“This is not it,” I cried, “Lord, You promised me abundant life, this is not it.” I was lying awake on the floor of my cousin’s room, everyone else in the house was asleep. I couldn’t sleep. I was too analytical and too miserable to sleep. I was struggling. I had thought that I was on the right track in my faith. I had, at least, started out well, so how did I get so far down, so miserable, so tormented? I had spent the day in great fun with my family. Fun… I had forgotten about fun. I wondered if it was alright for me to have fun the way I did. I also wondered why such feelings were so foreign to my faith. Everyone else thought me to be “on fire”, but me – I felt that I was in the dark. If there was any fire, it was the tormenting fire of anxiety.
The next morning I excused myself from the fun for a while because my anxiety had just become to great. I went and I lie on the couch in the adjoining room. Again I prayed, “This is not where You are, God,” pointing to my head, “You’re not in here, You’re there,” pointing to the kitchen where my family was gathered laughing, eating, and enjoying one another’s company. As I looked on the cheerful scene in the next room, my suspicions from the night before increased greatly. Namely, the suspicion that the faith I knew was not “The Faith” at all, that something was terribly amiss and that I was missing out on the abundant life that Jesus had promised those who follow Him. My rationale was simple, if Jesus promised abundant life, but I couldn’t even enjoy quality time with my family because of my anxiety over whether it was “the right thing to do”, then I clearly wasn’t following Jesus the way He intended. But I didn’t know how to escape it. My thought patterns were so set, I had been so certain that I was in the right. I didn’t know where to go. So I prayed once more, “God, You’re going to have to lead me out of this. I can’t do it. I don’t know the way. You have to be the one to do it.”
That was the first step into a journey that would transform my life and my faith. This journey has led me from the darkness of cold, hard religion into the magnificent light of the freedom and joy of the Kingdom of God. It was an important first step, for in that moment I realized that the “God” I was following was only in my head and was only my own small-minded understanding of who God is and what the faith is supposed to be. In that moment, I realized that following God should result in community and joy. With my current understanding of the faith I was cut off from both, but the severing, I learned, was not God’s doing, but man’s.
*In the following entries I will reveal the issues that had led me astray and the answers I have found concerning them. Stay tuned!
The Journey 
I greatly look forward to this series.