I Found God in a Hopeless Place

 “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them”1 John 4:16

It’s come to my attention recently that I haven’t been filling the molds other people have expected me to fill. There are some things about me that are different; things that nobody planned. Things that come as a surprise to even me, and things I have to come to terms with, even if I don’t want to.
I’ve just completed my freshman year of college and let’s just say it was quite the doozy. My favorite piece on this blog from this year is “Monsters in my Heart”. It was a polished and poetic way of expressing all of the crazy doubts I’ve always had pent up in my mind. This post will run alongside “Monsters”, but in a much less elegant and much more raw form.
I have always been terrified of disappointing the people around me, especially those who have always been important: family, friends, and other loved ones. I feel like I spent my life trying to make everyone else happy; especially when it comes to their perceptions of who I am. I’ve always wanted people to be proud of me, through both troubling and easy times. But this year was different… this year I took some chances. They were bold, not all of them good, not all of them bad, but all of them scared the sh*t out of me. Taking steps without knowing where my feet were going to fall was the hardest thing, but something funny happened when I closed my eyes to risk it all… I found God.

Now I know this all sounds cheesy, so let me clear some things up first. I was raised in a loving and supportive Christian home with parents who worked (and still work) hard to try to give me the best possible position in life economically, academically, and religiously. I love them for that, and will be forever in their debt. So no, when I say I found God that doesn’t mean that I discovered who Jesus was and began reading all the Bible stories, etc.. No. I have been going to church as long as I remember, and the Holy Book was always present on our bookshelves, tucked between the French literature and tropical medicine texts of my youth.
When I say I found God, I mean that three years ago, it felt like I had lost Him. I stopped going to church, could barely look at the Bible, and convinced myself that I didn’t need to rely on Him.
Bad move on my part.
But God, being the lovely guy that He is, continued following me around, waiting for that moment when I would smack my forehead and realize that, “Oh yeah! Maybe it would be good to have Him in my life again…”
That’s what I mean when I say I found God. It took me falling into the deepest hole I’d ever been in to figure it out… but I’m so glad I did. On the worst day of the year, I made the decision to join Colby Christian Fellowship and through that, met some of the most incredible people ever, and I know He definitely had a hand in making sure they became a part of my life.
Before, and for a time afterwards, I was in a hopeless place, completely unable to deal with what was going on around me. I had convinced myself that I had somehow achieved the one thing I had dedicated my life to avoiding: disappointing the people I loved. I foolishly felt like no one was proud of me anymore, and that I had somehow messed everything up. I wasn’t a good Christian, I wasn’t doing as well academically as I wanted to, and I had flaws that I had never before been willing to admit. It was rough when I started coming to terms with all of the things about myself that didn’t fit other people’s mold of me, but at the same time, it felt good. Like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders to finally be looking in and concentrating on myself and who I really was. But, because I had kept it all in for so long, once I started letting go just a little bit, everything came crashing down all around me. I felt like I had somehow messed up the world in a million different ways. I struggled to keep things hidden, like my often-overwhelming anxiety and numerous insecurities, but that didn’t last for long. Everything that I had refused to confront ended up blowing up in my face and I was left in the middle, staring at the pieces around me. That’s when I found God. When I was at my lowest point, when I felt sure that no one on earth could possibly be proud of the girl I had become. When I felt like all the good I had done could never outweigh the stress and pain I was causing in other people’s lives. When I felt like I had disappointed everyone that had ever meant anything to me, just by being honest about myself. I found God in a hopeless place, and through God, I found love. I found love in new friends that stepped up to fill empty holes, I found love in the people around me who began sharing their own stories of pain and suffering, I found love in the reflection of myself I had shied away from for so long. I found love… and I found God. Because God is LOVE, and according to a verse a dear friend sent me, , “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them”. So from this moment forward, I choose to live more firmly in God, because I don’t want to even imagine what another year of my life would be like without love and what another year of my life would be like without Him. And who am I kidding? I didn't find God, He found me.