If you have not already read it, I encourage you to read
Part 1 of this story first.
To pick up where I left off, it was 2006, I was turning 21, and believed I was going to Hell. Because I didn’t want to stop going to bars, getting drunk, and sleeping with my boyfriend, I dropped out of the leadership team at Bridgeway: The Church on Campus. I recognized that I couldn’t have it both ways. I didn’t want to be a negative representation of our church, which I deeply cared about. But I was having fun, or at least what I thought was fun. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I ever enjoyed doing those things.
I kept going to church. I kept praying. I kept attending Bible studies. And it was torture. I was plagued with guilt and sorrow for my sins. I was taking a few creative writing classes that year, and I constantly wrote about my double-life. I wrote about Jesus coming back to accept his bride, watching me stumble down the aisle to meet him, looking at me with sadness in his eyes, and telling me I am not his child. I wrote about the double life of my hands—praying in one moment, and groping in another. My mouth—praying to God, singing praise songs, then taking shots, making out… It was really hard to keep up. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I didn’t want my church friends to know what else I was doing. My boyfriend and other friends couldn’t understand. To them, the church was just trying to ruin my fun, to make me a boring Christian. There was no doubt that I wanted to be more devoted, but a large part of me feared that what I would be giving up was too high a cost.
I remember one church service in particular. I don’t remember what the sermon was about or what songs we sang, but I remember the pastor called any who needed prayer to come to the front, and for others to come up and lay hands on them to join them in prayer. I went up, along with several others. We ended up in a large web of people, all with hands on each other’s shoulders, all praying together and for each other. I could feel my roommate Christine and her fiancé Brice’s hands on my back. I was sobbing and praying about my confusion and guilt. I walked away knowing that I had to break up with my boyfriend. This seemed impossible to me, but I felt like it was the first step in the right direction.
I wish I could say that I obeyed God right then and there, broke up with my boyfriend, and it was all downhill from there. Not the case. It took me several weeks to work up the nerve to break up with my boyfriend, who I loved very much (even though we didn’t have a healthy relationship). After we broke up, I immediately started to regret it. I was lonely and sad. I stopped thinking about God and could only think about the boyfriend I had lost. I tried to get him back, but he agreed we should take a break. This should have been a great opportunity for me to work on my relationship with God, without the distraction of a boyfriend. But he had become more of a distraction than ever before. I was so depressed and alone.
As this was going on, our church was going under. The attendance had dropped significantly after our pastor moved. We spent nearly a full year with a different guest pastor every week. People eventually got tired of the inconsistency and moved on. Eventually the church shut down all together. I had never been to a church like that one before. It was contemporary with a band, young people, and lots of fellowship. I was convinced that I would never find another church like it. And with the decline of that church, went also my excitement for God.
Eventually, after more months of partying, dating other guys, and making more stupid mistakes, I ended up back together with my old boyfriend. We decided that we were going to make it work for real this time. We each came up with conditions that the other would need to follow for it to work. Mine was that he would have to find a church with me. I made no rules about sex. I guess my hope was that after he started going to church, he would want to stop.
I have to give him credit; he did everything I asked of him. He was genuinely trying. He tried out several churches with me, none that either of us liked very much.
Amidst all of this searching for a church and a renewed relationship with God, I met Scott Curley. I don’t want to go too much into that story b/c I hope to write it in more detail later. But as things progressed, I ended up breaking up with the boyfriend and getting together with Scott. He was Catholic and occasionally went to the Catholic Church in our area. He didn’t love it though. It is not a very exciting church. Early on we determined that I did not want to be Catholic. He did not want to be Protestant. There I was again, a boyfriend standing between me and God. But I liked him so much. It was new and exciting, and he was completely unlike my previous boyfriend. So, as I seem to do, I threw myself into it, and just stopped trying to figure out the church thing. I stopped trying to figure out the God thing, too. I guess on some level I still believed I would go to Hell because while I wasn’t partying as much or being as crazy, I was still having sex. But I tried not to think about it. It was easy not to think about it because I wasn’t going to church. I wasn’t praying. I wasn’t reading The Bible. There was nothing there to remind me that what I was doing was wrong. Nothing except for that lingering feeling in my heart. But for the moment, I pushed it aside and tried not to care.
Okay, still not the happy ending you were hoping for! It’s taking me longer to write than I thought. The NEXT one should be the happy one!
