Hello AuntieAnt, your reaching out to me with the warm welcome, kind words, compassion, and sharing of verses and that very beautiful song are greatly touching to me. Being that you were the first person to respond to my post here gives me a very positive impression of this community and reassures me I made a good decision seeking this out. Just a short overview of my background: I was raised in a Christian home, attended a non-denominational Christian church all through my childhood up until about the age of 16, when I decided I wanted to "break away" from my family's tradition and began attending Catholic services with the intention of being confirmed and baptized as a Catholic. This had less to do with an earnest spiritual journey and more to do with a rebellious need to attach a different identity to my beliefs than that of my family's. But I don't regret a moment I spent in the Catholic Church. Indeed there are many aspects of it that I greatly admire and enjoy being around. But I didn't ultimately complete this process of initiation and about the time I turned 18 I just stopped going to church altogether. College years were devoted to adopting a "liberal" attitude and being an open-minded explorer of all different beliefs, including a lot of immersion in the Eastern Philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism along with the writings of thinkers antithetical to Christianity like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or the Post-Modernists... I had lost any sense of solid belief in anything. I was wandering and exploring and unable to gain any sense of certainty. But I must point out that there was a very critical event that took place right after I turned 18, when I was nearly killed while traveling alone in Europe, being held at knife point in someone's car going on the freeway headed who knows where. It was by far the most terrifying moment of my life and it was then that I cried out to God and somehow miraculously escaped when the car came to an abrupt halt and then I jumped out and ran for dear life. A dear life that was spared by the power of God. It has always mystified me. I have never been able to make sense of why I should be allowed to live when so many others perish for doing less than I did by foolishly getting into that situation. But I have had to live with that and it changed my life forever. Because of that I have never been able to relinquish a belief in God. I don't think I have really been an atheist for a single day of my life. Yet years have passed, almost 16 years since that incident and because of what my life has turned into, I'm losing that sense of God... I cannot ever fully reject Him... but I still have a struggle in fully embracing Christian faith, even though I strongly identify it and seek a real relationship with Christ. I have suffered a lot because of my loneliness, severe depression, and sense of failure as well as a belief that I am unable to get what my heart wants from life, namely: love. I'm 33 years old and my life is in shambles. I spent 2.5 years teaching in Russia, followed by 4 years of teaching the public school system in California. All those years were very difficult, spent mostly in solitude, alienated from others, whether in the enormous foreign city of Moscow or the small town where I lived from 2014 till last year without a single adult friend. I was plagued by constant negativity and stress, my loneliness exacerbated all of this. My sense of God was totally destabilized. I began looking at everything in the starkest terms, adopting a sort of deistic/agnostic view of God, like He was somewhere out there, some transcendent force that for the most part was absolutely indifferent to the suffering of humans. I resented God for all my loneliness. Watching friends of mine (most of whom were non-believers) find the kind of love and companionship I wanted and then basically abandoning me. My own little world was shrinking progressively, consumed by my own mental prison, and I came to conceive of the universe as a place operating in a spirit of "anarchy," where in spite of the laws of nature and physics, all life forms essentially had no purpose and no personal deity to seek help from. A world where my life was simply an accident which never should've happened. I've had a problem throughout my adulthood with self-medicating and substance abuse. Over those three extremely lonely years teaching in that small town it all got worse. I was drinking 1-2 bottles of wine every night, smoking a pack of cigarettes every day, smoking lots of marijuana (this was in the marijuana growing capital of North America, the Emerald Triangle of Nor. California) and I was crumbling, barely hanging on in a state of endless turmoil. So alone. So isolated. On more than one occasion I came close to committing suicide. Some of this was quite frightening. The last attempt was very close. I was in the darkest state of mind I've ever sunken into. This was nearly 2 years ago. Last year I reached the point where I knew I needed to get out of that situation and that my life needed a new direction. I couldn't cope with living in such isolation any longer and moreover I simply couldn't handle the public school teaching profession. It was destroying my quality of life and driving me to the edge. So for the past year I have been stuck in the aftermath. I moved back to my parents and I have still been extremely isolated. Holed up inside this house every day, trying to figure out a new game plan. Applying for jobs in a sort of aimless fashion, with no clear objective of where my life is headed. It kills me to feel like nearly every day is wasted and that my life at age 33, close to 34, is so far removed from where I want it to be. I fear I will never be able to thrive and that any possible light at the end of the dark tunnel is too far out of reach to perceive. Life feels sterile and empty. I tell God I surrender. Take my life completely into your hands. I do not want to be the driver of this vehicle. I need God. I need Christ. I have no idea where to go from here. I keep praying and seeking... I need God more than ever. I need my life to be saved... I'm ready to do whatever it takes, ready to devote myself 100% to God... But then again there's so much inside me getting in the way. So much pain, anguish, anger, and just negativity that festers. I want faith but I guess I am struggling to have it. Anyways, that's my story. Thanks again for reaching out to me. God bless you.
