I had gone to church all my life. I had learned all the lessons and heard all of the sermons. All of it. And I was a true believer in it.
Life wasn’t great. I never had very many friends. I was picked on at school and felt like an outsider while I was at church. My family life was hard as well. I was the quiet kid who no one seemed to care for. I saw happiness and friendships all around me. I heard of the wonderful things that God had been doing in the lives of others and the blessings he bestowed upon them, and yet here I was. God placed me in a miserable life and didn’t seem to want to bless me. God seemed to ignore me or at least prefer everyone else instead of me.
This bred in me, a hatred of God. I hated God.
Yet I was powerless before the Almighty God. So for the next 13 years, I both ignored God, or sometimes I did the only thing I could to acknowledge God. I would target his heart. I would say with full honesty exactly how I felt. All of my hatreds laid bare. But more than God, I hated myself. I hated my life. I hated everything around me in this pointless, harsh, cold and horrible existence.
The bulwark of my own cynicism was great, only masked by a false smile and occasional bouts of fun and happiness. But despite my ramblings, God never left me. Never stopped loving me. This was made clear a few years after the day I first realized just how strongly I wanted my life to end. I didn’t know it that day, but God came to me in my turmoil and gave me a moment of peace and joy and the realization that I could no longer live as I was. Because at the end of my path was death at my own hands.
A few years later, God called me back to the church. He led me back actually, though I resisted for quite a little while. Despite everything I never stopped believing in God. I just didn’t love God, and despite it all, God loved me, never left me and seemed to be cheering me on. I stumbled and fell more than I care to admit. I still do, but God is always there to pick me back up. And nowadays I feel closer to God than ever before, especially before it all began. And now God is working through me, revealing the small tasks that I can do right now, helping in church wherever I can, bringing more people into my life than I am frankly used to. It’s all a strange feeling, but I’m starting to feel at peace more and more every day. I slip up and have a bad day every now and then. I revert to my old self and mindsets a couple of times per day, but there is still more peace there and it’s growing.
