Please God, please. Please don’t let my parents break up. I’ll never ask for anything ever again God, just this once.
I sat there crying, tears streaming down my face, meeting in the middle of my neck and slipping down my chest. I could barely breathe, and all I could think was if He could hear me.
The ladies at my church told me if I prayed to God every day and did my best not to sin then God would listen and lead me and my family down a good path. I was a good kid, or at least I thought. I practiced forgiveness and I never said the Lord’s name in vain. I ate my vegetables and shared my toys. So why wasn’t He listening? Could He not hear me? Or maybe He didn’t want to answer my prayers. Maybe I wasn’t pleading hard enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for him at all.
When the court battles began for custody over me and my siblings, I began to lose hope that God loved me, or that He was even real.
Growing up Christian was a strange experience for me. In the beginning, it was just part of life. I didn’t know that other people didn’t believe in God or didn’t go to church. It was so normal for me, and I loved Sundays because of it.
But as I grew older, the more toxic this environment became for me. It was hard to believe in God when I couldn’t see him, and explaining him as a concept didn’t work for my 5-year-old brain either. After my parents divorced I stopped wanting to go to church. Adults would come up to me and ask me questions, interrogating me, only five years old. I hated that everyone was practically begging me to choose. Why do I have to choose? Why are these adults telling me to pray for my dad but not my mom? What did she do?
Why doesn’t God love her too?
Along with these heavy questions that lingered in my head like bad perfume came even more fighting in the divorce, and when my parents split up, my entire world split in half: Mom vs. Dad. My mom stopped going to church because she didn’t feel welcome there, and it didn’t help that she married a woman. Being gay was a sin in the eyes of my church, and because she didn’t go there, I felt all the shame and eyes on me that she would’ve received. Some people in our church even contested against her in court so my dad could have full custody of us. Nothing made sense, and I just wished God would fix everything.
How is love a sin?
In the Bible and kid’s church, we were taught that God is three things. He is all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful. But this is contradictory, isn’t it? If God is all good, then how come He lets good people go through bad things? Maybe He isn’t all good. Or, if He is, then He isn’t all-knowing, because maybe He doesn’t know that we’re struggling. Maybe He doesn’t know that my childhood was taken away from me. Or, if He is all-knowing and all-good, then He must not be all-powerful. He must not have the power to fix all the evil in the world.
Yes, this is why He let this happen. He can’t be all three things at once, otherwise my parents would still love each other.
However, this explanation did not provide me with as much comfort as I expected. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve only thought about it more each day.
This year I’ve been taking a World Religions course, and my brain twists into knots just thinking about every single religion we’ve learned about. About how they came to be, and how connected they all are. And I’ve heard so many different stories and analyzed countless perspectives. Some say it’s all fake, a tool to control the masses. Some are true believers in their faith and will do anything to prove it. I feel like I’ve seen almost every point across the scale, and still, I’m lost.
Why can’t I just make a decision? Do I believe in Him? Do I believe in anything?
What’s more, it seems like everyone else has got it figured out. It “seems” that way. But I know it’s not true. Even my dad has changed how he thought of religion over the years. He believes that for the most part, all religions are differently interpreted interactions with God, and although he remains Christian, he now has a broader scope of how connected many of the world’s religions are. And I think I’ve done the same. But I still have much to learn, about faith, about god and most importantly, about me.
So how do I define myself? What do I say when someone asks me what religion I follow? Well, I don’t know, no one’s asked me that question in a while. But I think if it ever does come, I’ll just say…
I’m figuring it out.
And even though I’ve been dealt what feels like an awful hand, I’ll make do with what I’ve got and still wonder if God is real. I’ve realized that allowing what happened between my parents to affect how I feel about God isn’t going to get me anywhere, and I want to start fresh in this journey of discovering if I have faith in Him. Although I’m ashamed to say this, and I still don’t know what I believe in, when I’m all alone, curled up in the darkest corner of my room, filled with sorrow and despair, I pray to God in secret, hoping He’s there, listening to me.
And I think that’s okay.
