How Christianity Ruined My Life
It felt like God was content to kick back and read His newspaper while I drowned at sea.
This wasn’t supposed to be my lot. I’d served Him faithfully all my life and lived within the boundaries He’d set for godliness. Yet on all the things that mattered most to me, He stayed curiously silent over the years. I wasn’t asking for much: just someone I could love, work that I could be proud of, a community where I could be safe. These things were biblical, surely, and good. And what was it that Scripture said?
As the years went on, that verse increasingly felt like a joke. Around me there were people who didn’t give any thought to God and His ways, but they were getting everything that I wanted! Why did God seem intent on frustrating all my attempts to carve out this life for myself?
My circumstances had led me to misinterpret God chronically: I thought that He was not good because He refused to give me the good things that I needed to thrive. But after three miserable years of trying to find happiness apart from Him, I realised that I’d gravely misread the situation.
We don’t hear much about idols these days. It seems like such an antiquated idea, people bowing to wooden statues and expecting to be saved. How can they not see that those things are useless?
But what I didn’t realize was how much having a spouse, a job with career progression, and a church community to alleviate my loneliness, had become idols.
If only I had these things, my heart unknowingly thought, I’d be saved from pain. They’d meet my needs for significance, love, belonging, and value.
And, if I really had to choose, it wasn’t God who I believed was the more effective of the two.
As He held those things back from me, and watched me rage and rail, God must have been rubbing His temples wondering, “How can she not see that those things will not save her?”
I can’t be certain, but I have a hunch why God ruined all my plans. If He had let me have those things I had wanted so badly, I would have depended on them to meet all my needs. I would then have to spend every waking minute ensuring I didn’t lose them, so that my needs could keep being met.
And when these idols failed to complete me—as they were bound to fail—I would have been completely shattered. What kind of damage would being so overwrought with fear have done to me? What kind of damage would I have done to the people I loved by expecting them to fill a need no human could fill?
It was out of His goodness that God upturned my life: to expose all the idols that I was relying on to save me. God refused to leave me deceived, clamoring for things that would not work. Instead, He led me to Himself: the True Satisfier (Phil 4:19). I’ve come to learn that being married or having a successful career or a church community aren’t dreadful things to want. But if I couldn’t survive without them, I know I’ve made them my idols.
Since I left my relationship and returned to God, there’s not been a day where I haven’t felt an excruciating loss. But there’s also not been a day where I’ve gone to bed without peace. God has come through, without fail, in quiet and surprising ways to meet the needs of the day.
They aren’t consolation prizes, God tells me, but the very best things I know you need right now to heal. Sometimes He shows up in the books I’m reading, giving me answers to painful questions I haven’t even properly articulated. He even orchestrated an elaborate object lesson once, on my evening walk, to demonstrate how walking with Him will lead me into a life that suits me better than the one I had left behind. These things give me hope that I’ve not been forgotten.
Even without the things I thought I needed, I’ve been sufficiently . . . filled. In letting go of all the crutches that made me feel supported and safe, I can finally give God a chance to reveal His power and make my life whole.
