappointment in you, and so on.   You might fear being disowned.   This is a common concern because our families mean a lot to us.   It’s natural to want approval from your parents.   When you were young, you depended on them for your life; you absolutely needed their love, care, and approval.   So, even in adulthood, we long for our parents to love us unconditionally.     However, in terms of human development over the life span,  it is necessary for   everyone   to outgrow their parents.   Growing up to maturity involves becoming the authority in your own life and taking on the job of self-care and self-love.   This is true even if you aren’t recovering from religion.   Personal health and well-being, in other words, means that your inner “Adult” is tak

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Disney, the Creator, and Christ

By Carl S ~ I s Dumbo more real than Jesus? The answer depends on who you ask. Doesn't every culture have fantasy-fabricated individuals, often with lives of heroic proportions? Haven't celebrities with their real/imagined lives, been around forever? In the beginning, man created gods and keeps altering them. My oldest brother was an artist. He could paint a portrait of someone you'd know, and change the character of that person with a couple of brush-strokes, or make a sculpture of a figure and change its proportions daily, even hourly. He made figures out of Silly Putty, and watched each one as it changed form. Eventually each melted into a puddle. All gods are like that, because they're only as "real" as a person's imagination continues to create them, at whim. Humans need outlets for frustrations, anger, fear of the future and the unknown. Ergo, in the beginning, man created entertainment, Those seeking explanations for the origins of nature, death,