Catch me loudly declaring that God loves and delights in everyone for who they are while simultaneously never believing that is true about myself. (THREAD)

It’s been such an interesting journey with this on my shoulders. No matter what Christian tradition I’ve gone to, I’ve been followed by such an intense feeling of never quite meeting God’s expectations, feeling like I am hated by the Divine.

I remember despising worship music from a young age, and how uncomfortable I felt when people would quote scripture at me to try to make me believe I was loved. It didn’t really go through my head when there was also the narrative that we are all deeply evil and bad as a species.

Over the years, it has gotten harder and harder to “simply believe” when Christianity has so many apparent problems. For a belief system that prides itself on being “about love,” there are certainly a great amount of people who are ostracized and oppressed by it.

My heart always goes out to the people who say they don’t believe in God anymore. I know how brave they are for saying that. It would be so hard to admit that, knowing you will be attacked by so many people you were close to once, called a fake Christian and other nasty things.

Even now, I’m debating tweeting this thread because I am nervous about anyone who may:

A) want to condemn me as “not a real believer.”

B) quote scripture to try to convince or comfort me when the book they are quoting from is the very thing I struggle with.

I’ve been trying to rediscover the Bible on my own and engage with it creatively and spiritually, but that can be EXTREMELY difficult when you are told how to read it and what convictions you must get from it.

It’s hard to have faith when that faith is supposed to look like the shared faith of an institution that so many of your friends and family belong to. I cannot count the times I have been shamed for trying to engage with my faith in the way that is truest to myself and to God.

I have begun such a long, tedious, and painful process of finding my faith. Where I am at now is entirely different than where I was a few years or even a few months ago.

Perhaps this is just a public declaration to say I cannot be told how to engage with my faith nor my relationship to God. It has to be personal, or else it is not true.

That’s all.