My Story

Nielsen

Being born into a fervently Christian family and community, I remember trying to be enough, to live up to the inevitably high and exacting spiritual standards. Even when I strayed into momentary lapses of defeat and lived the cliche double life, I was still attempting in some part of myself to meet the standard’s hold over me. There I was, all throughout childhood and as a teenager and into young adulthood, trying to match up and never succeeding.

My relationship with God changed at 18 when I experienced the freedom of following God out of love and desire instead of obligation and duty. But the legalism, the expectation and pressure, it lingered. I went to YWAM (Youth With A Mission, an international interdenominational missions organization) because I wanted to but also because that’s what a good young Christian should do. It was perhaps beneficial, but was it me? Who, really, was I trying to be? I traveled around the world with a dear friend because I wanted to, yes, but also because I felt that God was “calling” me, all the while trying to make myself feel a love and servitude I don’t believe I had. I tried to be good. I wanted to be a hero. I was attempting to be someone—a missionary, a servant, a lover and follower of Jesus, to walk the narrow way into which I had been funneled. I was supposed to see supernatural signs and wonders and miracles and healings, to speak in tongues and cast out demons. But I did not. I was trying to be who and what I was supposed to be, but my heart never caught up. Was it ever me? Who was I trying to be? And for whom? Myself, my God, my parents, others?

I went to Asia with the same hopes. I wanted to make a difference through teaching English, to change the world, but the reality was far from the ideal. It was not for me to change any one or any place or any thing but to be changed, humbled, and broken by the world instead. The experience always differed from the expectation. I rarely saw or found God in the ways I was “supposed” to, faced again and again with my own emptiness and lack of love and compassion. Little by little I was losing my religion—perhaps even my faith and my God—with all of its legalism, duty, and obligation. All of my efforts were turned on their head. I as the one meaning to change the world was always changed by it instead, moving from my false self and false gods to truer ones. That lonely year in Asia changed me. Solitude and isolation had its way in my life, my heart. Loneliness filled me with a truth not found in religious activity.

After moving to Big Sky, Montana in 2016 I again had more spiritual aspirations. I wanted to serve and my dream came true when I was hired as the Next Generation Pastor at my small local church. But a year and a half in I left. I did my best to fulfill the role prescribed for me, having reached a pinnacle I no longer believed in. It wasn’t me, or it never had been (I am uncertain which); I could no longer give the pat answers I wasn’t at all convinced I believed in anymore. I was being inauthentic (torture for an enneagram four); in giving the “correct” theological answers I was lying to myself, and thus to others. So I went back to work for my former employer as a salaried employee. And here I am, no longer involved with the church because something I couldn’t question asked me to leave in order to be honest.

Now, I no longer know what I believe about many things (heaven and hell, salvation, who’s in and out, sexuality, homosexuality, the Bible, prayer, church, the supernatural, spiritual gifts, and the list goes on). Yet, I still believe much the same as I always have, just in a vastly different way—and from the outside.

This is the short story of my progression, the bare bones of my spiritual journey. “I reserve the right to change,” I once heard it said. I do. I am not today who I was yesterday. I will not be tomorrow who I am today. And in the progression—or regression, if you prefer—God is still with me, and so I with God.