It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and I was returning to my favorite place on earth: summer camp. This place had in many ways defined my childhood faith: it was the place where I had experienced almost all of my mountaintops of faith, where I had "grown up," the first place I ever lived beside home.
It was the summer of 2007. I had just experienced a year of intense personal growth at a Christian liberal arts college in northwest Iowa. I had been off on my own away from my family and I had made a bunch of new friends who had in a short period of time redefined how I viewed the potential of a close friendship.
This summer camp had been my "favorite place on earth," prior to college. I loved it there, and had spent two summers at the end of high school counselling there. I was excited to return and expected my third year to be much like the first two - a challenging and joyful time of God working in my heart. It wasn't. It was hard to adjust to being treated like a high school student (most of the staff were in high school). It was hard to adjust to a "Bible camp" mentality rather than a liberal arts college mentality. It was all such an adjustment.
Above all, though, I realized very quickly just how much I had changed in the previous year without even realizing it.
I remember that first week of camp, and how silent God was. I remember struggling to care, struggling to feel. I remember crying out to God to make Himself known to me.
He was silent.
This only continued into my sophomore year of college. I began to wonder where God had gone, and why He was being so silent. I struggled with apathy and with anger, with doubt that God loved me. I questioned the role of emotion in worship - were we being emotional because we're emotional creatures or truly because of the working of the Holy Spirit?
And slowly but surely, my armor began to fall away. In a very bad way. I remember taking a class for my education major at the time in which the professor began raising moral questions in relation to homosexuality. I remember wondering how she could consider herself a Christian and think the things she did. I remember a serious crisis of belief as I wrestled with the seeming disconnect between her evident love for others and God and her political/moral belief system. And before you knew it, I found myself wondering if God even existed at all.
I attended a Christian conference in Kansas City over New Years' 2008. The worship was emotion filled, the preaching passionate, and God seemed to be working. It sure seemed like He was working in my heart. I went home filled with hope for the first time. Maybe God did exist. After all, He seemed pretty obvious in the emotion of the thousands of people who surrounded me in that convention hall in Kansas City.
I wish I could tell you that things were better from that point on. But they weren't. The emotion died out. The next two years were a roller coaster of emotion, belief, and doubt. Through it all, I clung to the religious trappings I had grown up with, not having the courage to break my family's heart.
And eventually, by 2010, I realized that I was standing on the other side of my faith crisis. I realized that I no longer questioned God. God had brought me through an intensely difficult season of life in terms of a relationship gone wrong, and He taught me through that to trust Him to provide.
The moment when I realized that I once again believed with most of my heart was a freeing moment. I've had that moment over and over again the past three years, where I realize the miracle of belief and what it produces in me.
My faith is not always very emotional, maybe because of my history. But my faith is as deep and strong as it is frail. Where I am weak, He is strong.
Above all, I learned one thing. Through it all, God held me. It was Him who sustained my faith. Although I faced the choice daily to walk away or to continue to follow, Jesus never stopped calling me back to Himself. He pursued me relentlessly. My faith is a gift from Him. He is good, my friends.
I have so many questions all the time, so many things I doubt. Through it all, though, I am confident in a God who will not allow me to fall out of His hand.
God is good.
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