From Doubt to Faith: Discovering God's Ever-Present Guidance

From my mid-20s to my mid-30s, I identified as an agnostic who was unsure if there was a God.

However, the culmination of experiences and lessons learned over the past six years has made me a believer in Christ and prepared to get baptized next month.

I would say as a child, I was more of a cultural Christian than I was a believer in Christ. We'd occasionally go to a church but I didn't have a spiritual connection to God like everyone else around me. I was envious of their bond with God because I felt disconnected from Him.

Throughout most of my life, I struggled with loneliness and that would push me further into the depths of depression where it feels like God is out of reach. I'd often wonder why God would let me suffer and not reach out to me when there were so many he'd saved before.

In my mid-20s, I had a crisis of faith and religion and was tired of telling people the lie of me being a Christian. I felt saying there was no God was just as determinative as saying there was a God, so I settled at the mid-way conclusion: I don't know.

About six years ago, I started questioning what my purpose for living was, and I discovered that answer while on a train in Germany: To serve mankind and be a positive force in the world in any way that I possibly could.

Coincidentally, it was around this time that my life was changing for the positive as my social anxiety was finally gone and my days of depression were minimal. I would later realize that this horrid mental state was like blinders to seeing how God was always with me.

When I decided to write my book, it was partially to express myself, but what I don't talk about much was how it felt like I was called to do so. I wasn't a writer but I am a good communicator & throughout the entire process, it felt like I was being led to fulfill this obligation.

For once, I was listening to that voice inside me, my God-given instinct, and every time I followed my intuition, it led me into the arms of amazing and impactful individuals. My days of worrying about insignificant issues had disappeared because I was following God's lead.

Random Christians would come up to me and tell me how they see God in me and it would always hit me like a ton of bricks. Yeah, people say nice things to people but you can usually tell when it's a nice gesture but equally empty: These people were serious and genuine.

I began re-examining my entire life and perspective on the events that were both positive and negative and with a clearer mind, I now saw the necessity of the struggle that I endured due to the strength I obtained from those experiences.

I remember how even in those painful moments, something strangely positive would always come from it, or random individuals were interjected into my life to save me from an even worse predicament.

I think back to when I was going to sleep in my car after shortly moving to Tennessee and when my boss asked me how I was doing, I told him the truth about me being homeless when I would normally lie to suffer alone.

However, my boss gathered the other supervisors to pool money for me to sleep in long-stay hotels until I had enough money for an apartment. I never asked for their help and they didn't want anything in return: I believe that was God's way of showing himself to me.

How about my friend and former co-worker calling me with great urgency to leave my job because he felt something negative was about to happen with my employer? I found a job a few weeks later and they laid off the entire IT department just two months later.

I'm not usually one to think every good deed is because of God. Still, there has been an abundance of coincidences in my life of being helped or led by grace from individuals that all nudged me closer to the conclusion that there is something greater than me and loves me: God.

I learned that there can be a usefulness to suffering and that one person's suffering can be a way to prevent the suffering of others. Today, I regret nothing and am glad to have gone through this strife because I can now help many more who are in the midst of it.

Today, I'm a believer and constantly work on my relationship with God through daily prayer. I am equally thankful for the suffering I've endured as well as the blessings he's graced me with. I plan to symbolically turn my life over to God through Baptism next month.

So, next time someone tells you that people can't change, have them read my story. I’m giving my life to serve God and I can’t wait.