Recovering

I'm in this class about images of God, how they're formed, how different they are even for people with really similar upbringings, and so on. Part of the class is to examine our own images of God, and to do that, we write journals every week around some really open question. I have spent several hours on every journal, and cried a lot, and it's making me remember parts of me and my life that I had forgotten about, kind of recover them for myself, remember how they felt as they happened. I've been noticing that every time I "tell my story," the pieces fit together differently, and I notice new patterns. The more I talk about my life with God really honestly, without trying to sound spiritual for the Christians or detached and sarcastic for my fellow dissenters, the less I trivialize it and the more I miss it, I feel more validated and less stupid, and I see more clearly the ways I was let down, but also the ways I was moved. This particular journal entry made me feel that way. The task was to "describe your most spiritual experience." Here's what I wrote:

I have had so many extreme spiritual experiences, I don’t know how to choose a “most.” I have compiled a playlist of the Christian songs I was most emotionally involved with in high school and college, hoping it will jog my memory. In some ways, I think I feel most present to God through music. So many of the moments flashing through my mind right now have to do with music. I remember the first time I visited the high school service at the big-time Baptist church in my neighborhood, and heard the harmonies fill the room. I remember thinking “these people must be really serious Christians,” because of the way they sang. They sang like they meant it. I also remember thinking, “Here is God.” I remember the countless Bible studies in high school that ended with hours of singing in the dark, as a friend and I strummed our guitars, the harmonies sailing into the night. College too. I remember leading worship in the dark in PFC (a Christian club in college) and seeing the room lift their hands and dance and close their eyes and shout, I remember feeling so lost in the spirit of God, timelessly, like I could keep playing and singing forever. I remember feeling so overcome that I could die while listening to Lee University’s Campus Choir sing a gospel tune. I remember sitting on my bed crying in college while I listened to the new Caedmon’s Call album, crying because I felt like my eyes had been opened. I remember driving home from a study session one night, listening to a hymn, and feeling as though God was reaching right inside of me and holding my heart. Years after my faith faded, some of these songs could still pull me right back in. It shakes me now to think about. When I think about the moments that I knew God was right beside me, when I could almost literally feel his presence, there was always music. Was it the music or was it God?

Maybe the only time I really felt God with all my senses when there wasn’t music was my last year of college, at a training retreat for PFC’s small group ministry. All of us leaders were gathered in a sanctuary one night, praying for the upcoming year, when suddenly, the ministry’s founder told us “This is a battle. We have to fight.” She said more, but I’ve forgotten it. Whatever it was launched us into more intense prayer, and this is a Pentecostal school, so we are all praying aloud, many praying in tongues. You know, I have no idea what happened that night. I remember almost none of the specifics. Here is what I do remember: a rushing wind. Not literally, but it might as well have been, for the way I remember it. I could feel time moving from regular, ordinary operations to something extraordinary, the seconds heavy with reality, dissolving into each other. Something was happening, you know? We weren’t generating this. I felt so alert.

Someone decided we needed flags, because this was a battle. And since this was a Pentecostal church we were in, they had these enormous flags by the altar, and two people picked them up and started waving them around our circle and over our heads. The prayers intensified. They were battle prayers, mean, fierce words directed at the devil, or whoever it was that wanted to hurt us. Yes, I remember, there was some sense of danger, of someone trying to stand against us in the heavenlies, like we were about to embark on the most important mission the world had ever seen, and something threatened to derail us. I usually only mumbled during those symphonies of prayer, I didn’t want anyone to hear what I was saying, plus, I would get distracted by all the other prayers, but this night, I was shouting. Shouting. I felt God settle over us in a whirling cloud, I felt dislodged from myself, emptied, out of control, filled with God. I saw the same in all of my friends. At some point, the battle turned to victory, and we shouted louder, prayers of thanksgiving and proclamation and joy. We knew that we were protected, that we needed only to call on God and he would stand for us. We celebrated because we knew we would be God’s instruments, and because we knew God was triumphant. The flags waved all the more furiously. Afterwards, we ate pizza in the lobby and talked like nothing had happened.

This was a commissioning for me. All year, I looked back on it as evidence that God was with me, and that I was capable of leading this group. I think I also took it as evidence that the year would be extraordinary, that as life-changing as the small group had been the year before, it would be even more so under my leadership. Everything was possible. We prayed for one girl’s healing that night, and she woke up the next morning feeling perfect. a sign. I was finally going to succeed as a spiritual leader, I would put myself out there and pray and work and God would do it, he would change lives. I was really stepping up, and God was going to use me. It was exhilarating.

My year of small group was a bust. I could barely get anyone to come, and I’m pretty sure the people that did come only came to be nice, not because their lives were being changed. The ministry didn’t last another year. That spring, I stopped believing in God.