(CN: doubts, mental health, eating- don’t worry there’s plenty of hope too!)
There’s a Rend Collective song called My Lighthouse that’s become a bit of a Christian cliché. Some laugh at the actions people add for children, some call it overplayed and cringey. I absolutely love it though, because it tells my story in four short lines:
“In my wrestling, and in my doubt,
In my failures, You won’t walk out.
Your great love will lead me through,
You are the peace in my troubled sea.”
I sang this song weakly to myself in the summer after my first year of uni, staying by a wild and windy sea in North Devon, every moment overwhelmed with wrestling and doubt. That was the summer where I almost walked out on God, believing Him cruel, judgemental and utterly removed from my life.
And that was the summer I discovered how extraordinarily different God was, and how determined He was to never let me go.
I grew up in a wonderful Christian family, and can’t remember a time when I didn’t assume that God was real. I asked to get baptised age 11 after years of hearing about God’s love, and had an incredible church youth group, which was a refuge for me throughout secondary school. Conversations about Jesus with people who weren’t Christians used to terrify me, but in sixth form my friend convinced me to help set up a Christian Union, which to my surprise really helped me grow in confidence.
Now I knew the intellectual reasons why Christianity was true, the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, the unlikeliness of the perfect conditions for life appearing by chance, the difficulty of believing in right and wrong in a world without God. By the time I went to university, I was eager to get involved in church and the Christian Union, and wanted to share Jesus with the people I met.
However, starting university was a pretty overwhelming experience, and not just because of the global pandemic that accompanied it. My course was taught from a very post truth perspective, highlighting the harm caused by Christian missionaries and suggesting that the idea that there was one universal truth was inherently oppressive. I had lots of conversations with new friends about faith, which was hugely exciting, but became a little overwhelming when I felt I had to defend myself every time I walked into the kitchen. Hardest of all, I met a whole host of amazing people who didn’t know Jesus and showed no interest in Him.
For the first time in my life, I started seriously questioning whether Christianity was true, or even good.
That summer, as I went on holiday with my family to North Devon, my questions only grew. Why if there was a loving God, was the world wracked with suffering? Why did so many people not know Jesus, and why didn’t God seem to care? Why had people who claimed to be Christians caused so much harm?
I kept flip-flopping between certainty and despair, spending my days asking for prayer, reading Christian books, trying to see if it was true, and my nights laying in awake in bed, unable to stop worrying about suffering, judgement, lack of meaning. I got to a point where I couldn’t sleep, could barely eat, and was struggling to exist inside my own head.
The world without Jesus seemed so dark and empty, without hope beyond death, without good and evil actually mattering, without a reason to love the outsider and the weak. But I’d take it if I had to. I didn’t know which was worse – a meaningless world, or a God who didn’t seem to care at all.
We continued our routine of normal holiday activities, and I was desperate to be fine again, and didn’t understand why I couldn’t stop worrying. I struggled to eat without throwing up and grew thinner than I’d ever been. My family, who were such rocks throughout all of this, suggested I met with a biblical counsellor from church, who I’d read the Bible with in my gap year. I agreed, I would have tried anything at that point, but didn’t think it would help much.
In hindsight, I’ve never been more grateful to have been wrong.
The morning of my first counselling session, I paced round the living room unable to stand still, talking non-stop at my parents about how hopeless I felt. Eventually, once they had persuaded me to eat something small, I sat in their bed, opened up the Zoom call and threw a barrage of my hardest questions at my counsellor. I was expecting her to give theological answers like many had tried to before. But instead, she told me “I’m actually not going to answer these questions right now. Jesus doesn’t need defending”.
I was stunned and confused. Wasn’t it her job to answer my questions?! And how could she possibly be so sure about Jesus? But what she said next floored me even more.
“I can see you want to know if it’s all true or not, but to do that, you need to get into a place where you’re healthy. The God I believe in really cares about you, and wants you to be well, safe, and happy. So you need to eat, and sleep, and look after yourself, and then we can start to think about your questions.”
She went on to give me practical advice about taking care of myself, including a brilliant grounding technique of making a list of all the things, even tiny things, that I could think of to be thankful for when I started to spiral. I was amazed by how kind and gentle she was, putting my wellbeing first, without any sort of agenda to convince me to be a Christian.
And I also wanted to know more about the God she knew, who seemed so, well, nice.
As the weeks went on and I began to eat and sleep better, we started working through my questions, and had some amazing discussions. She explained to me that though Christianity seemed big and overwhelming, at the end of the day the most important thing was what I made of Jesus. The whole thing hinged upon whether or not he was God on earth, and whether he really rose from the dead. I started rereading the gospels, and was struck by how kind Jesus was, how he cried, and laughed, and suffered, and did things only God could, and made friends with the lowest of the low, and died for the people who killed him.
According to Jesus, God was nothing like the miser I’d imagined. He was a Father, who gave everything he had, even His only Son, to bring His children home. The story of the Prodigal Son particularly struck me- this Father runs to embrace runaways and reprobates.
Meanwhile, God just kept doing things in my life and refusing to let go of me. Every single day, I decided that Christianity couldn’t be real, and I would have to give up hope and leave it all behind. Some days, I actively wished God dead. And yet every day, something would happen that was so strange, it made me think it must be God. Bible verses that I woke up with in my head, forgot about and then randomly came across in a book later that day, and were exactly what I needed to hear. Friends who normally never talked about Christian things, suddenly curious, making me realise maybe I did know what I believed. Songs that described exactly how I felt, silver seas, sunsets. This went on for about two weeks straight.
The final straw happened weeks later, when I woke up at 3am back at home, randomly screaming at God. I’d been doing better for weeks, rebuilding my health, so why did I suddenly feel like I was back to square one? My questions were raging again, and I screamed at God like never before to give me sleep, for any sort of peace. I eventually went to sleep and woke up, feeling oddly, tangibly peaceful.
I had counselling, and it helped, but as the day went on, I sank back into despair again. And I just gave up. God wasn’t here, He wasn’t real, He definitely didn’t care about me or anyone else and I may as well give up on faith right there and then. I was just exhausted and felt entirely numb.
Then, just then, I heard the thunk of a letterbox and realised that something had come through the door, and it was for me.
It was a postcard, with a sunset on it. And in front of the sunset, a cross.
The postcard was from my friend from uni, who wasn’t a Christian, and had no idea this was even happening to me. So why had he sent me a postcard with a cross on?
Why did he say he’d been drawn to visiting churches?
Why did he say that maybe, we need something like religion?
And I got down on my knees and I wept.
I cried, and cried, and threw up my hands and gave in, because I just knew it was God. He knew just what I needed at exactly the right time, and was active in my life in ways I didn’t even think possible. He must have known that I love letters, love physical, certain words that can’t be doubted or denied. And He was working in my friends’ lives.
The story wasn’t over yet, of course, and God held on to me through plenty of ups and downs after that. A few weeks later, I was cycling through traffic on a cloudy day, and my mind drifted into anger and hopelessness again. I went down to the river and prayed rather miserably for God to give me just a drop of Himself.
As I sat by the bridge reading, I saw my next-door neighbour on the other side of the river, limping. I was in exactly the right place to help her, so I ran over the bridge and started walking her home until her daughter arrived. I gave begrudging thanks to God, telling Him “You work in weird ways”. It started raining, so I gathered up my books and started walking home.
Then, as if for confirmation, I looked up and suddenly, the sky was bright blue, and the most perfect rainbow I’d ever seen was stretching over the river. I laughed out loud and started praising God, because He was there! I’d prayed for a drop, and He’d given me a whole bucketload of joy. By the time I got home, the rainbow had disappeared, and I realise I would never have seen it if I hadn’t been down by the river at that specific time.
And I kept thinking wow, how patient must God be to keep pulling me back time and time again. How on earth could he love me this much, to bend the sky, just for me.
In my wrestling, God didn’t walk out once, and I am now grateful for that summer. Hard as it was, it completely rebuilt my view of God, and has enabled me to help others through periods of doubt. I still have ups and downs, but I wanted to share something of the goodness of knowing Him, how He loves you with a deep, relentless love, no matter how weak or doubtful you feel. I would absolutely love to chat if you’re interested in anything I wrote here. I also urge you to get support if you’re struggling with mental health or in any way.
And I urge you to ask that question my counsellor asked me: “What do you make of Jesus?” You never know how it might change your life.