u/Pleasant-Intern-598

I have spent a long time wrestling with the hardest questions I know how to ask.

I struggled deeply with Calvinism. The idea of a God who ordains every detail of every life — every desire, every failure, every death — felt not only intellectually strained but morally horrific. It seemed to erase real responsibility, turn the call to repentance into theater, and make God the ultimate source of the very evil He condemns. I could not square that portrait with the God who speaks of justice, mercy, love, and hatred of the blood of the innocent. The attempts to qualify the plain language of Scripture so that it fits the system only increased my distrust.

I considered the problem of evil from several angles. I can accept that God, seeing every possible future, may choose the one that most fully displays both His justice and His mercy. I can accept that intense evil sharpens the thirst for justice and makes the final triumph of goodness more decisive. I can accept that we did not ask to be born, yet existence itself was not a trap — we are the ones who turned a world made for community and love into something darker. What I cannot accept is a God who authors the wickedness and then punishes the creatures for being what He made them to be.

These walls pushed me toward agnosticism. The deeper question became consciousness itself: how a physical world produces subjects who suffer, invent meaning, invent God, and then demand that reality answer for itself. Belief in God still feels like the most reasonable response to the existence of mind and moral demand — until the theological costs become too high.

Yet I cannot force a blind “yes.” I am constitutionally unable to shut off the questioning. Pretending would feel like a betrayal of the very mind I was given. So I am left with this decision:

I will follow God’s Word under the assumption that this is something I must do as a human being prone to evil. I will attend His call, knowing He guides even though He has no obligation to do so. I will try to obey what the Bible clearly teaches and question everything that must be questioned. I will wrestle until I die, but I will never lock myself inside a human system.

From this day I am simply a Christian. Not a Calvinist, not a Molinist, not a Baptist, not a Catholic. I will learn from any tradition that confesses Christ as Lord, the Father as the Author, and the Holy Spirit as the Comforter — all of them God. I will keep what is blatantly biblical and discard what cannot bear the weight of the text.

I will trust that God is good, just, and caring. That His wrath is not unmerited. That He hates evil, chaos, and the destruction of the innocent. That He desires an ordered world in which His creation can live with Him. I will read Scripture expecting a God who wants to be with me not because I am special, but because I am His. A God who works to preserve whatever remains of the image of God in me. A God to whom I can respond because He is trustworthy.

I will not respond to a tyrant.

If He is who He says He is, then I will be fine. I will keep walking, keep questioning, and keep trusting that the One who made the mind that cannot stop asking is not threatened by the questions.