Three years ago I let go of my faith in God.
I say I let go, though I now wonder if faith is something we can even hold on to - or if it’s something that fills us. Something gifted, filling us, that maybe we are capable of draining? Drained by holes the world and man punches in our vessels.
Punches that illusively feel a lot like love. A lot like peace. A lot like prosperity. Or a lot like pain. A lot like poverty. A lot like pestilence.
I’m thinking it’s perhaps the latter.
Because God saw the holes be punched in me. My faith leak,
leak,
leak,
until Jesus was just as fictional as Santa Claus.
Until Christians were all silly little people disadvantaging themselves of the world's gains and consumptions in the name of ignorant self righteousness.
Then a year ago, I began writing.
I started 2023 with the intent to write every day. Though suffering from the worst hangover my young body I now know is never meant to experience, I failed that 1st of January in starting that discipline.
Then January 2nd came, and with it came words.
With it came the movement of the unrecognized Holy Spirit shifting the trash piled high, miles high, on top of my once proclaimed faith.
In these words I began to really process my life up to that point. The life I was currently living and convincing myself was good.
I was evaluating everything consumed and everything spit out.
My faith, annoyingly yet soul-longingly, being one of these things.
For I was being drawn to believers, and it frustrated me to my core.
So in inquiry, and partly out of frustration,
I began going to church. Determined to validate my disbelief. To validate that I needed not to admire these proclaimed Jesus lovers. Daring this proclaimed Jesus to prove my disbelief wrong.
I followed these believers to church.
Harvest House, for those of you Boonies who still follow me, where most often I would go alone, sitting in the back, pen and page in hand, searching for truth as to who or whatever God really was. What being a “Christian” really was all about.
Where had I gone wrong?
These people appear to live such similar lives to myself, yet I am empty! Every night! I live, like, literally the same outwardly full life as most of these people, yet I am exhausted in searching for life.
Is there something here I missed?
Is there something about this Gospel of Jesus Christ I missed? How could that be so? I grew up in the church. I was the Jesus freak in high school. I doodled bible verses on my school notes!
If anyone should believe in this, it should be ME!
But it wasn’t.
For I had missed the true Gospel of Christ.
Fed by dispirited religious gospels in pursuit of prosperity after death.
Yet now I’m at this crazy thing called Passion.
Standing in the stadium hallway because my sensitive little ears are telling me to take a hearing breather,
and I needed to write this.
Because I’m at this crazy thing called Passion, a place honestly a year ago would have been one of my worst and comical nightmares.
And honestly? Until reassured so kindly by the Holy Spirit He was with me, being here has made me feel like a major fish out of water. It’s all so new. All so loud. Is it real? Is the Holy Spirit that met me on the wings of a dove rolling in waves of power throughout this stadium of 55,000 young adults?
The answer: undeniably. undeniably. yes. yes.
God is moving.
I’m not a fish out of water either, I realize.
I’m a fish in this rushing water of revival and resurrected life.
And wow. Wow is all I really know to say.”
Written by Meg Powell
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