To a certain degree my faith story is a fairly common one: I was raised going to church multiple times a week, walked away from my faith during high school and college, and eventually returned as an adult. I stopped identifying as a Christian in my youth largely because of negative life events that I struggled to cope with due to a lack of fully understanding what being a Christian meant. It was all too easy as an adolescent to believe that God wasn’t inherently good and wasn’t there to keep bad things from happening, and therefore wasn’t the kind of God I wanted to follow. Before rediscovering my Christian faith as an adult, a few traumatic life events pushed me to my breaking point; one of the most difficult events was the loss of my father. Ultimately, it took reaching the breaking point to realize I couldn’t get by without God.

I always describe my father as being the greatest example of unconditional love, and most anyone who witnessed our relationship would agree. When I was a child, we were inseparable. I wanted to be just like my dad - for better or worse. Even when my parents divorced before I started high school, he was always there for me. In the voicemail my dad left me exactly one month before he went into the hospital (and soon after passed away), he said, “no matter what goes on in your life, I’ve got your back.” He often told me he had my back and he meant it. It didn’t matter what I did at any point in my life - no matter how foolish or rebellious I was, he was always my greatest supporter. I’ve heard members of the clergy talk about how our relationships with our earthly fathers affect our view of the heavenly Father. For example, if you had a father who was inflexible, legalistic, or abusive, it is going to be hard if not nearly impossible for you to accept the heavenly Father as a father who loves unconditionally and will fight for you. However, in hindsight I have come to recognize my earthly father’s love was so unconditional that it blinded me in a way from realizing it was actually just a reflection of the love shown to me by the Father I had pushed away. To a degree, I feel like I didn’t desire a relationship with God because I felt like I was getting all the love I needed from my dad. While I knew that my father loved me and that a father could be good, in ways it made me feel like I didn’t need the heavenly Father. After all, what could this mysterious, invisible being possibly do for me that my father who was right here couldn’t do?

After my dad passed away in November 2015, I fell into a pretty deep depression. I wasn’t attending church, and hadn’t been for well over a decade. I was going through the ending of a marriage that wasn’t rooted in God. On top of that, the weekend I moved out of my and my then-husband’s home, I went through an assault at the hands of someone I had called a friend for seven years prior. Afterwards, I drove myself to my new home - the house I grew up in, and that my dad had lived in until the November prior - and fell apart. These hard things were made harder by the fact I couldn’t go to my dad for consolation. I couldn’t find safety in the presence of the one person I wanted to cling to more than anyone. As I tried desperately to cope with all the trauma that I had experienced in such a short time, my motto became “it is what it is.” I think this is a common thing for people to say when there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the suffering they are experiencing. I started the therapy process to deal with the trauma, which helped, but it didn’t heal all of my hurt. I had been making steps towards renewing my faith for a couple of years, however it was only at this, my lowest, that I finally realized faith in God was an absolute necessity.

Once I made this decision, I worked hard to find a church where I felt at home. I’m happy to say it didn’t take long for me to find my church home, where I found community and a sense of family. I am now in a place where I recognize that God is active in my life at every moment (and always was, even when I was slamming the door in His face), and I openly talk about my faith to most anyone without feeling insecure. As I have healed, I have discovered a passion for sharing God’s love with everyone who will listen. It is my hope that God will speak through me so that others can hear what I needed to hear growing up which would have empowered me to lean on my faith in crisis rather than abandon it. While I had many difficult events occur in a short period of my life, I feel it was ultimately losing my father and his unconditional love that forced to me recognize that the unconditional love of the Lord was the only thing that could sustain me through the ever-unpredictable ups and downs of life.