A lot of that was influenced by "Nick." When I saw how involved he was in his church in New York this summer, I felt really convicted that I needed to get off the fence and stop waiting for the time to be right for me to return to my old church. I needed to commit to a church and get involved. So I started the membership process at a church that I've been going to off and on for about three years. It's not a perfect church, but I guess no church is.
Only the thing is, lately, I've been wondering if there's even a God at all. I don't know when it all started. I think I've been spiralling into depression since:
a.) my very last single girlfriend has now moved away
b.) after months of living out of boxes, I began renting a new apartment with a radiator that is so loud I can hear it through my earplugs at night, resulting in the fact that I am now suffering from
c.) sleep deprivation
d.) already prone to depression, living alone when the days have gotten so much shorter and darker has taken a serious toll on me
e.) Loneliness.
That last one is the worst. I don't know how it happened. It was so slow and subtle. One day I was living my dream in New York, visiting museums and buying vintage clothes. And the next, I'm curled up in a ball in a bare apartment, wondering, wondering, wondering how I've been passed over.
Back when Allison still lived in this city, we went to a singles forum at church where the speaker told us she KNEW we were sitting at home on Saturday nights and crying our eyes out and that she knows exactly how that feels. Allison and I were horrified. We liked our lives. We didn't cry our eyes out because we were home on Saturday nights! We found something to do!
But now, in the dark, in the cold, in the Loneliness, I know what she was talking about. Now life hurts.
I went to the membership classes at church, and it was hard to get up so early and commit to being there. But a few weeks ago, I read some membership materials that gave me pause for concern. And when I attempted to ask the other new member candidates their thoughts on the reading, the table leader POUNCED on me and told me to stop talking, it was not an appropriate time to discuss such things.
I was dumbfounded. "Class hasn't started yet," I said. "I'm just asking people's opinions."
"We already discussed all that last week when you weren't here, so now is not the appropriate time at all. If you have concerns, feel free to address me later."
"Absolutely not," I said. I would have gotten up and left if I'd been closer to the door. I was floored that anyone in leadership could be so rude.
Afterward, the lady's husband came up to me and apologized profusely for his wife's manner. But after he left, she walked up to me and REEMED me. She accused me of being divisive, of trying to attack other believers, of causing dissention. I started bawling. I already felt completely forsaken by God, in a membership class FULL of couples, at a church where I seemed to be the only unmarried person around. But was this God spiting me for even attempting to join a church?
The following week, I went to a different location of the church. There were many more people my age there. The message was from Mark. The centurion cries, "Lord, I believe, help me with my unbelief!" I left church again bawling my eyes out.
I called Nick. I know I oughtn't have. But Nick was the one who planted all the crazy ideas about a non-literal Bible in my head anyway! And he was the only one who could undo it all!
"Nick," I cried, "If what you said was true and the whole of Genesis really is just a myth to explain the conception of the world, then what else in the Bible isn't true!?"
"It's not that it's not true," Nick said. "It's that there might not have literally been a person named Adam. It was written in a way that the ancient Israelites would have understood. And a lot of that understanding is lost to us."
"Well then, give me some books to read! Because everything has fallen apart in my head in the last few months and I don't even know if God is there anymore!"
Nick's response was: "I hesitate to give you books, kiddo. Even the Bible itself has been elevated for Christians into an idol of sorts. What you need is less books, and more of God Himself."
Well, that may be true. But I am struggling with triple horrors:
1.) that God has forgotten about me altogether
2.) that God remembers me but is disciplining me
3.) that God doesn't exist at all
It's a dark night.
