Faith & Prayer - My Abbreviated Story

First, an explanation...

A few weeks ago I was asked by another blogger, someone I had come to consider a friend, if I’d be willing to do a guest post on the subject of “faith and prayer”.  My initial reaction was “you don’t know me very well…I’m the last person who should be talking about faith and prayer.”  But the request just kept gnawing at me.  And this encouraging inaudible voice kept saying, “my child, your story is one I’m proud to have told.”

I then wrote and submitted the post below to the blogger for publication on her blog.

Because the story below is one that was particularly challenging for me to share and because I feel that by sharing it publicly I've opened myself up more than I normally would, I've chosen to publish it here.

So, here’s my nearly-unedited story about faith and prayer…

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Faith & Prayer

      A decade ago you wouldn’t have found me proclaiming myself a Christian or believer in God at all.  In fact, I spent plenty of time talking about how GOD has been used to fund more wars than I can list and justified more deaths than can be counted. To believe in God or be Christian, for the most part, was to be a hypocrite.  In my mind, anyway.

      But that girl, woman, child that I was…in reality,  was a scared, hurt, longing creature.  I ached for someone to love me as much as some proclaimed God loved his children.  But I was fatherless, abused and uneducated in the way of God’s love.  And I thought I knew it all.  I was certain I knew better than the  fools who waited for God to provide for them.  And I was sad and lonely and empty and shameful.

      You see, ages ago, when I was just a little tiny defenseless child my life turned…and when it turned, it turned in ways that I had NO control over.  Ways that etched away at the trust and honesty and hopefulness that every small child comes into the world with.  And somewhere along the way, without anyone really talking to me about who God IS, I came to the conclusion that a good and just God would never allow all that had happened in my life to happen to an innocent child; and therefore, God couldn’t possibly exist.

      And then I convinced myself that people who believed in God were fools.  Mislead, pitiful fools, hoping for someone to save them.  But I “KNEW” that “God” wasn’t going to just show up and save them; after all…he’d never saved me – not from one single atrocity that had happened in my life.  And if this “God” was everywhere and knew everything, WHY didn’t he show up and save me from any of that stuff?

      For a long time I wavered between believing God didn’t exist and that God existed but that I was just damned.  I didn’t know WHY I was damned, really; but I could have written you a list of things that I know today aren’t my fault but that I would have listed as “my fault” and reasons why I was damned.  In short, I hated myself and believed I deserved eternal damnation.

      And then, somewhere along the line, there was this whisper in my life that told me to go and check out this amazing church my friend was always talking about.

      And in this church I met people who admittedly had done way worse than anything I had ever done, but who were loved by God and believed in God and had HOPE and FAITH!  "Real People, in a Real World, serving a REAL GOD!"

      And for the first time the accepting love and forgiveness of God was illustrated for me in ways that I could relate to.  And my life started to change.  I started to feel like I had never really been alone when before I had felt abandoned and forsaken.  I started to feel loved.  I felt guided!  And I felt SAFE following the path that was laid out before me!

      And I felt God’s love.  And recognized that it had always been there…in the darkest moments of my life I had always been loved and cared after.  When I lost my earthly father, the man that I knew would have looked out for me and kept me safe; my heavenly Father stepped up and took over the sentry position.  SO MUCH WORSE COULD HAVE HAPPENED in my life!  I recognize that and thank the Lord that he kept me as safe as he did.  I am thankful that I can still feel love despite all that has happened.

      And I feel THANKFUL that I now KNOW, to the core of my being, that there’s nothing that can keep me away from God if I choose to be in his presence!  Thankful that I KNOW that I am HIS child and I have VALUE!

      There’s a LOT more I could write and fill in the gaps in this story…but having written it in a sitting with NO editing other than correcting spelling and punctuation, I’m certain that this is the story of Faith that I am supposed to share with you for now…I pray it touches your heart in some way.