New Age to Christian, Part 3

Did I find God or did God find me?

This is part 3 of a 3-part series. Here is: part 1, part 2

Peter Paul Rubens, The Return of the Farm Workers from the Fields, 1640

In the middle of last summer I picked up the Bible.

What was the final impetus, you ask? What could have gotten me to read it, to go pull it out of hiding?

I am a little embarrassed to tell you, but I will anyway:

I did a rare thing and watched the series about the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders on Netflix.

It was rare because I don’t tend to like watching things, especially when there are many episodes. I don’t remember why this one — I think my husband had mentioned it, and I suddenly felt very much like binging it that day.

If you’ve watched it, you already know. If not, there was one girl in particular, named Reece.

She was young, great at dancing… and extremely devoted to Jesus.

She prayed on camera, she told the camera men that her talent was all Jesus shining through her, and she was engaged to her equally young and Christian boyfriend.

“Do you think she really believes it?” I asked my husband. “Is she just completely brainwashed? Or is there something to it?”

“I think she really believes it,” he said.

In my own life things were coming to a breaking point. Or maybe they had been there for a while. Through working with a trainer I had gotten to the point of at least being able to walk again, but in May my knee went back to how it had been — overnight. Just getting out of bed in the morning took all of my energy; I couldn’t do basic tasks like wash the dishes. Told for the fifth time that I had severe autoimmune disease, I was finally convinced to take medication from the skinny gigantor woman with freezing hands in the white coat, and I perched at the top of the slide leading to more and more intense medication in the coming months.

I did not feel much faith in anything.

In the Spring I had taken two full months off of screens, following this call I felt to detach from the outside world entirely. I didn’t even use my phone; no one could text or call me. I felt like there was something I needed to be quiet to hear, but I didn’t know what it was.

I don’t know in what order things happened. My husband brought home a copy of The Artist’s Way, and I began writing morning pages every morning. Some of my first pages said “I want to believe in God, but I don’t know how.” I started to find joy again, considered the things I might love to try. My husband was gifted the Nike memoir, Shoe Dog, and through reading it I remembered: just because things seem to be going wrong does not mean I’m doing life wrong. I went for a hike one day and suddenly my belief changed from “there is no one who can help me” to “maybe, just maybe there is someone who can help me.” I watched Reece dance on-screen again and say, it’s all up to Jesus and this is just him shining through me.

In the middle of all of this, I opened up the Bible.

“Fine,” I thought. “I will just see what it says.”

I didn’t know where to begin, so I decided to start with the Psalms and Proverbs.

It felt wrong in some way to read silently, so I read one of each out loud.

My study bible had Orthodox morning prayers in the back, so I read some of those too.

I didn’t know what I thought about all the words, exactly — but I felt calm.

I just felt this unquestionable sense of peace wash over me, and this sense that this was right.

It was that simple. The feeling was enough for me to continue. This turned into my daily routine for months.

I would wake up before sunrise, get in my car and drive to the park near the ocean, and watch the sun come up with my bare feet on the earth while I read the Bible out loud.

I let myself not know what I thought. I wondered about many things. I felt myself cringe a bit at the word “mercy” (how dare anyone suggest that I needed it?!), and then I thought, I wonder what exactly Jesus means by mercy? (mercy has since become one of the most beautiful words in the English language to me). I read Proverbs and I thought — surprise — these seem very reasonable and like a very good guide to life.

Notably missing from the Bible was shame.

Shame, something I thought had to be underlying the need for mercy, a concept I thought was taught in every church, was not there. In fact, God seemed to be very loving and forgiving. Forgiveness was then a concept I turned over in my mind for months.

At some point it occurred to me that there must be books written about Christianity. I asked a friend for recommendations and she gave me about fifteen. I searched around and realized — feeling somewhat silly, for my naiveté — that I was diving into a tradition that has been wrestled with, analyzed, and studied for thousands of years. There was quite literally an endless amount of material to explore.

I bought books about Orthodox priests and Catholic priests and Christian mystics. I bought books about the morality of God and Christian femininity and sex in the Bible and creating a God-filled home and the history of Christianity. I found podcasts with Christians and articles and quotes that I adored.

It felt sort of like I was suddenly shouting to God “hey! Did you know Christianity exists?? That it has such beautiful and good values and is actually really mystical and deep and spiritual??” and God was like .. yes obviously, this has been here your entire life. And not only that, you were actually baptized into it!

Some of the books I read, some I saved for later, but above all I read a little bit of the Bible every day. When I ran out of Proverbs I changed to the book of John, figuring that over time I could read through the entire Bible.

Everything in my life started to fall into place. When I think of last summer I see this image of all the various parts of my life, scattered and swirling around me, partially hidden, chaotic and disordered — and then I see the light dawning when I picked up the Bible and all of it falling into order, alignment. It felt like I was led from person to person that I hadn’t known existed — plop plop, they just appeared in my life. The next thing I needed to know to heal was right there in the book I read, or email I received. I got off the medication, walked back down the ladder of the slide.

Imagine the difference between banging around a bunch of random keys on a piano and switching to playing a classical song — that was my life.

It wasn’t that everything became suddenly magically and completely better (at all!), but it just started to feel — finally — like things were flowing again. I became certain that I was on the right path. I saw the way forward. I felt supported, even loved.

Could I accept full love and forgiveness from God? I was kind of mad at God, still.

Could I trust Him even through what was happening?

I didn’t find it easy to let His love in all the way (I still don’t, honestly), but I found myself able to let it in a little bit more.

Somewhere along the way, I found that all of a sudden I believed in God.

Like most things, when I stopped trying was when it happened. I had thought I could only read the Bible if I decided to believe in God first. But I never decided. I read the Bible and I prayed and I lived and I thought, I will just do this because it feels good, and I don’t need to force anything more than that.

I know what it felt like, as my old self, to read sentences like “God opened my eyes.” (it felt kind of weird, confusing, and annoying).

But I found my beliefs changing and that was the only real explanation. Certain things that had once felt good — porn, dark music, dirty talk, certain words or imagery — suddenly I lost all taste for. It wasn’t that I logically decided they were wrong, or that I felt ashamed or that I wasn’t allowed to like them anymore — it was like a veil over my eyes had been lifted and they were just.. wrong. Things that didn’t match the pure goodness I felt from God were no longer interesting to me.

And no one was more confused by this than me.

I just felt differently about things and I didn’t know how it had happened. For example, for the past decade I mostly worshipped nature. I mentioned in Part 1 of this series how I told Christians that I felt God the same way they did, I just called it Nature. The moon, the birds, the trees — I made offerings to these things, asked them for what I wanted.

Like wiping a dirty windshield it quickly became obvious to me — God created nature.

I saw my past self as a silly little human, stumbling around and lost and praying to the objects and beings around her to keep from praying to God. How I used to say “Spirit” or “the Universe,” how those words suddenly felt empty and even disrespectful on my tongue. It seemed so obvious and yet it had not come from me. God created nature. I still loved nature just as much — but in an even freer way, a gratitude for God for creating it for me, for all of us! The moon was still beautiful, I still said “hi moon” in awe, but instead of the moon being some dark mysterious hollow thing, she was created by God.

I am a baby Christian.

I am a returning-to-my-roots Christian.

I am not here to tell you how to be a Christian or to tell you what is correct and incorrect about Christianity. I feel like in so many ways I still barely know anything about Christianity.

I do not yet even go to church every Sunday. If there was an Orthodox church near me, I might — but for now I live on a tiny little island where the only non-woke church is Catholic, and we went there a few times but didn’t love it (the priest, etc). We did attend the Greek Orthodox church on Christmas on a neighboring island which was the best. We hope to find a church community when we move this year.

I stopped reading the Bible every single day (not on purpose, but because we were selling all our things and it got packed away and and and….), but I do pray most days and I think about God in basically every moment of every day. I am still reading through all my books about God.

I say all this to say: I am not trying to portray myself by writing these pieces as someone who is now an authority on Christianity.

I’m just a person.

Who… somehow… believes deeply.

My life path has fallen into place. Whoosh whoosh whoosh — the pieces coming into alignment.

God is leading me. I am healing. I can run — literally, I went from barely being able to walk to being able to run. (!)

I will be exploring some of my questions around Christianity on this Substack (among other various topics). Morality, mercy, forgiveness, sex, marriage, women in the church, cults — these are all things I want to write about more.

I have a podcast where those conversations are/will be happening as well — both stories of discovering Christianity, and challenging aspects of Christianity.

So I wanted to give you a primer, a sort of explanation for those who have been following my work for a long time and want to know — what happened?

God revealed Himself to me.

I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

I don’t know all the stories of the Bible, but I know that I feel God deeply in every moment of every day.

When I have been creating lately — whether podcasts or writing — it feels like underneath every perspective is this question I have come back to again and again: but what are we living for?

We can live for our ideas of ourselves, for adventure, self-growth, pleasure, love, power, money… or any other reason we can imagine.

I feel that living for God is the truest way to live.