Transparency in my testimony

The last few years I’ve felt as though I’ve been clinging to my faith for dear life. I thought I was alone in this struggle. You see, I was under the impression that Christians either had a rock-solid faith and didn’t question the existence of God and His love for us or they turned their backs on him and chose to follow a different path.
My husband tried reassuring me that people do struggle with their faith, but I wondered why I had never known any that admitted it.
I wonder why there isn’t more transparency in the church. It’s like people think if they admit to failings than the world is going to reject Christ.
News flash…they already ARE rejecting Christ and it has nothing to do with any false sense of control nor a smooth, varnished image of absolute confidence in the message of the gospel.
They are rejecting Him because Satan is alive and prowling the earth like a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8). People have hardened their hearts to Christ and the message of the gospel. They have become caught up in our humanistic, self-indulgent culture and the word sacrifice may as well be struck from their vocabulary. They don’t understand it and they certainly don’t demonstrate it.
We take too much responsibility on. It’s not our job to sanitize the gospel and put forth a clean, shiny mask every day. We can’t always pretend life is peachy keen and if we just smile and have faith all will be well.
Sometimes people- yes, even Christians!- struggle. We struggle with sin. We struggle with life. We struggle with our faith.
There is a whole contingent walking around that have been wounded by those in the church and have left. There are pockets of people, raised in Christ, that have turned their backs on Him and been seduced by other religions or philosophies.
I think there is also a number of people that have simply struggled with their faith and, finding nobody willing to talk about it, take it seriously or relate to, have simply slipped from the fellowship and battle their dark questions in isolation until they finally decide to throw their hands up in frustration and consign the matter to some musty, unused corner of their soul.
I’ve not done that. I’ve never really cared if everyone around me believes one thing and I find myself disagreeing. I’ve never cared much if my questions come across as rebellious, faithless or fickle. I don’t care because I only care that I find truth and I please the Lord. He isn’t intimidated by my doubts. He isn’t impressed by my personality.
I know many godly men and women that love God and have never doubted Him. They never doubted His goodness, His message or His existence. I’m not one of those people. Wish I were, but I’m not built that way.
So many people live their lives believing one thing because they are afraid to question. They are afraid to test their faith. They are content to just let it be. I’m not one of those people either. If my faith can’t take some questions it isn’t much of a faith, is it? I’ve never been able to let anything be and I’m afraid my “why’s?” didn’t stop when I left childhood.
So, for nearly a decade my doubts have grown, my questions gone unanswered and my faith has taken a beating but…
He IS faithful. I believe I have finally made my way through this season. I believe He has honored my tenacious clinging. Every day when I awoke I had to make a concerted effort to retain even a modicum of faith in the Jesus of my childhood. Faith became a conscious decision for me. A choice. Not an absolute or a given, but something I worked at very, VERY hard.
Now, though, I feel like I’m waking up. You know that fuzzy, dreamy sleep you are in right before the alarm goes off and you kick the blankets off the bed? That’s how my life has felt for so long. Everything seemed just out of focus.
But there has been a paradigm shift in my life. It started gradually but then, almost overnight, everything cleared. I was asleep, I was waking up then I was awake.
I have some ideas about why I went through what I went through and I will be sharing them but for now I want you to know that I will always be transparent about my faith regardless of how messy, ugly and non-conforming it may look. I think the world is jaded by one too many Christians refusing to admit humanity. We aren’t perfect, not by a long shot, but we do have access to one who is and I hope by sharing my very real and very human testimony that I can lead people to His feet.