Tonight I’ve been listening to Elephants, the gorgeous, soul-stirring album from Aaron Strumpel. This is a Psalms-style “worship album” complete with groaning, despair, joy, and desperation. This is the way worship is supposed to be, I think, yet you probably won’t find these songs on too many PowerPoint presentations come Sunday morning. My current favorite is one called “This Can’t Last”:

Chains hold my hands
I almost think they’re friends
But my heart still can feel

Time marches in
Pretending to make me old
But my heart still can feel

Worries rule my mind
I almost think they’re right
But my heart still can feel

Tremors rack my bones
I think I might be broken
But my heart still can feel

This can’t last
World goes round
Sun will rise
In your arms I’ll be found

This describes my current spiritual state better than I could. I am still swimming in a sea of questions and I feel as if all of my passion has run dry, but there is a part of me that is confident in grace and in the God who offers it to me. Even though I have become quite cynical and calloused, my heart too can feel.

I waited patiently for the Lord to help me,
and he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the pit of despair,
out of the mud and the mire.
He set my feet on solid ground
and steadied me as I walked along.
He has given me a new song to sing,
a hymn of praise to our God.

Psalm 40:1-3

“This business of having to feel a particular way or to feel a sense of absolute confidence in God or to pretend to know that God is there all the time is one of the things I’ve actually been saved—and am being saved—from. I’m not called to pretend at belief ever. I’m only called to try, with God’s help, to be faithful; to try to love, and to try to tell the truth. I often feel a strong sense of confidence that the one who began this redeeming work in me will bring it to completion.”

This is yet another quote from David Dark, and it’s one that comforted and encouraged me tonight when I reread it. Dark addresses the idea of pretending and fallacy, while pointing out that we who profess faith were never meant to hide our questions. Saying that I believe in something means nothing unless my words are backed up by acts of faith, whether that is through service, showing more grace to others, or simply trusting in God to guide my story. For so long, I feel as if I’ve been saying that I believe, but my belief has been so fragile and unlived, at times even non-existent.

One of the primary reasons I have been struggling so much with my Christianity is because I hate what Christianity has become. When Christians are portrayed in the media, they often appear as caricatures. Christians are widely known to be judgmental, bigoted, prideful people who are focused solely on obedience and not so much on love. In many ways, the Church has become a hideout for clean, sober, well-dressed Republicans who have their acts together and hold their Bibles up as their proudest possession. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these types of people, but the Church should be the place where the outcasts of society feel most welcome, a place where the modern-day tax collectors can gather, knowing they’ll be accepted and welcomed into a community of people seeking the same truth.

But I can’t point my finger at the Church and not point it at myself. Before I accuse the Church as a whole of its failures, I must also address mine. I know that I don’t reach out to people often enough. I am very quiet and intimidated by people I don’t know very well. I tend to spend my time with people who are in the same social class that I am, people who also have faith. Though I hate it when Christians judge those outside the Church who do not fit into their moral code, I am just as guilty as these judgmental Pharisees when I judge them for their own faults. I often wonder if the bigots I know are the ones with the most doubts. Maybe they doubt their worth so they condemn others to feel better about their own sins. Maybe they doubt that they were truly forgiven.

Because of the state the Church is in, because of the view so many have of Christianity, I have to assume that many people are sitting in places of worship Sunday mornings with heads and hearts full of doubts or disbelief. If every person professing faith in Christ truly meant it, I think things would be different; things would be better, as Jesus intended. Perhaps many in the Church struggle with a silent and unspoken atheism, a disbelief they have either chosen to ignore altogether or just chosen to ignore on Sundays so they can continue to look the part of the saint. Or maybe some, like me, have been afraid to admit their disbelief, afraid of losing their religion and the God they have spent their whole lives seeking.

What I want now is to become more honest with God, my Church, and my friends. I want to become more transparent, yet I know that it’s going to be hard. It’s going to take trust and reliance on other people, two things I struggle with enough on their own. But I am learning that I must address my questions. I can’t fake my way through and hope that no one notices that even though I’m carrying my Bible and singing the words from the PowerPoint, I am slowly dying inside because of my religious act.

This issue with Scripture is yet another thing that I felt guilty about for a long time, an issue that I wanted to push aside and not really think about for fear of actually admitting it. It feels like such a self-centered, sacrilegious thing to say to admit that the Bible offends me, but that is the truth right now.

There’s a quote from David Dark, a Christian thinker and writer I have a lot of respect for, that speaks to this issue in a way that connected deeply with me. He says this in his latest book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything:

“If the words of Jesus of Nazareth…strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, then receiving the words of Jesus is probably not what we’re doing. We may quote a verse, put it in a PowerPoint presentation, or even intone it loudly with an emotional, choked-up quiver, but if it doesn’t scandalize or bother us, challenging our already-made-up minds, we aren’t really receiving it.”

I love this idea because it seems as if people avoid being offended and avoid trying to offend other people. I do this daily. But to be offended is to feel something, even if that something is upsetting or causes us to go places we’d rather stay away from. When I read a passage from the Bible that offends me somehow or causes me to pause, at least I am engaging with the text somehow. At least I am not just reading the words to read them, to say that I’ve done my daily “quiet time.”

I am realizing, slowly but surely, that reading the Bible is worthless unless I take the time to think about what I’m reading, to chew on it and wrestle with it. I think struggling with issues of faith is essential to making it authentic. Authentic faith is what I want more than anything. I don’t want to pretend anymore. I don’t want to hide my questions and silence myself when I feel lost or confused. I’ve played the role of the good Christian girl for too long and now I just want to be myself, even if the picture isn’t as pretty.

“The mystery of God’s love as I understand it is that God loves the man who was being mean to his dog just as much as he loves babies; God loves Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons, as much as he loves Desmond Tutu. And he loved her just as much while she was releasing the handbrake of her car that sent her boys into the river as he did when she first nursed them. So of course he loves old ordinary me, even or especially at my most scared and petty and mean and obsessive. Loves me, chooses me.”

–Anne Lamott

This quote has inspired me so much lately. This is the God I desire to know better, a God that loves the ordinary, sick, and depraved simply because he chooses to.

The older I got, the more I felt the need to accept responsibility for my faith. I knew that my faith had to be exactly that: mine. I had to study the Bible on my own time. I had to spend time in prayer, bringing those in need before God. I had to give my money and my time, I had to witness to a lost and depraved world. I felt the weight of this responsibility on my shoulders and I also felt great shame when it seemed as if I had failed in carrying out my duties.

As a youth in middle school, I reached my peak as far as being the model Christian goes. I wore Christian t-shirts. I listened to 90% Christian music. I wore a What Would Jesus Do bracelet. I also had a matching Bible cover, asking the same question. I had Christian posters on my walls and Christian stickers on my bulletin board, my personal favorite being a glittering Christian fish eating a Darwin fish. I found that sticker to be incredibly clever.

One of my favorite posters showcased a famous quote from St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary, use words.” This is one of the rare artifacts from my youth that I am still challenged by, an idea that I still cling to, now more than ever before.

Words were a particularly difficult subject for me during my time spent “on fire” for Jesus. In my eyes, using a swear word was one of the worst sins that could be committed. Even now, I have only said two swear words my entire life, both times when I was 5 and didn’t know better. I remember going into Best Buy one day and being able to buy a CD. I decided upon Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing album. I got it home and began listening to it and I discovered the worst of all swear words, the F-word, on the very first track. I replayed the song over and over again just to make sure I was hearing it correctly. The guilt I felt at owning that CD was intense. After that, before I bought any “secular” album, I went online and read every lyric beforehand, making sure no inappropriate words appeared. (Imagine my glee when Lifehouse and Creed managed to be both secular and Christian. It was a youth group dream come true.)

The funny thing about this obsession with good, clean music is that it was an obsession I formed on my own. Though I have heard stories about pastors and youth pastors speaking out against the evils of secular music, I never heard such statements myself. I grew up listening to the music my parents liked, stuff like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Motown. They had never told me that I was only allowed to listen to certain things. I believed listening to only Christian music made me holier. In spite of this, I still could not part with my Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, or Mariah Carey albums.

I remember very clearly a time that shows my musical legalism at its finest. A Christian that I knew owned one of Jewel’s CDs and enjoyed it very much, enough to recommend it to others. I knew that this CD contained at least one swear word. I honestly thought to myself, “How can this person be a good Christian and own that CD?” I am not entirely sure where this legalism came from. As I said, it was not handed down to me. It was, in many ways, something I constructed for myself.

I’m not sure when I began to part ways with my legalistic ideals. I don’t remember an exact moment when I realized how ridiculous I was acting. As I made my way through high school, I wanted a more genuine faith. My youth pastor talked all the time about being real and that was what I wanted. Even so, I hid. I went on trips I didn’t want to go on because I felt like I would disappoint God if I didn’t. I went to camps I wasn’t at all enthused about. I was on my youth group’s leadership committee during my sophomore year in high school and felt tremendous guilt for not being more outgoing, for not making my weekly phone calls to those others students to who I had been assigned.

I remember one specific mission trip that I went on. I was just beginning to discover music outside the world of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) and mainstream Top 40 hits. This was one trip where we were not told we could only bring Christian music, so I brought along a CD by Joseph Arthur, Redemption’s Son. As I sprawled out on my air mattress at night in the basement of a church that used to be a bar, I replayed Arthur’s song “You’ve Been Loved” over and over again, because at that point I was struggling a lot with my faith and did not feel loved by God at all. I clung to the words as if they were a direct message from the Almighty:

It’s always hard to admit
Most days you feel like you don’t exist
Temptation sneaks past your fists
Until the devil won’t let you resist
Oblivion is what you want

But you’ve been loved
You’ve been loved
You’ve been loved

That song got me through that week away from home. It gave me strength to try. And now, a few years later, the idea of the song is still what encourages me to reflect back and finally address my questions. I believe that God exists, and I believe that he knows the questions already. If there is a chance that I can indeed be loved by him even as I ask and argue and complain, I will ask and argue and complain until I come to the place of David the Psalmist who knew God was good even when life was not.

As I look back on my recent history, I see a pattern:

1. I grow weary in my faith, I sin, and then I feel guilty.
2. I feel aimless for a while.
3. I “repent” and again seek to know God better through Scripture and prayer.
4. I grow weary, and the cycle repeats.

Lately, I have felt nothing but aimless. I realize that having faith requires just that, that I must simply learn that some questions will never be answered. But now, at this time in my life, my questions are many. I feel stuck because part of me thinks I should not be asking the questions at all. As I’ve pondered the cycle of my spiritual journey, I have started to wonder that perhaps I grow weary because I have been ignoring my questions for too long.

If I truly examine it, I see so much wrong with the modern American Church. Sometimes I feel that if I want to be a Christian, I must shut off my intellect, never question, and live my life the way I think it’s supposed to be lived. I have lived this way for a long time, and it’s not working for me any longer. There have been moments when I have questioned the existence of the God who I have spent most of my life seeking. There have been times when I have questioned His goodness. Deep within my heart, I do believe that God is there. Without Him, I see no purpose for humanity’s existence. I simply cannot accept that our lives were mere accidents, that something as complex and as beautiful as the world we live in simply appeared without a creator.

This is where I am: I believe that God is there. I believe that God is the source of creation, that He is beyond time and gender. I believe that Jesus Christ was who he said he was, both God and man, sent to earth to offer the world redemption. Stripped down to the basics, my faith still fits comfortably under the label of Christianity. But I am at a standstill now. It’s as if I don’t know my next step. I am confused, doubtful, angry, and wounded, wondering how to be a “good” Christian, wondering what that even looks like.

I have a lot of questions. I struggle with a lot of doctrine. I wrestle with the Scriptural idea that homosexuality is an abomination to God. I wrestle with the concept of humanity being completely devoid of goodness or value without God’s presence. I wrestle with the Genesis account of creation, that God created the world and everything in it in six days. When I first admitted these questions to myself, I felt immense guilt. But the questions are here. They are nagging and loud. I can’t just ignore them any longer. I can’t live my life as if I believe something when I really don’t. Though I believe in God and want to find a way to love Him deeper and better than I have ever imagined, I am not quite sure how to get there. And the old clichés don’t satisfy me right now. Really, they never have.

I feel as if I am at a big turning point in my life. I know that I can’t ignore my doubts any longer. I want a faith that is alive and passionate, a faith that is genuine. Right now, I am hanging on by a thread. My hope is that I can strip away all of the religious clutter that I have acquired during the last seventeen years that I remember being in church. My hope is that I can gain a firm foundation and began to build my faith again, brick by brick. I understand that I will not be able to find solid answers to most of my questions, but I need to come to a place where I am able to rest easy in the unknown, a place where I can accept silence. I am not there yet, and I am finally admitting that. Even that small admission feels like freedom. I want this space to serve as a place where I can ask my questions, where I can sort out my thoughts and opinions. I want to have a place in which I can be transparent. I can’t hope to have a good relationship with God when I am lying in my prayers, pretending that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. But I still hope. I hope because I do believe God is present in the world. I do believe in redemption. I believe in second and third and millionth chances. I am sure of little, but I am sure of grace. And that is enough to keep me asking, to keep me walking, to keep me wanting. That is enough for now.