I was encouraged to write my story, and felt very strongly this encouragement needed to be followed. My other blog is more blog style. This one will remain the story.
We will call this part “pre-kids.” This is very condensed because by the time I graduated high school I knew the choices I had made were mine. I knew why I had chosen them, poor or not, and no longer felt a need to place blame for the responsibility of my actions on others.
My family, like all families, is not perfect. Once I hit middle school age, I found reasons to not care what people thought, have regard for rules or authority, or really maintain any real aspect of my “Christian faith” outside of still being involved in church and having a great church face. In high school I went back and forth on how I should act, and where I stood in my own beliefs. I wouldn’t call this Christian either, but simply teenage confusion with foolishly justifying and excusing what I thought, felt, believed, did, etc in a manner that logically left no real blame on me. I still went on missions trips, and was very active in church. That statement still makes me cringe at just how fake I was in that aspect of life. I had seen miracles with my own eyes, had no real reason to doubt God or my faith, and yet didn’t really believe most of what I had been raised in or taught.
After high school, my faith life quickly became non-existent. I knew I had beliefs, but going against so much of what I had been taught, I chose to no longer even attempt to fake my way through it all. I know there is a lot of speculation on this part of my life to what I was doing or how I was living, but the simple truth is that most of the speculation or accusations simply were never true. I am not saying I didn’t make my mistakes, just that instead of people asking me things or getting to know me, I usually ended up finding out what my life was “really” about from random people I didn’t truly know at any point in my life. At this point, my main justification for not returning to church was an explanation of most of what was being said about me coming from people in my church. My friends who had never had any real church experience treated me better, and with no real trust in who else had possibly been fake at church or real, I simply didn’t go back.
By the time I learned I was pregnant with Lexi, I simply knew that I didn’t want to be her Mom if I couldn’t set a good example for her. I had a decent understanding of what I believed, but despite not still being 100% convinced church was right, I went back. I made the decision to give up many aspects of my life to ensure that even if I wasn’t in agreement with all that I had been taught, that what I wouldn’t want her possibly seeing from me as a Mom was changed for what I considered to be positive.
I continued in this religion style of church going for quite a while longer before it became a true relationship like we have been called to according to the Bible. I was continually making improvements in not blatantly sinning, but without the relationship, these changes were still very limited. Some I had claimed to change, but hadn’t really as it was based more on my own control rather than for the love of God.
God has a sense of humor though, because despite all of this I really did know he existed. I had evidence of how amazingly real he was many times in my life. I do still find it so crazy when I look back, knowing the reality and yet not caring enough to really invest more than my hour of church to him. I had knowledge of scriptures, biblical promises that had always been true, more reasons than most would need to be convinced of why to have a relationship, but I was still running life my own way with it looking like God’s way in my actions, speech, and more.
The start of changing this came with my marriage falling completely apart.
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