A lot of times I’ll have a wave of sadness rush over me when I’m by myself and I don’t want to just sit in it but I never know what to do when I feel this way. So I wanna know what other girls do in moments like this that help :)
I (F27) grew up in a Christian household and went to church growing up, but I never really liked it. I always believed in God, but I never really liked church.
It wasn’t until I finished high school at 18 that I feel like I started my own faith journey, one that was for myself, and not for my parents.
I went to Kona, Hawaii, to do a program called YWAM (Youth With A Mission), which was 3 months of learning about God and 2 months in a different country doing missionary work, like spreading the gospel and stuff like that. I was involved in YWAM from 2017–2020 in various capacities: both as a student and a staff member.
I made great memories and some of my closest friends there, but I also saw a lot of things that made me question what was real and what wasn’t. I saw a lot of hypocrisy from people in leadership and a lot of things that felt very performative, like people being friendly and encouraging in a group setting but then being so mean and judgemental when one on one with them.
There’s also times when there would be speakers that came and prayed over people, and people would fall over and shake because they were supposedly “touched by the Holy Spirit.” But when the speaker came to me, I didn’t feel anything. This happened quite a few times, to the point where I started questioning whether I was the problem because I wasn’t responding the same way, or if people were faking it??
There was also a time when a speaker prayed for someone whose one leg was slightly shorter than the other (on stage in front of a ton of people). The person being prayed for said he felt healed, but later told people privately that he had lied because he felt pressured being on stage. So this made me question how many healings were real or how many were fake bc people were too embarrassed to admit they weren’t healed.
Once I left YWAM, I just worked and went to school and lived a pretty normal life. But throughout this time, I continued to go back and forth with my faith. There was even a time when I was supposed to go back to YWAM, but instead I ended up going to Colombia with my then-boyfriend. This was kinda a last minute decision, and my mom didn’t speak to me for months because she was mad at me for not going back to YWAM…
My parents have always encouraged my faith, but in a way that has sometimes felt more like pressure than genuine support. For example, I recently started going to church again for the first time in years, and my mom was SUPER supportive, which is great, but on the weeks I didn’t go, she would either not answer me (for context, we mostly talk over text because we don’t live in the same city) or just respond with “oh.”
Feeling like my parents, and more specifically my mom, support me conditionally depending on how they perceive my faith journey has made me question whether I actually believe in God, or if I’ve just convinced myself I do because that’s what I was taught growing up.
Has anyone else been through something similar?