Well It's A Bit More Than 25 Years, In Fact...

[blau1976]

Keep up the story.  It's too bad about your church being so deceitful about the money.  

[ax345]

Thanks for sharing again...I look forward to more.

[rachel15]

It's really interesting to read your story - look forward to hearing more. 

[25YearsLater]

If you've read this far, thanks, I hope it's been interesting.  I'd spent 7 years a firebrand Christian, but for the last two of those years, I'd been getting increasingly disillusioned by the fakery I saw in my church. And then the final straw came when I uncovered some corruption amongst the leadership.  After challenging the pastor with my evidence, nothing changed, and I and my then-wife left the church - publicly writing a long letter of explanation to many of the church members, and thereby discovering who my friends were. 

 

I was initially intending to find another local church, and although I went to a few meetings, I found nothing that appealed.  So I did what I should have done years before, and threw myself into finishing my PhD and looking for a job.  This involved crazy hours (12-14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week) for the better part of a year, as I clawed my way back from years of neglecting my studies and my research.

 

I did chill out a little on Sunday mornings, however, once I stopped looking for another church.  It didn't escape me that a few hours with coffee and a newspaper (this was before the internet existed!!) was infinitely more relaxing than the same few hours, packed with hyped-up worship and indoctrination.

 

I finished in the lab, moved to London where I'd grown up, and started work.  My time was still fully taken up, working hard at my new job during the day, and spending most evenings and weekends writing up my PhD thesis.

 

There wasn't much time for Christian activities, but of course, if I'd really wanted to, I'd have made time.  But I didn't, and over time, realised that I had no desire to get back on to that particular treadmill.  Then, sometime probably in early '94, I'm not sure when exactly, I found myself thinking that actually, I didn't believe it any more.

 

I'll expand on this a bit, since it's easy to say that I didn't believe it - but actually it was a realisation that took several years to crystallise completely.

 

The Christianity that I'd signed up for back when I was 17, was like the gospels and Acts.  It never made any sense to me that it could be wall-to-wall miracles during Jesus' and Paul's time, but not subsequently.  And of course, I'd gullibly soaked up lots of Christian 'testimony' type books, where it's cover to cover 'God did this, so and so got healed, etc'.  So initially for the first few years, I believed that that's what it would be like for me as I 'matured' as a Christian.

 

But over years, the deafening silence of unanswered prayer became so loud that I couldn't ignore it.

 

On one occasion, some time before I left the lab, I'd been helping a fellow PhD student move apartment.  He fell down the stairs carrying some heavy stuff, and dislocated his shoulder.  In that moment, my faith had never been stronger - of all times, this was the opportunity to pray for a miracle.  I asked him if he'd mind if I prayed for him, and he didn't object - so I prayed for him to be healed in Jesus' name.  For a moment I felt a surge of something that I imagined was faith - and I truly expected him to be healed - a real John 14:12 moment.

 

Nothing happened, of course.  Full of embarrassment and shame, I drove him to the hospital, where they fixed him up, and I think he was grateful for that.  And we never spoke of it again.

 

I was crushed spiritually by that failure.  Over time, I realised that every occasion where a simple reading of the scriptures would lead one to expect a miracle, it simply never happened.  And unlike many in the church, I was always too honest to claim miracles when clearly there had been none.

 

So I faced up to the fact that reality simply did not match expectations.  If the Bible was true, it should be as true now as recorded in the gospels and in Acts.  And it clearly wasn't.

 

Another thing that happened after I moved down to London was that I fulfilled an ambition I'd had since I was a little kid - in '92 I learned to fly.  Nothing had been such a joy and passion in my life, and I still love flying today.  It was satisfying on so many levels - physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.  I totally lived for it - and I couldn't stop myself from talking about it to anyone that would listen.  I was an flying evangelist, and you know what?  I never felt awkward telling people how wonderful the sky is, unlike when I used to tell people about Jesus.  I had done a bit of street evangelism, a bit of 'witnessing', as a Christian, but I could never shake that awkward feeling.

 

Whereas flying truly was a joy to talk about, and so easy to prove as well - you just had to get someone in an aeroplane and they would love it.  Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks - Luke 6:45. Gradually I realised that despite believing so deeply in my early Christian years, despite being filled with the Spirit, despite attending a very charismatic church, I loved flying the way I knew I ought to feel about being a Christian.

 

I could ignore the truth no longer - I had to admit to myself, and to the people around me, that in reality, I no longer believed.

 

On the day I announced that I was no longer a Christian, that I no longer believed in Jesus as the Son of God, I had the most bizarre experience.  What made it bizarre was that it was identical to an experience I'd had on the day I became a Christian.  I had prayed that prayer, and for a few days afterwards I felt as if I was a different person - as if someone other than me was looking at the world through my eyes from the inside.  It was a very strong sensation, and of course at the time I interpreted it as having been born again and as evidence of God's Spirit in me.

 

Yet the day I rejected it all, some fourteen years later, I had the exact same experience.  The feeling of connection to the previous occasion was uncanny, literally spine-tingling, and again, I felt as if it was a different 'me' looking out through the same pair of eyes.  It was accompanied by a feeling of the most delicious release, as if a huge weight had been lifted off me.  But this time, it wasn't Jesus doing it, it was me.

 

I had been sleepwalking through those most formative years of late teens and twenties.  There was a lot of ground to make up, but I was alive again.

 

Again, thanks for reading.  There's a little more to say, just to wrap things up, but I'll leave it for now.

[ax345]

Thanks, 25YearsLater.  One of the best aspects of being an ultra-devaout follower of Jesus can be the sense of freedom when you let go.