An Honest Question

By OatmealPanda ~

Hi, in the interests of honesty, I need to tell you I'm not an ex-Christian; I'm... ? I think the phrase is 'searching for the truth' and I'll go with that. At present, I count myself a Christian, and my question is this: when reading through testimonies (extimonies?) on this site, I've noticed that they seem to be missing claims of the author having felt Christ in their heart, there never seems to be any mention of a feeling of personal sins being washed away, etc, that I would normally expect to hear in church/from new Christians; that being the case, I'm curious if any of you did, genuinely, *feel* something that you perceived as the love of Christ, or if you were going to church out of, I don't know, a sense of duty or similar. I think a few other Christians have tried to pose this question before, but they always seem to say things like 'I don't think you were really Christians to begin with' which, to me, sounds offensive and judgmental. I'm not saying that at all, truly. I'm just curious whether your former faith contained an emotional, 'I really believe this, deep down in my heart' aspect, or whether you always had doubts? Obviously we're taught in church not to listen to our doubts; I'm not denying that, hehe; my question is, I guess, was there ever a point at which you truly *believed* you had a relationship, not just with your church/minister/Christian relatives/etc, but with God? I think that's the question that Christians on this site keep trying to ask, but for whatever reason, turn into a judgmental statement rather than a question.

I hope you can tell that this is a sincere question, prompted by a desire to understand, and also, to hopefully share some knowledge (namely, the knowledge of WHY Christians who come to the site keep saying you guys weren't really Christians--I think that from their perspective, they're not hearing a description of a *loss* of belief, so much as a *lack* of belief from the start).

Have I made any sense to anyone?