There were many other things that influenced my doubts that I didn’t include for the sake of brevity, but they were also very influential.

That post explained how my frame of mind changed, which allowed some of these other events to be re-examined in a different light.  Before my frame of mind changed, I was able to dismiss all of the doubts raised by these other events because, at my core, I still believed.

So, I want to talk about some of those other things.

One of my best friends was in a car accident with her husband and three kids, five days before Christmas in 2008.  Their small car was struck by an 18-wheeler on the highway.  They were all alright, except for their 6-month-old son, who died.

One day a couple of months after the accident, my friend told me that she wanted to go to church with me.  I remember thinking that this was the way God was using her tragedy for good – it was bringing her closer to Him.

For an evangelical Christian, there is no greater good.  For all of God’s lost sheep to return to him is the ultimate purpose of this life.  That is why evangelicals are so annoying.  There is nothing that matters more.  Nothing.

So, if she had to lose her baby boy – a baby she had never been apart from and was still nursing – that was worth it if it brought her to Jesus.

Seriously.

Then, I remember thinking that I hated myself for thinking that.  I hated the entire belief system that made that an okay thing – no, the right thing – to think.

At the time, I was still in deep.  I had no way to explain my “supernatural” experiences, feeling “god’s presence,” and what have you, so I wasn’t ready to throw the baby Jesus out with the bath water just because it made me uncomfortable that God would allow a baby to die in order to bring the mother closer to himself.

God didn’t kill the baby, the truck driver did.

That’s what I told myself.  We have free will.  God doesn’t control what will happen, but he uses our bad situations for good.  The good was that she was finding Jesus.

Still, I felt sick over feeling that the death was ultimately a good thing.  It seemed so wrong.

But, like everything, I brushed it off.

I am so glad to be free of that belief system.  It feels good to know that the reason I felt sick for thinking her son’s death was for the greater good was because that was wrong.  There was no greater good.  It was an awful thing that happened.

You can argue about whether or not my problem was god or that I had a flawed theology, but it doesn’t matter.  Christianity places God above all else, no matter what flavor you follow.

I much prefer my new belief system where family, friends, and the people we care about are what’s most important.

I agree that religion is not the same as race or sexual orientation (which themselves are not the same as each other).  But is religion a choice?

I say, no.  At least, not in the sense that one usually talks about something being a choice.

I didn’t choose to stop believing in god; I just did.  It was like a switch went off (or on).  Once it did, there was no going back.

I have read many deconversion stories since then and so many of the people who left Christianity – who stopped believing in Christianity – wanted badly to still believe.

If belief is a choice, then why couldn’t they go back to believing?

Belief is a complex process.  It is not as simple as choosing to believe or not.

A friend of my mother has been having some problems with her adult daughter.  She, the daughter, recently joined a cult, but then stopped believing what the cult believed.  Unfortunately, she had already married into the cult and is in need of her mother’s help to get out.  She feels like it wasn’t her fault that she believed all of that stuff, like she couldn’t help it.

I was discussing with my mom whether or not this is a case of “she got herself into this mess.”  (My mom’s the tough love type.)  I was trying to explain that when you really believe in a religion, it is almost like you have no control over your thoughts, but not exactly.

It’s really hard to explain.

When I look back on things that I believed, I can’t believe that was me.  I’ve taken to calling my 5 years as a Christian my “Jesus coma” because it was like my brain was shut off.

I’m not saying that people are not responsible for what they do when they are under the influence of religion, just that there is more to it than a simple, conscious choice.

So, if you’re an atheist, don’t get frustrated at the seemingly impenetrable layer of stupidity encasing the brains of religious people.  They are not deliberately choosing to be obtuse.

And keep the conversations going.  You would be amazed at the number of things people said to me in debates over the years – things that I had completely dismissed at the time – that came flooding back into my mind when I started to have serious doubts about my beliefs.

Even when you feel like you are not getting through, you are planting seeds, to borrow a biblical metaphor, that may some day yield fruit.

I have found, and Harris alludes to this, that there exists basically two schools of thought on morality – that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions (and that those answers come from god) and that there are no absolute right and wrong answers to moral questions.  This has always troubled me.  I remember talking about this in philosophy class in college.  At that time I was not religious, but the idea that there are no moral absolutes just did not fit with my understanding of the world.

During the time I was a Christian, I found that I liked the idea of having answers to moral questions that were grounded in some sort of authority, but I didn’t always find that the answers themselves were what I would consider right and I didn’t like the fact that the answers came from a culture that existed thousands of years ago.  It always seemed that, with all of our advancements in the last 2,000 years, we must know something that isn’t in the Bible.

Sam Harris is saying that there is a third option – that there are answers to questions about values, even if we don’t have those answers (ie. from religion), and that we can find those answers the way we find answers to other questions.

He starts by saying that the separation between science and values is an illusion.  Most people think science does not have anything to say about values because science deals in facts, and facts and values are in different spheres.  Values are a certain kind of fact; they are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.  There are truths to be known about the way human beings flourish, even if we don’t know those answers.  In order to find those answers, we have to admit that these questions have answers.  He adds that admitting that there are right and wrong answers about how human beings will flourish will change the way we talk about morality.

He likens finding the answers to moral questions to finding the answers to scientific questions, in that there are experts in science and there are opinions that are and should be disregarded when discussing scientific questions (ie. answers from non-scientists).  Moral questions should be approached the same way, in that (1) they have answers and (2) there are experts as well as people whose opinions should be disregarded.

I think he is really on to something that could totally change the way we talk about morality, as he says.  I think that anyone who is not religious can clearly see the problems with religious answers to moral questions, such as Islam’s treatment of women or fundamentalist Christianity’s treatment of gays (and sometimes women).  Yet, it is impossible to have a conversation about these issues without admitting that moral questions do have answers.  After all, how can their answers be wrong unless there are right and wrong answers?  If we could take that step, then we could use the knowledge that we have to determine the best answers to those questions.

If we would talk more about moral questions having answers, how to arrive at those answers, and what those answers might be, it would take that discussion out of the realm of religion.  Because right now, that is where those answers are found.  Religion is where people turn when they need answers, but those answers are often wrong and, sometimes, even dangerous.

I know there are already experts out there in the realm of finding answers to moral questions outside of a religious framework.  I searched high and low for those experts when I was first deconverting from Christianity.  That information needs to be easier to find and a more prominent part of the public discussion about morality, not tucked away in the atheism section of the bookstore or on Point of Inquiry podcasts.

Maybe, with someone as visible as Sam Harris talking about this, that will happen sooner, rather than later.

Leaving Christianity was a really hard process.  After having what I thought to be many genuine experiences with God, I was left feeling at a loss for how to make sense of the world.  I am still trying to find my balance.  To center myself.  To figure out what it means to be.

It’s not about god.  I don’t really believe in god, though there’s a part of me that easily could.  Because I know that there is something more.  That is why a strict rationalist view of life just doesn’t resonate with me.  It doesn’t resonate with a lot of people, I think, for the same reason.

There exists something that is bigger than ourselves.  But it’s not god.  I’m not 100% sure of that, but I am quite sure.  Sure enough, anyway.

I haven’t quite put my finger on what it is, but I think that it’s us.

All of us together make up this thing that’s greater than the sum of its parts.  That’s why people feel fulfilled when they join a religion.   It’s not god; it’s us.  We need each other.  When we help each other, it creates personal satisfaction, but it also produces good will that carries on and produces more.   It – metaphorically – takes on a life of its own.   But it can feel like there’s some outside force at work, some guiding hand, god.

But if that were so, how can we explain the times when it doesn’t work out?

“God’s ways aren’t our ways.”

“God works in mysterious ways.”

No. That’s not sufficient, in any sense.

I prefer to think, rather, that it is not god.  We have an interdependence that goes far beyond what we can see.  It is so deep, it can feel like there must be more, something that is bigger than ourselves.   But we are it.

The universe is indifferent to our existence.  It doesn’t care what happens to us.  There is no god looking over us, with his divine plan, guiding our lives.  The universe doesn’t care if you get that speeding ticket, if you get that promotion, or even if you get cancer.   It doesn’t care.   There is no other way to explain all of the bad things that happen, without revealing a god so twisted and sadistic as to not deserve our worship.   After all, he’s playing with our lives and we don’t even know his rules.

No.   Events happen and they happen by random chance, more or less.  That person two cars in front of you that died in the head-on collision could have been you.   The fact that it wasn’t doesn’t mean that god spared you and not him.  It means you won the toss of the cosmic dice that day.

But just because the universe is cold and meaningless doesn’t mean that life is.  It matters.  You matter.  We all matter.  We matter to each other.  And I don’t just mean that you matter to the people who love you, or even the people who know you.   You matter to humanity as a whole.   Everything you do affects the rest of us.  And we’re glad you’re here.

The other day, I posted about how I got my start in blogging.  Without the person who introduced me to blogging, I might never have started blogging.  Without the local alternative daily reporter who started a blog about Vermont blogs and linked to me, I might never have gained the audience I did.   Without that exposure, I probably would not have met the person who I turned to for support when I left Christianity.  Without that support, I really don’t know how I would have gotten through that, the most difficult time in my life.

Something as simple as telling someone about your blog can lead to that person making a new friend.  I’ve made a lot of wonderful connections through blogging, all because someone told me about his blog.

In just that one small example, you can begin to see how seemingly meaningless actions can profoundly effect the lives of those around us.  When we get into the ways in which we all love and support each other, our interdependence become mind blowing.

Every little thing we do in our lives affects someone else. When taken together, it creates this web of support that enriches our lives and makes them better.  It also gives our lives significance and meaning.  It creates something that is bigger than us, something that transcends our being.

But it’s not god; it’s us.  And really, isn’t that enough?

So there I was, not believing in Christianity any more, but still not really knowing what I believed in. And not really knowing what to do next.  I was afraid to tell anyone because I didn’t know what would happen.  This was such a big change in me.

I already told the story on my old blog about contacting my blog friend and atheist JD Ryan from the blog Five Before Chaos, so I won’t repeat it here. That was my first step toward coming out as a non-Christian. Now, it was real.

That night, after I talked to JD, I told my husband. That was hard. Among Christians, especially the conservative evangelical variety, everything good comes from God, so a life without God means a life without the things that are of God. If morals come from God, then atheists cannot have morals, at least, not the kind of morals that are grounded in the truth of what is right. So, of course, his first reaction was to think that something else bad was coming. It was a tough time getting through those first few weeks, but eventually we talked through what had happened to lead me away from the faith and he saw where I was coming from. He is still a believer in God and in Christ, but he is no longer being held hostage by the strict beliefs that we had.

Telling my family was not difficult at all, since they are not Christians, though it was interesting to hear what they thought of my little foray into evangelical Christianity.

The hardest part was telling my Christian friends. I actually had it relatively easy because the people in my close circle all recently moved out of state. I broke the news via facebook. A couple of people were deeply hurt and tried to talk me back. I was sent creationism links and told to think about my children and what would happen to them if I were wrong. It was assumed that I was angry at God, of course. The worst response I got was silence. That was hurtful.

I still haven’t told anyone from my church. I just stopped going.

After my big coming out on facebook, the reality set in. I was no longer a Christian. So now what? I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know what kind of music to listen to. I had let my religious beliefs dictate my thoughts and actions for years. It was like I needed to re-learn everything.

I spent the next coupe of months trying to get my bearings. I felt a little crazy at first. I started to believe that there are no morals without God. I went from looking at everything in terms of absolutes, to looking at everything as ambiguous, wondering if anything, short of obvious violations of other human beings physical bodies, is ever really wrong.

It sounds so ridiculous to me now. I mean, I new right from wrong before I was a Christian, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to know right from wrong after. Thankfully, I had a friend to point that out to me. It really saved me a lot of trouble reinventing the wheel.

Still, in those first months, I questioned everything about my life. My mind was overfilled with all of these life questions, big and small. It was miserable, but at the same time it was wonderful to have my mind working again.

After the excitement and relief at being free from my oppressive and thought-controlling religious beliefs started to subside, I went through a month or so of being depressed and kind of lost. Now that I was free from Christianity, I wasn’t really sure where to go.

When I left Christianity, I called myself an agnostic. I really wasn’t sure what I believed and I wasn’t really sure if we could ever really know god, even if there was one. But, it didn’t take long to start thinking of myself as an atheist. The more I thought about things, and the more I read about the experiences of other former Christians, ranging from atheist to agnostic to people who found some other religion, the more I realized that I didn’t really see the existence of any god as a likelihood or even a necessity to living a full life.

But still, something was missing, and I think that is why I became a bit depressed. The problem with atheism is that it lacks any sort of meaningful explanation for the experiences that I had as a Christian that seemed to transcend my being, the things that I had attributed to God.

Sure, I read things about probability and random chance and errors we make in reasoning when we attribute events to a supernatural force. But there still seemed to be something lacking in that explanation. I had felt things that were bigger than myself and I needed an explanation for that.  I needed to figure out the meaning of my life without God.

(Read part five.)

Then, I started singing a song we used to sing in chorus to warm up, “I love the mountains.  I love the rolling hills.  I love the flowers.  I love the daffodils.  I love the fireside, when all the lights are low.  Boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-dee-ah-da, boom-de-ah-da.”  We had a laugh.  (Yes, I am totally cheesy.)

Then a couple of days later, I saw a video called “We love xkcd” (which I do), posted at the blog Pharyngula.  It is sung to that same tune.

I hadn’t heard that song in years upon years and days after I sang it, I heard the same tune.

Coincidences like that happen all of the time.

Last Friday, my mom took my two older boys to see “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and I stayed home with my 6-year-old.  I watched “Reality Bites” on HBO for the first time since the mid-90s.  I love that scene when they are dancing in the convenience store to “My Sharona.”

Well, a few days later, Althouse had a post saying that Doug Fieger, lead singer for The Knack, died, with a video of, wait for it… “My Sharona.”

Another song-related coincidence.  Creepy!

Actually, coincidences like that happen all of the time.  There is nothing creepy about it.  But when I was a Christian, that sort of thing was always taken as a “sign” from God.

I actually decided on a church because the choir was singing my favorite song from Christian radio on the day we went to visit.  Seriously.  It was “Indescribable,” by Chris Tomlin.  I thought it was a sign from God that we had found the right church.

Now that I no longer view every event from the point of view that God is micromanaging my life, I can see that there are odd coincidences all of the time.  There’s really nothing supernatural involved.  It was perfectly within the realm of probability that the church would be singing a song that was popular on Christian radio at that time.  In fact, that was frequently the case.

It amazes me how much meaning people assign to random events.  Everything happens for a reason, the saying goes.  No, it really doesn’t.  Well, yeah, everything has a cause, but there isn’t some greater cosmic reason that I heard the same tune twice in one week, or my mom called just when I was thinking of her, or even that Bob (my husband) and I just happened to start at the same company on the same day.  Those events are not the result of divine providence; they just happen.

I used to think that attitude removed all of the mystery and wonder from life.  I was wrong.  I was wrong about a lot of things.  Life is still full of wonder.  I still said, “Wow, that was cool; I was just singing that song” when I heard that xkcd song.  I just don’t assign any greater meaning to it.  And I still think it’s amazing that Bob and I just happened to both start at the same company on the same day and totally hit it off, and still be together 11 years later.  I just don’t think that God created us to be together, or had anything to do with us meeting.

All of the chance encounters and interesting coincidences are no less fascinating without the supernatural cause.  They might even be more so because they just happened randomly, yet turned out great.  I don’t need belief in god to appreciate the wonder of mere coincidence.

I suspect that I had doubts about Christianity building up for years.  I don’t really remember any specifically, but there were times that I went through a low period, where I would feel disconnected from God, and would emerge with a renewed faith and purpose.  I would always dismiss those times as the result of my own selfishness and unwillingness to accept God’s plan.  Any doubts that contributed to how I was feeling were pushed down or dismissed.

In June of 2009, I saw an online ad for “The Gabriel Method,” a book by Jon Gabriel about how he went from over 400 pounds to 184 pounds.  I know it’s kind of lame, but the before and after pictures were so amazing and I was able to find it on Amazon pretty cheap, so I bought it.

The book was interesting, but what’s relevant here is his focus on visualization.  He explained how he visualized his ideal body as part of his weight loss method.  This has actually been confirmed as effective in studies.

I started thinking about visualization and how powerful our minds are.  Then I started thinking about all of the different things that people believe and how that helps them cope with bad circumstances.  It’s like we can convince ourselves to believe anything.  If that’s true, what if I was only convincing myself that I had experienced God?  What if it was all in my head all along?

So, of course my first reaction was to put the book away because it was obviously satanic.  No, I’m serious.  That’s what I did.

But, what is done cannot be undone.

A few months later it started to come up again.  What if it was all in my head? What if I only felt God because I believed that I did?

But that’s just part of what was happening to me.  Around the same time that I read “The Gabriel Method,” I got interested in a book called “Teaching the Trivium,” which is about Christian classical home education.  One of the foundations of a classical education is logic.  I decided to brush up on logic myself before I started teaching it to the kids.  It had been like 15 years since I studied it in college.  In a Christian classical education, logic is used to defend Christianity.  But in my case, brushing up on logic started to unravel mine.  It brought up a lot of flaws in my thinking.

The final piece to this puzzle has to do with my son, the one with ADHD.  After years of trying to get his behavior under control, we finally had amazing success with a non-stimulant medication called Strattera.  It was like night and day.  His mood and attitude were completely changed and he was finally able to utilize all of the coping methods we had been teaching him.  It’s like it slowed down his impulsiveness enough to react appropriately to frustrating situations.

For years, the Christian community had told me to mistrust psychology and psychiatry because it would undermine my faith.  His behavior was a spiritual attack and we needed to pray for protection.

So, I prayed and prayed and prayed.  I trusted the Lord.  I looked at my struggle as a test of my faith.  Meanwhile, my son’s behavior got unbearable.  He was a wreck.  We all were wrecks.

When things finally got so bad that I broke down and took him in for a psychiatric evaluation, we finally got the help we needed.  We learned that he has ADHD and we learned how to be better parents – and it was not the strict, authoritarian, obedience-at-all-costs parenting advice that came from the Christian community.  And, eventually, we put him on medication, which is when all of the parenting efforts finally paid off and things got remarkably better.

Parenting, let alone homeschooling, a child with a neurobehavioral developmental disorder is extremely difficult.  When the parents have no idea what they are dealing with or how to deal with it, it can be a living nightmare.  Once my son’s ADHD was being managed, the stress level in the home went way down and I was able to actually think about things.

If a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor drug could make his erratic, unreasonable behavior almost non-existent, then it wasn’t a spiritual attack at all.  It had nothing to do with anything supernatural; it had to do with his brain chemistry and a lack of a specific type of neurotransmitter.  Despite my pleas for years, God did not help my son, but science did.

It was like the perfect storm – realizing how powerful our minds are, examining the logical problems with my beliefs, and experiencing the superiority of science over superstition in a way that was life-changing.  The floodgates opened and I began to question everything about this worldview I had believed in so deeply for years.

Needless to say, it did not withstand the scrutiny.

I was confused.  I was conflicted.  I didn’t understand what it would mean for my life if I wasn’t a Christian anymore.  I didn’t know what to think.

Then one morning, I was getting up and I just stopped.  I sat there on the edge of the bed and thought to myself, what would happen if I didn’t believe in God anymore?  I decided to spend that one day as if God did not exist and see what would happen.

I remember that the sun was shining brightly that day.  I felt relieved.  I felt alive.  I felt free.  I finally understood what a self-imposed prison the Christian religion is.  And I never went back.

It’s been a rough couple of days and last night I found myself singing, “I’m never going back to okay.  I’m never going back to easy.  I’m never going back to the way it was.  I’m never going back to okay.”

Then, I wondered, who is that song even by?  So, I googled it.  Oh, yeah.  The Afters.  A Christian band.

I don’t think that song means what I think it means.

Obviously, the singer is saying that they (it’s “we” not “I,” as I sing it) are never going back to the way they were before finding Jesus.  I am saying that I am never going back to the way I was after I found Jesus.  It’s rather ironic, no?  I sing a Christian song to encourage me in my unbelief.

Let’s look at the lyrics from my perspective, that of someone who felt like she was not really living her life, but playing it safe by relying on Christianity to tell her how to live and thinking that prayer is actually an active way of dealing with her problems.

It’s not the end, but it feels like it is
I’m waking up, like I’m back from the dead
I’m stepping out, and I feel so free
But as long as I’m moving it’s all right

I feel alive, and it hurts for a change
No looking back
It’s hard to believe that I was cool
With the days that I wasted
Complacent and tasteless and bored
But that was yesterday…

We’re never going back to OK
We’re never going back to easy
We’re never going back to the way it was
We’re never going back to OK

Wow.  It is uncanny how spot on that describes how I feel about my old life as a Christian (complacent, tasteless, bored, the days I wasted) and how I feel now (alive, waking up, back from the dead, so free).

And it hurts for a change.  One of the things I have realized is that I never felt extreme pain when I was a Christian because I believed with all of my mind and heart that God was handling everything and I did not need to worry.  I really believed that for a long time and it made my life relatively worry-free.

That might sound great.  It is an appealing claim that Christianity makes and it really works, if you can make yourself believe it strongly enough.

But then there is the other side.  You cannot suppress one side of your emotions without it affecting the other.  So, while I was insulated from extreme pain and worry, I also was not feeling the extreme joy and pleasure that life has to offer.  Everything was just a moderate lukewarm.

I’m waking up, like I’m back from the dead

I’m never going back to okay.

Indeed, that is where we start.  That is how we know that God is real.  Then, we are more able to force ourselves to accept the garbage that follows.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I last left you, I had just accepted Jesus and got saved.  But that was not when I became the believe-it-at-all-costs, hard core Christian that I would become.  I still lacked that God moment that I could turn to when presented with anything that contradicted my deeply held beliefs.  I had not yet encountered the thing that would transform my desire for a savior into full fledged Jesus coma – the transcendent experience.

Oddly, I cannot remember how soon after my conversion this event happened, but I remember it like it was yesterday.  I was overwhelmed and frustrated with things I cannot even recall today, so I went into my room and cried out to God.  The details are murky to me, but what happened next remains crystal clear – hot tears began to pour from my eyes as I felt a warm, tight “hug” envelop me.  I knew everything would be okay because my Jesus was holding me.  I could trust him, this I knew.

From that point on nothing else mattered.  Nothing.  There was nothing you could say or do, no science, no psychology, no history, no contradiction in the Bible that you could ever point out to me that would convince me that Jesus was not real.  I had literally felt his presence.

Why Jesus?  I have been asked that before.  How did that experience prove that the god(s) of Christianity was real and not some other god.

I believed that it was the God of the Bible because that is the god I had prayed to.  I had no experience with any other god-based religion and, since this one came to me when I needed him, it must be true.

(Yes, I am so aware of the twisted logic of that conclusion – now, that is.)

In early 2005, shortly after I became a Christian, our kids had met our new neighbors, who happened to be Christian.  They were those “it’s not a religion; it’s a relationship” counter-cultural Christians.  They were cool, with tattoos.  The mom had blue hair.  The dad worked at a coffee house and listened to the Christian equivalent of death metal (life metal?  eternal life metal??).  They went to a home fellowship, instead of a church.  They were not religious people; they just loved Jesus and loved people the way Jesus did.

One day, the mom came to my door to tell me about a book study she and some other women were doing at the home where they had their fellowship.  The book was Captivating, by John and Stasi Eldredge.  I joined the study and met the other women involved in the home church.

This was a real turning point for my faith, for several reasons.  For one, I now had a community of believers.  It was amazing how easy it was to open up to and trust each other, since we knew that we all loved Christ.  It was unlike any kind of relationship I had ever had with another woman, let alone a whole group.  It was an amazing bond.  The fact that the bond was so unlike anything I had ever experienced further convinced me of the supernatural presence of god and his working in our hearts.

Another significant thing that came out of that book group was my introduction to spiritual warfare.  “Captivating” was my first introduction to the concept.  As with everything I came to believe, I had an experience that confirmed its existence and from then on I stopped questioning it.  (After all, the questioning comes from Satan himself, another spiritual attack!)  I read everything I could about spiritual warfare, like “Battlefield of the Mind,” by Joyce Meyer.  I went to a “Living Free in Christ” conference, where I learned all about how spiritual warfare works and went though the “prayer steps” to renounce any and all things I had done in my life to give Satan a foothold.  “Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram,” the podcast that led me to accept Jesus as my savior, even had a series on spiritual warfare.

Everywhere I looked, there was confirmation of this idea that there is a battle going on in the heavenly realm for our souls.  Every time we would step out in faith and do something great for God’s Kingdom, we would come under attack, in the form of negative thoughts, bad attitudes (especially from our children), and other events that seemed to stand in our path.

Soon, every doubt I had about Christianity was thought by me to be an attack from Satan.  My circle of Christian friends confirmed this belief as true and everything that went on in our lives was viewed through this lens.

I started to fear worldly influences as an attempt by Satan to undermine my beliefs and the plan that god had for me.  So, I limited what I would watch and listen to.  I even limited what the kids could watch and listen to.  After the “Freedom in Christ” conference, I even went though all of my books and CDs and threw out anything that was against god, including yoga videos and most secular music.   It was black and white – if it wasn’t honoring god, it was working against god and not something that I should let in.

Meanwhile, there were other ways that my faith was affirmed.  It seemed like every time I trusted God, he was there for me.  Every time this happened, my belief became stronger.

My oldest son, now 13, but 8 at the time, was going into third grade.  For kindergarten and second grade, we had a lot of problems with the school.  He now has been diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety, and severe seasonal depression, but at the time, he was just a very bright little boy who could not sit still when he finished his work.  Since he didn’t have a diagnosis, the school expected him to use will power to sit still.  Needless to say, that did not work.  I was at the school almost daily trying to help them come up with a solution and he was getting lower and lower self-esteem because he wasn’t able to change himself.

A few weeks before school was to start for third grade, I received a letter from the school with information about his teacher for the new year.  I started getting really stressed out about the school year.  We had such a great summer and I could not stand the thought of dealing with the same problems for another school year.

After three or four nights of not sleeping because of the stress, I decided that I would trust the problem to god.  I prayed about it and asked god to give me one good night of sleep and provide a solution to my problem.

I fell right asleep and woke up the next day with the idea to homeschool.  I believed that god had given me this idea.  When it turned to be the ideal solution for my unique child (even the principal agreed), I was convinced even further that I was following an all-knowing god who would always lead me in the right direction.

Every step of the way, every time god came through, my faith was stronger and I went deeper into trying to live in a way that served and honored god.

When I learned about tithing – giving 10% of our income to the church – I knew that we had to trust god with our finances.  (That’s how they spin it.)  If we showed god our thanks for everything he gave us, he would always meet our needs.  So, even though we are a one income family, which puts us in the low income category, we gave 10% of our income to the church and other Christian causes.  We trusted god.

And god came through.

The first time we tithed, my husband got an unexpected spot award, just as our car needed repairs.  Praise God!

And so, on it went.  I would trust.  God would provide.  My belief was confirmed.  I would go deeper.  Lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseam.

(Read part three.)