My Faith Story

I was raised in a Christian home, attended church all the time, fortunately didn't attend "Christian" secondary school due to the fact that the local "Christian" school basically housed all the kids who couldn't function in normal school (mostly due to drug use, gang violence, etc.)

For most of my public school years, I was rank-in-file with my parents, even though they encouraged me to look beyond them and our church to form my own beliefs, especially since we attended a very loving Baptist church, and my parents didn't believe in once-saved-always-saved.

I attended a "Christian" college for three years, mainly because it is my parents'/aunts'/uncles'/grandparents' alma mater.
I did grow in my faith during that time, especially in the area of identifying and forming adequate questions, but monetarily it was a waste. I sluffed off the last two semesters, even getting straight 0's on my transcript during the last one.

I met my future wife during my last year there, and during the following year off from college, God worked amazing things in my life through her, especially in teaching me true selflessness.
I also made my first atheist friends during that year, and God taught me the importance of LISTENING, and to value PEOPLE more than doctrines or dogma.

As my future-wife and I plowed through the struggles of her mother's lung and eventual brain cancer, I returned to school at a community college, meeting more diverse people than I ever would have at the "Christian" university, again spending more time listening than speaking, and speaking only in love and understanding.

I gradually stopped attending church during that time, mainly due to my Sunday School teacher's complete inability to do anything other than lecture us (and come on, we were in COLLEGE...we didn't need ANOTHER lecture every week!).

My then-girlfriend hadn't been raised in church, so it wasn't a big deal for us to to treat Sunday as a much-needed rest day, and nothing else.
We did end up finding a community which reached out to us, and we were eventually married in that church.

During the struggles with her mother's health, my girlfriend asked me many times why I didn't just pack up and walk away, since it wasn't really my fight, so to speak.
I know now it was God's influence that kept me around, but at the time it just seemed like it would be a jerky (for lack of a better non-censored word) move to just walk out when the going got tough.
Her mother eventually died as a result of uncontrollable brain tumors which began as a single malignancy which had metastasized from her lung, three months before our wedding.

As it stands now, I can look back and see God's hand in all of the major changes I have gone through, and feel Him still at work in my life as I try to be the best husband I can be with His help.
But I don't feel the same personal sense of His constant presence that my elders describe.

Maybe it's just because I have too many distractions right now, as a husband, college student, and employee trying to also be a church keyboardist.