Lost, but kinda sorta found-ish

When I felt that God had abandoned me, it felt like I had lost a parent. This is, I believe, impossible to understand if you have not, at some point, been deeply, deeply spiritual.

I did not truly begin to want to live for a being that transcended everything tangible around me until the summer before my senior year of high school. In retrospect, I did not realize that the people I felt had truly abandoned me were the people I expected to stand up for me and never leave me. And, God—well, God would never leave me and he would always protect me, which is what my heart ached for and still aches for.

And let me tell you, that hope, that divine and eternal reassurance is unlike anything else. And the loss of it—well, that is unlike anything else as well.

Let me paint the picture for you. The picture that is painted—not engraved—on my heart. I see love as something perfect, transcendent and eternal. And I am unable to see it in any other way. From a young age up until today, I have felt abandoned by many of the people who have loved me the most and who I have loved the most. The people I never thought would leave, left. And their exits from my life were not only the typical ways such as a break up, or a dramatic sharing of a secret or a friend deciding they no longer wanted to be my friend. They were subtle, gradual abandonments—psychological, mental and emotional abandonments.

And, one by one, they crushed me.

“God I don’t know why I’m praying because you don’t exist.” No one talks about this heartbreak. The Christian leaders in my life made me feel guilty and the non-Christians in my life looked at it as a sort of victory for me (or maybe a victory for themselves).

God is not afraid of questions. God can handle my disbelief. And so I let go of trying to force faith and just waited.

I am still waiting because faith cannot be forced. And because, quite frankly, life is painful and makes it hard to have faith in many of the good things—even the ones we ‘know’ to be true.