Debunking myself
Title: Debunking myself
Summary: Back when I was Christian, I had my testimony online. Now that I'm atheist, I wanted to point out some things about it.
Ever since I was ten years old, I felt pressure from my church to be out there evangelizing and giving my testimony to everyone I met. My problem: I didn't have a testimony. Despite all my prayers, God had never revealed himself in any great and powerful way. I found myself reading other people's testimonies and piecing together my assurance from their assurance. I found the "canned" phrases that best fit my life. I was never confident speaking out loud, because in face-to-face conversations, a person could ask a question that I didn't have an answer to, and I had no gut instinct. My testimony was there so I could convince myself that I was having a normal Christian experience.
Lo and behold, in my college years, I discovered the internet. Finally, a place where I could write my piece, put it out there for the world to see, and leave it at that. I could field Q&A from the standpoint of being able to walk away, think, research, and come back.
My family was so proud of me for having my testimony on the internet where all the world could see it, but for me, it was the safest place to have it, because I was not personally accountable to anyone that read it. I felt confident that I was doing my Christian duty by having it there.
In 2008, I took my testimony off my website. It had been sitting there stagnant for years, and I was having more trouble believing all those canned assurances in it. I cannot question another person's testimony, but since mine was out there for so long, I wanted to take some time to point out the places where even I didn't believe the words I was saying.
I put this out here, because I see so many atheists that come from Christian backgrounds who post "I honestly tried" and I know a common Christian response is that you didn't honestly try hard enough. If you had honestly sought God, you'd have found him. I want to tell all of you doubters that we do honestly try. My "testimony" is everything I tried and I challenge you to read it and tell me I did not try hard enough or seek honestly enough. So here it is... my testimony:
I grew up in a Christian home, surrounded by loving parents who took me to church every week. I can't say exactly why I liked going. Although I often complained when my older sister did and objected when she did, I still liked being there probably because it was easy to have the right answer.
This is an interesting way to begin a testimony. The first bit is your typical life-long Christian's opening. Then I say something amazing. I liked being there, probably because it was easy to have the right answer. That, in a nutshell, sums up my entire devotion to Christianity. I didn't have to think too hard because it was easy to have the right answer. It was easy to gain acceptance and approval because all I had to do was know the right words to say. Now that I have given up religion, I have to think a lot harder about my entire perspective on the world. It's not fun and easy, but it's also not dismissive of truth.
I can't say exactly how or what brought me to be saved and I can't remember ever not being saved. I don't know that it was my parents or Sunday school or what. But as far back as I can remember, I've known I was saved. I had a passion for worship. Coming from a musical family, it seemed like I was born to sing praises to God. I learned scriptures through song and as I grew up I found that the words to a song can strike powerfully, especially when they are truths from God's word with melody.
This is more a testimony to the power of music than that of God. In my baby book, at the age of two, my mother wrote that I "could learn anything if it were set to music." I have always loved the way I can get completely lost in a song--how I can close my eyes and be someplace else. I feel happy and free. When I was in my twenties, I started to convince myself that I was standing before the throne of God. I created the scenario to convince myself that I was experiencing a relationship with God. Even at the time, I felt I was lying to myself about the God connection.
I'm not lying about the music. I still believe that the words of a song can change a person's mind and heart, give them hope, and carry them through. I have a whole "motivational" playlist, without which I never would have survived grad school, and honestly, there was never a single Christian song on it. They are about 50% Disney songs with messages about believing in yourself, persevering, and dreams coming true.
Despite this growing knowledge of the bible through music, I didn't read the bible much. My parents did not dig into the bible, at least not that I knew, so I never considered it a necessary part to my faith. In high school, when my parents finally forced me into a youth group, I learned that people did these things called "quiet times" (an individual bible study) which I thought was good, but also foreign. It made sense that a "good" Christian would read her bible every day and pray every day. I wanted to be a good Christian, so I decided to do it too.
I can't say whether this was a good or a bad thing, because it put in my mind that there are 'levels' in Christianity and that there are some Christians that are better than others. Also putting me down in this youth group were the abundance of cliques, none of which I was a part of. I felt isolated by from these people who were better Christians than I was.
Can I just say, I hated everything about that youth group. I was not popular enough to have friends, I wasn't part of any cliques. The only person who really cared about me was my small group leader. (Our youth group had 100+ kids, so for about half an hour we were broken into small groups called D-teams. D stands for delta, delta means change, change happens in small groups.) Having all the right answers in a group like this does nothing for you. Having the right friends was everything. The girls in my D-team went to my highschool, but I was not popular enough to hang out with them at school, so outside of the four walls of the church, we had nothing. With attitudes like that, I questioned their Christianity. I figured they were just doing it to be cool.
Still, I was relentless in proving myself to be a good and faithful Christian. I learned effective ways to study the bible, kept a prayer journal (mostly because my mind wandered too much if my hands weren't moving), and believed it was a time of growth.
Reading the Bible was a good thing. I can now say I've read it cover to cover. I've studied it. I've made notes and high-lights. I've cross-referenced. I decided Deuteronomy was my favorite book and Psalm 73 was my favorite Psalm (with the opening of Psalm 27 taking a close second). I had no qualms with the Bible or God, and I could make excuses for the people, because people weren't supposed to be perfect.
But let me break into psychology for a moment, because I am a thoughtful writer and I worked very hard to put together this testimony. (Remember that at the time of writing it, I was still 100% Christian.) At the time I wrote this (likely mid-college), I was looking back on those highschool times and rather than say "it was a time of growth," I said "I believed it was a time of growth." I knew that for all my seeking, I had not "grown" at all.
I can't really say I was impacted at all by what I read. I didn't try to apply it to my life, nor did I memorize the words. In addition, I came to notice that the new songs I was learning, the more contemporary ones, did not have scripture embedded in the lyrics.
Towards the end of my senior year in high school, some one at church suggested that I should go to SEMP, a summer missions project in Illinois. "Maybe God is calling you there," she suggested. Well, I had no clue-- didn't really know how to know what God was telling me, didn't have the patience to listen, didn't have the ability to quiet my mind. But after that I became intent on going to this conference, so that I could become a better Christian and maybe learn how to listen to God.
And there it is again in my own testimony. After four years of seeking God, reading books, going to church, and trying to walk the Christian walk, I felt no impact. You can see that I'm making excuses for why. "I didn't have the ability to quiet my mind." When I wrote this, I had determined that it was my fault that I wasn't hearing from God. I was trying my best and falling short, and the fault had to lie with me.
The experience was definitely a turning point. SEMP stands for Students Equipped to Minister to Peers and is organized by Sonlife Ministries for high school students every summer. It is different from most other missions trips in that you don't go to build a house, or a church, but you go to learn how to become an evangelist and how to witness to friends and neighbors. As practice, we were bussed to Chicago where we knocked on doors in the city and shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with those we met. We also wrote letters to non-Christian friends at home, initiating conversations on the same level which would force us to use what we learned. Despite all this opportunity, I was just a bit too shy and did very little witnessing and did not pray with anyone to receive Christ.
But I did take a lot of it home with me. I became bolder in telling people that I am Christian and now, many came to know me as not just a 'good girl', but a Christian girl.
And there I was again, being forced into that face-to-face witnessing that I have never able to do. Did I attribute it to my lack of connection with God? No. I was too shy.
Let's clarify: Yes, I'm an introvert. Yes, I can be shy. Yes, I try to be sensitive about throwing my personal/political beliefs at people. But when I know something or believe something, I will talk up a storm. Ask me about abortion, higher education, or pizza toppings. Ask whether wormholes can be used as time machines. I can talk your ear off. So I find it odd that after a lifetime of "knowing" God and years of studying the Bible, I could have so little to say about "my personal Lord and Savior."
With regards to those letters home, I did not actually initiate conversations. I proselytized all of my friends, told them I was worried they'd die and go to hell etc. To one friend, I apologized for thinking I was better than her, told her that we were all equal in God's eyes, and then moved into proselytizing. One of my other friends told me that the letter made her cry. I never followed up on any of the letters. I didn't have the guts to tell any of my friends to their faces that I believed they were sinners and going to hell.
As an aside, in my church, I was taught that homosexuality was a sin. In my early years of highschool, a few of my friends came out to me as gay and bi. I had to choose whether to be loud and upfront on the bible's stance against homosexuality, and I chose to stay quiet. My friends were the same people they were before they came out to me. I already suspected they weren't Christian. They were good people and they accepted me for who I was. I felt bad for making any of them cry by writing those stupid letters.
The major turning point came towards the end of the week when our evening celebration speaker talked about the "Acceptance trap." Here he addressed that artificial "third level" where some Christians place themselves. This level is created by the actions of the person, either in tithing, praying every day, praying for over an hour, dressing conservatively, going to church every Sunday, etc. Somewhere along the line, people got the impression that one's actions can make one a better Christian. But it doesn't!
... It means that being a Christian doesn't make me better than anyone else, but the door swings both ways-- no one else is better than me just because they read their bibles and pray daily, etc., etc.
... It doesn't matter what we can do because what we do is diddly squat compared to what God wants (and what God needs because he is holy). That is why we are saved through GRACE and not by our own works!
As you can imagine, the ultimate realization that pathetic me was acceptable to God and that there was nothing I could do to make myself more or less acceptable had me in happy tears for a good while and measurably impacted my life.
I've pared this down, because I went on for a long while with explanations, scriptures, and analogies. Perhaps you can see what happened here, perhaps you cannot. This was not a major spiritual revelation, this was a psychological one. I never cared about being popular or having lots of friends, but I'm still not entirely immune to the need for acceptance.
After four years of striving to fit in with my peers at youth group--after four years of feeling rejected and shrugging it off--I was being told that their acceptance didn't matter. Whether I felt it or not, I was accepted by God. What person would not want to believe that? What person is going to put their foot down and say "no, the acceptance of my peers is of paramount importance." When someone gives you permission to say the daily rejections you've been experiencing are meaningless, of course you're going to be in happy tears.
I went to college all excited about God and joined a Christian fellowship on campus. I was up with the sun every morning, reading my Bible. After freshman year, I attended a retreat with Christians from several colleges. I was excited about God and digging into scriptures; I was memorizing scriptures for the pure joy of knowing them and loving it. Then one afternoon, I was shushed out of a discussion and realized that some of the people there were more interested in going swimming than discussing the bible. I was trying to ask a question and felt completely ignored, rejected, and devalued. The world came crashing down around me. I refused to participate in bible discussions for the rest of the week. (And there was a lot of week left at this point.)
Satan really attacked my time with God during this week, but when you give your life to God, he doesn't let go so easy. At the time though, I thought God had disappeared. It's a situation where one broken relationship will affect and even destroy all other relationships, and my relationship with God and all the Christians there really took a beating. I could barely bring myself to study scriptures, my prayer became hollow, and all I wanted to do was curl up and die (not from embarrassment, but from loneliness).
This is another one of those "acceptance traps." I thought I fit in with these people. After all, they were so excited about God that they were willing to go on a weekend retreat and do nothing but commune with God. Actually, no. They wanted to commune with each other. People were being dumb, hurtful people, I felt rejected, and I blamed Satan. Seriously, if God were God, why would one five minute conversation make him disappear from my life? (As I write this, I'm reminded of what happened to Eve and the whole fall of man, and I'm starting to think maybe it is in keeping with God's character.)
Another aside: I did bounce back after that incident, but I didn't have it written into my online testimony. My faith yo-yo'd for years as I diligently sought God, read books, attended bible studies, kept prayer journals, etc. I went through a suicidal depression, and were it not for my Christian faith, who knows if I'd have survived. (When you wish you didn't exist, the fear that there might be an eternal afterlife makes ending your present life moot.) Eventually, I came out of that depression and I went back to church and bible studies. The doubts that had been seeded before the depression were growing, but I wasn't willing to let go of the faith that had kept me through the darkest moments of my life.
So where have I come in Christ since? I can't 100% say. It's so hard to see yourself change or see God work in you. The only way I really know is by what others say the see in me. To myself, I'm still a pathetic, imperfect Christian, inconsistent in studying the bible and in prayer, unable to keep my attention focused on anything for very long. But thankfully, God does not see what I am but what he is making me to become. My only hope is that I will know him better tomorrow than I do today. Like I said, I'm bad at relationships...
The mixture of insecurity, excuses, and platitudes is really striking to me in this. I was striving to know God and never quite meeting him. I never felt assurance from God, but I got a lot of positive reinforcement from other Christians who approved of my diligent faith walk. And I end with the weirdest excuse of all: I may never have a good relationship with God because "I'm bad at relationships." (I actually have a whole other post about that.)
And there you have it. That was the only testimony I ever had. I tried so hard for years to view my experiences through the Christian lens, and while I could make it sound convincing on paper, I can't say I ever believed it true.
Summary: Back when I was Christian, I had my testimony online. Now that I'm atheist, I wanted to point out some things about it.
Ever since I was ten years old, I felt pressure from my church to be out there evangelizing and giving my testimony to everyone I met. My problem: I didn't have a testimony. Despite all my prayers, God had never revealed himself in any great and powerful way. I found myself reading other people's testimonies and piecing together my assurance from their assurance. I found the "canned" phrases that best fit my life. I was never confident speaking out loud, because in face-to-face conversations, a person could ask a question that I didn't have an answer to, and I had no gut instinct. My testimony was there so I could convince myself that I was having a normal Christian experience.
Lo and behold, in my college years, I discovered the internet. Finally, a place where I could write my piece, put it out there for the world to see, and leave it at that. I could field Q&A from the standpoint of being able to walk away, think, research, and come back.
My family was so proud of me for having my testimony on the internet where all the world could see it, but for me, it was the safest place to have it, because I was not personally accountable to anyone that read it. I felt confident that I was doing my Christian duty by having it there.
In 2008, I took my testimony off my website. It had been sitting there stagnant for years, and I was having more trouble believing all those canned assurances in it. I cannot question another person's testimony, but since mine was out there for so long, I wanted to take some time to point out the places where even I didn't believe the words I was saying.
I put this out here, because I see so many atheists that come from Christian backgrounds who post "I honestly tried" and I know a common Christian response is that you didn't honestly try hard enough. If you had honestly sought God, you'd have found him. I want to tell all of you doubters that we do honestly try. My "testimony" is everything I tried and I challenge you to read it and tell me I did not try hard enough or seek honestly enough. So here it is... my testimony:
I grew up in a Christian home, surrounded by loving parents who took me to church every week. I can't say exactly why I liked going. Although I often complained when my older sister did and objected when she did, I still liked being there probably because it was easy to have the right answer.
This is an interesting way to begin a testimony. The first bit is your typical life-long Christian's opening. Then I say something amazing. I liked being there, probably because it was easy to have the right answer. That, in a nutshell, sums up my entire devotion to Christianity. I didn't have to think too hard because it was easy to have the right answer. It was easy to gain acceptance and approval because all I had to do was know the right words to say. Now that I have given up religion, I have to think a lot harder about my entire perspective on the world. It's not fun and easy, but it's also not dismissive of truth.
I can't say exactly how or what brought me to be saved and I can't remember ever not being saved. I don't know that it was my parents or Sunday school or what. But as far back as I can remember, I've known I was saved. I had a passion for worship. Coming from a musical family, it seemed like I was born to sing praises to God. I learned scriptures through song and as I grew up I found that the words to a song can strike powerfully, especially when they are truths from God's word with melody.
This is more a testimony to the power of music than that of God. In my baby book, at the age of two, my mother wrote that I "could learn anything if it were set to music." I have always loved the way I can get completely lost in a song--how I can close my eyes and be someplace else. I feel happy and free. When I was in my twenties, I started to convince myself that I was standing before the throne of God. I created the scenario to convince myself that I was experiencing a relationship with God. Even at the time, I felt I was lying to myself about the God connection.
I'm not lying about the music. I still believe that the words of a song can change a person's mind and heart, give them hope, and carry them through. I have a whole "motivational" playlist, without which I never would have survived grad school, and honestly, there was never a single Christian song on it. They are about 50% Disney songs with messages about believing in yourself, persevering, and dreams coming true.
Despite this growing knowledge of the bible through music, I didn't read the bible much. My parents did not dig into the bible, at least not that I knew, so I never considered it a necessary part to my faith. In high school, when my parents finally forced me into a youth group, I learned that people did these things called "quiet times" (an individual bible study) which I thought was good, but also foreign. It made sense that a "good" Christian would read her bible every day and pray every day. I wanted to be a good Christian, so I decided to do it too.
I can't say whether this was a good or a bad thing, because it put in my mind that there are 'levels' in Christianity and that there are some Christians that are better than others. Also putting me down in this youth group were the abundance of cliques, none of which I was a part of. I felt isolated by from these people who were better Christians than I was.
Can I just say, I hated everything about that youth group. I was not popular enough to have friends, I wasn't part of any cliques. The only person who really cared about me was my small group leader. (Our youth group had 100+ kids, so for about half an hour we were broken into small groups called D-teams. D stands for delta, delta means change, change happens in small groups.) Having all the right answers in a group like this does nothing for you. Having the right friends was everything. The girls in my D-team went to my highschool, but I was not popular enough to hang out with them at school, so outside of the four walls of the church, we had nothing. With attitudes like that, I questioned their Christianity. I figured they were just doing it to be cool.
Still, I was relentless in proving myself to be a good and faithful Christian. I learned effective ways to study the bible, kept a prayer journal (mostly because my mind wandered too much if my hands weren't moving), and believed it was a time of growth.
Reading the Bible was a good thing. I can now say I've read it cover to cover. I've studied it. I've made notes and high-lights. I've cross-referenced. I decided Deuteronomy was my favorite book and Psalm 73 was my favorite Psalm (with the opening of Psalm 27 taking a close second). I had no qualms with the Bible or God, and I could make excuses for the people, because people weren't supposed to be perfect.
But let me break into psychology for a moment, because I am a thoughtful writer and I worked very hard to put together this testimony. (Remember that at the time of writing it, I was still 100% Christian.) At the time I wrote this (likely mid-college), I was looking back on those highschool times and rather than say "it was a time of growth," I said "I believed it was a time of growth." I knew that for all my seeking, I had not "grown" at all.
I can't really say I was impacted at all by what I read. I didn't try to apply it to my life, nor did I memorize the words. In addition, I came to notice that the new songs I was learning, the more contemporary ones, did not have scripture embedded in the lyrics.
Towards the end of my senior year in high school, some one at church suggested that I should go to SEMP, a summer missions project in Illinois. "Maybe God is calling you there," she suggested. Well, I had no clue-- didn't really know how to know what God was telling me, didn't have the patience to listen, didn't have the ability to quiet my mind. But after that I became intent on going to this conference, so that I could become a better Christian and maybe learn how to listen to God.
And there it is again in my own testimony. After four years of seeking God, reading books, going to church, and trying to walk the Christian walk, I felt no impact. You can see that I'm making excuses for why. "I didn't have the ability to quiet my mind." When I wrote this, I had determined that it was my fault that I wasn't hearing from God. I was trying my best and falling short, and the fault had to lie with me.
The experience was definitely a turning point. SEMP stands for Students Equipped to Minister to Peers and is organized by Sonlife Ministries for high school students every summer. It is different from most other missions trips in that you don't go to build a house, or a church, but you go to learn how to become an evangelist and how to witness to friends and neighbors. As practice, we were bussed to Chicago where we knocked on doors in the city and shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with those we met. We also wrote letters to non-Christian friends at home, initiating conversations on the same level which would force us to use what we learned. Despite all this opportunity, I was just a bit too shy and did very little witnessing and did not pray with anyone to receive Christ.
But I did take a lot of it home with me. I became bolder in telling people that I am Christian and now, many came to know me as not just a 'good girl', but a Christian girl.
And there I was again, being forced into that face-to-face witnessing that I have never able to do. Did I attribute it to my lack of connection with God? No. I was too shy.
Let's clarify: Yes, I'm an introvert. Yes, I can be shy. Yes, I try to be sensitive about throwing my personal/political beliefs at people. But when I know something or believe something, I will talk up a storm. Ask me about abortion, higher education, or pizza toppings. Ask whether wormholes can be used as time machines. I can talk your ear off. So I find it odd that after a lifetime of "knowing" God and years of studying the Bible, I could have so little to say about "my personal Lord and Savior."
With regards to those letters home, I did not actually initiate conversations. I proselytized all of my friends, told them I was worried they'd die and go to hell etc. To one friend, I apologized for thinking I was better than her, told her that we were all equal in God's eyes, and then moved into proselytizing. One of my other friends told me that the letter made her cry. I never followed up on any of the letters. I didn't have the guts to tell any of my friends to their faces that I believed they were sinners and going to hell.
As an aside, in my church, I was taught that homosexuality was a sin. In my early years of highschool, a few of my friends came out to me as gay and bi. I had to choose whether to be loud and upfront on the bible's stance against homosexuality, and I chose to stay quiet. My friends were the same people they were before they came out to me. I already suspected they weren't Christian. They were good people and they accepted me for who I was. I felt bad for making any of them cry by writing those stupid letters.
The major turning point came towards the end of the week when our evening celebration speaker talked about the "Acceptance trap." Here he addressed that artificial "third level" where some Christians place themselves. This level is created by the actions of the person, either in tithing, praying every day, praying for over an hour, dressing conservatively, going to church every Sunday, etc. Somewhere along the line, people got the impression that one's actions can make one a better Christian. But it doesn't!
... It means that being a Christian doesn't make me better than anyone else, but the door swings both ways-- no one else is better than me just because they read their bibles and pray daily, etc., etc.
... It doesn't matter what we can do because what we do is diddly squat compared to what God wants (and what God needs because he is holy). That is why we are saved through GRACE and not by our own works!
As you can imagine, the ultimate realization that pathetic me was acceptable to God and that there was nothing I could do to make myself more or less acceptable had me in happy tears for a good while and measurably impacted my life.
I've pared this down, because I went on for a long while with explanations, scriptures, and analogies. Perhaps you can see what happened here, perhaps you cannot. This was not a major spiritual revelation, this was a psychological one. I never cared about being popular or having lots of friends, but I'm still not entirely immune to the need for acceptance.
After four years of striving to fit in with my peers at youth group--after four years of feeling rejected and shrugging it off--I was being told that their acceptance didn't matter. Whether I felt it or not, I was accepted by God. What person would not want to believe that? What person is going to put their foot down and say "no, the acceptance of my peers is of paramount importance." When someone gives you permission to say the daily rejections you've been experiencing are meaningless, of course you're going to be in happy tears.
I went to college all excited about God and joined a Christian fellowship on campus. I was up with the sun every morning, reading my Bible. After freshman year, I attended a retreat with Christians from several colleges. I was excited about God and digging into scriptures; I was memorizing scriptures for the pure joy of knowing them and loving it. Then one afternoon, I was shushed out of a discussion and realized that some of the people there were more interested in going swimming than discussing the bible. I was trying to ask a question and felt completely ignored, rejected, and devalued. The world came crashing down around me. I refused to participate in bible discussions for the rest of the week. (And there was a lot of week left at this point.)
Satan really attacked my time with God during this week, but when you give your life to God, he doesn't let go so easy. At the time though, I thought God had disappeared. It's a situation where one broken relationship will affect and even destroy all other relationships, and my relationship with God and all the Christians there really took a beating. I could barely bring myself to study scriptures, my prayer became hollow, and all I wanted to do was curl up and die (not from embarrassment, but from loneliness).
This is another one of those "acceptance traps." I thought I fit in with these people. After all, they were so excited about God that they were willing to go on a weekend retreat and do nothing but commune with God. Actually, no. They wanted to commune with each other. People were being dumb, hurtful people, I felt rejected, and I blamed Satan. Seriously, if God were God, why would one five minute conversation make him disappear from my life? (As I write this, I'm reminded of what happened to Eve and the whole fall of man, and I'm starting to think maybe it is in keeping with God's character.)
Another aside: I did bounce back after that incident, but I didn't have it written into my online testimony. My faith yo-yo'd for years as I diligently sought God, read books, attended bible studies, kept prayer journals, etc. I went through a suicidal depression, and were it not for my Christian faith, who knows if I'd have survived. (When you wish you didn't exist, the fear that there might be an eternal afterlife makes ending your present life moot.) Eventually, I came out of that depression and I went back to church and bible studies. The doubts that had been seeded before the depression were growing, but I wasn't willing to let go of the faith that had kept me through the darkest moments of my life.
So where have I come in Christ since? I can't 100% say. It's so hard to see yourself change or see God work in you. The only way I really know is by what others say the see in me. To myself, I'm still a pathetic, imperfect Christian, inconsistent in studying the bible and in prayer, unable to keep my attention focused on anything for very long. But thankfully, God does not see what I am but what he is making me to become. My only hope is that I will know him better tomorrow than I do today. Like I said, I'm bad at relationships...
The mixture of insecurity, excuses, and platitudes is really striking to me in this. I was striving to know God and never quite meeting him. I never felt assurance from God, but I got a lot of positive reinforcement from other Christians who approved of my diligent faith walk. And I end with the weirdest excuse of all: I may never have a good relationship with God because "I'm bad at relationships." (I actually have a whole other post about that.)
And there you have it. That was the only testimony I ever had. I tried so hard for years to view my experiences through the Christian lens, and while I could make it sound convincing on paper, I can't say I ever believed it true.