How Fear Led Me to Christianity
Until courage to face fear led me to embrace uncertainty with spiritual certainty
Proverbs 1:7 (NIV)
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
- Proverbs 1:7 (NIV)
Courage is the most important of all virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
- Maya Angelou
The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
- Seneca
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Oh, the challenges I have faced throughout life on making decisions with long-lasting consequences. Sure, nowadays when you get married you can also get divorced. When you quit one job you can get another one. When you commit your life to Christianity you can switch religions/spiritual systems or become an atheist. The thing is, those are lifestyles that require effort and a consistent flow of energy in order to stay plugged in. They each require the perception that it is good for you (or that it should be good for you), a life-thought that creates the reality, and action to manifest the thought life in the here and now in a tangible way. Once manifested there has been a fair amount of energy accumulated keeping what has been manifested in motion. This can be years and years in the making and can be like a high-speed rail traveling at 160 miles an hour. Only, as human beings we are not operated through technological systems with an on-off switch, we operate through energy — which at its best is pure chaos. When there’s a switch in speed and direction through some shift in the pattern we tend to find it difficult to go with the flow of the new energetic path.
I wasn’t raised particularly religious. It was something I was born into as an established communal rule. A system set in place designed to keep my family lineage physically alive, with the perception of safety, and with the promise of eternal joy and happiness in the afterlife, which were unobtainable in the realities of this life. If we could follow the mandates of the faith of our religions and live a life worthy of God’s blessings our reward would be Heaven.
My family embraced Christianity.
Although no one in my family was particularly pious, spent much time in church, or even actually read the Bible, they all seemed to go along with the belief in a God that was omnipresent and the Creator of ALL. They believed in the virgin birth of Jesus and in the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit who lived within each and every one of us who believed.
I lived through a very colorful childhood, riddled with moments of adventure and bliss mixed with severe abuse that left me with little self-worth. I spent quite a bit of my childhood in and out of the rusty doors of my grandmother's houses. The dirt roads that led to her houses would flow right up to her porch as a constant reminder that the city had neglected to pave the roads for the inhabitants of the rural parts of town. As a child, the dust and dirt were toys that filled my days with an outlet for the expression of my limitless imagination. Lost in play I connected to my inner guidance that served my Soul. I believe psychologists refer to this as the resilience of children. Even through my darkest moments, play was the flicker of optimism that kept me going, that consistently brought me back into myself to experience my own inner guidance rather than the vile and cruel physical realities that I was enduring.
I tried to make sense of my outer realities. It was so confusing — the stark difference compared to my inner realities. I spent so much time in play as a beautiful princess, loved and adored by everyone around, and the feelings were mutual. I had the most magnificent relationships, I lived in the most beautiful homes, ate the best foods, traveled the world, coexisting peacefully with everyone around me. Outside of my imagination I was sexually, physically, and mentally abused. I was emotionally neglected and not properly looked after.
I picked up on just enough through sporadically attending church services and eavesdropping on the conversations of family members, that the way to make life here worth living was to follow the ways of Jesus.
“God don’t like ugly! Ya’ betta git ya’ life right, cause ya’ know what’s waiting fo’ ya’ on the other side if ya’ don’t!”
These are the words echoed off the walls of my grandmother's heart. They echoed while she sold candy to the neighboring children during the day and shots of whiskey to the drunks at night. They echoed through her side hustle of cleaning churches a couple of days during the week and yelling at her grandchildren for this that and the other in between. The words aren’t exact, they are a combination of accumulated energy pushed forward from her grandmother, to her mother, to her, to my mother, to me.
Get your life right? How do you do that? And no, I don’t know what’s waiting on the other side. Do you?
Eavesdropping became my modus operandi. I had so many questions and I convinced myself that the answers to my questions would ease the confusion between my inner and outer worlds. But the reality was that I was receiving information on how to “live right” from the very people that were abusing me and only added to my confusion. Over time I let go of my inner guidance of beauty, peace, and love and succumbed to the harsh realities of my outer existence which was becoming increasingly fueled by a fear of uncertainty.
As the conversations that interested me the most amongst my family increased so did their insistence that I leave the room, “This is grown folks business! Go’on somewhere!”
The gist of what information I was able to gather was that…
- We all needed to get our life “right” before we died
- While young get all of your “sinning” out of the way so that by the time you got old it would all be out of your system
- Before you get too old give your life to God, it’s his anyway, but the act of voluntarily giving would ensure that you go to Heaven when you die
It didn’t take long to hit rock bottom after giving up on my beautiful princess dreams. At the ripe old age of eighteen, I decided I would give my life over to God, hoping he would cure all that ailed me. It never really worked out that way, but I gave it my best shot. Over the years I found out how misinformed I had been, but also how so many other people had been misinformed as well. I spent countless hours in Bible study, knocking on the office doors of pastors, watching the religious TV stations, and trying to make sense of how what I was experiencing was not lining up with the words that I was reading in my Bible. Pastor after pastor boiled it all down to my lack of faith.
“You have to have faith Sister Nicole. Keep pressing forward…and in faith.”
Somewhere along the way something clicked.
I had spent a lot of years in and out of churches searching for answers, looking for some guarantee that what was being taught was actually true. It was beginning to feel more and more like a placebo. I had given so much time and energy to the mandates of my religion, pumping the brakes seemed almost impossible. But…
I left the church. I left the Christian world view. I stopped putting energy into the God of the Bible. I put it into myself.
Needless to say, most of my friends dropped like flies. All of those people who told me how much they loved me. The ones that told me how special I was in the eyes of God.
Yes, those people.
Soon I was being met with scriptures like:
2 Corinthians 6:14 NIV
Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
And…
2 Peter 2:20–22 NIV
20 If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing(A) our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ(B) and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.(C) 21 It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.(D) 22 Of them the proverbs are true: “A dog returns to its vomit,”[a](E) and, “A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.”
There were secret prayer circles lifting me up before God in hopes that he wouldn’t strike me dead and send me to hell. My husband (at the time) would tell me that now that I had turned my back on God that I no longer had a moral compass, while he and a friend of mine would hold hands and cry together praying for my withering Soul.
I was contacted by pastors, their wives, and even by people that I barely knew offering prayers and their mentorship. I was even contacted by my mother! (That’s a whole other story in itself!)
Alas, as far as the church was concerned, I was a lost cause. While I was open to others giving their energy to what they felt was true and life-giving for them, I was not met with the same level of love and acceptance. I was no longer a part of the club, so I lost all of my friends with the exception of one.
With religion I was given certainty that I was loved and that I would spend eternity in Heaven if I lived a certain way here on earth. I was a part of THE elite club and everyone else had it all wrong and we were the only ones with the truth. At least I thought I was given certainty until I realized that as each pastor told me I just needed to have “faith” over and over again — that they didn’t know any more than I did. It was like they had closed their eyes and crossed their fingers and hoped that this would all work out in the end. Was I the one all along who determined what my life would be?
It took a tremendous amount of courage to make the shift. Imagine the force of everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor flying forward from slamming on the breaks of the high-speed rail traveling at 160 miles an hour. My whole life went through a metamorphosis. All that wasn’t bolted was destroyed. My marriage, my home, my friends, my job, the church.
It took a tremendous amount of courage to slam on the brakes. I did get hit in the head with a few objects, but I’m okay. It’s kind of like sustaining a brain injury that uncovers a superpower. For me, that superpower is Courage.
I walked into the Christian faith afraid that I was doomed to live out the rest of my life as a battered and bruised little girl. I walked into Courage with the faith in myself to create the life that I wanted to live built out of the uncertainty of each moment. With the Courage to walk the path being structured as I walk along, my childhood dreams are back in full force, picking up energy as I write in this very moment.
“I am a beautiful princess, loved and adored by everyone around, and the feelings are mutual. I have the most magnificent relationships, I live in the most beautiful homes, eat the best foods, travel the world, and coexist peacefully with everyone around me.”