Although depending on your definitions, you might class me as an agnostic
I'm pretty scientifically aware, and I've been on my ongoing quest to find convincing evidence of God for almost a decade
Hi HappyLuke the friendly atheist, I'm Sara the happy Christian (but you can just call me Sara. May I call you Luke?)
I was raised in church. Well, I supposed "churches" would be more accurate but to clarify I don't mean the chicken place.
I took some of my best naps on church pews, made the larger campuses into my playground and I've seen everything from "holy rollers" to money-driven cults. I spent the majority of my childhood wishing the God my mom told me about could be real. I spent so much of my time reading through the Bible, I'd even bring it to school with me and I'd beg pastors and Sunday school teachers to answer my questions but just couldn't find anything that made it into a reality for me. I always believed there could be something or someone great out there but I also felt like even if He were real, He was impossible to know or reach because all of "His people" that I knew created such a miserable example. I felt that He could have been staring me in the face the whole time and I just couldn't break through to reach Him because no one seemed to know how! Even so, I tried to hold out an optimism that if there were a Heaven, I'd hopefully be allowed to go since all of "His people" had done such a fine job of scaring the Hell out of me (sorry, guys. A little afterlife humor for you all to enjoy a bit... or hate completely, whatevs!) I had a few very personal experiences that seemed to give me glimpses to this God and I'd be prepared to believe I'd found Him but I'd carried my faith about Him not being there for so long that even if someone had showed me Scientific facts that supported God's existence, I probably wouldn't have believed it.
The day before my high school graduation, I stood in front of the mirror and realized that life was only going to make even less sense since childhood was officially over. I was scared but it hit me in that moment that my one constant, even as everything my life so frequently changed, was the God I'd been longing to know. It was then that I decided -- after a lifetime of everything I had seen, done and so desperately wished to believe in and know to be real -- maybe the most real part of believing in God was in the fact that even though I never had the black and white "evidence" in front of my face to prove His reality to me, I would always have the reality of the belief. So I prayed hopeful prayer that He would stay with me, even though I didn't know what I was doing or how to know Him. The rest is an even longer story but I can happily say that He never leaves your prayers unanswered.
There is a verse in Hebrews chapter 11 that says "Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." I guess what I'm saying is that maybe faith has to become your reality before the evidence can be seen. Have faith in something not being there and you will begin to believe in the evidence that says it may not be...
I know you didn't ask to know ANY of that -- and how could you? We've just "met" -- but I said it all to say this:
You're in good company, mate! I can't say I know just how you feel, but I think I know where you're coming from!