A Faith in Recovery | Leverage

A long time ago, a friend of mine told me that the biggest request of the persecuted church is prayer. Ever since, I’ve gotten prayer bulletins from Open Doors, Barnabas Aid, and Samaritan’s Purse—Christian organizations that help the persecuted, marginalized, and disaster-stricken.

Admittedly, prayer is not the most exciting or pleasant discipline. Most of the time, it does little more than raise awareness of the suffering of believers. Most of the time, I say a prayer, think about the situation I’ve read about, and move on.

This request was different.

A Faith in Recovery | Lessons Learned

Last time, I said three big questions were hanging over my head:

1. How do I regard those lion dreams?
2. How do I discern God’s voice?
3. What lessons does He want me to learn from this?

I wish I could say I’ve found the answers, but even now I have only guesses. I don’t know what His voice sounds like, I don’t know what He wanted me to learn, and I don’t know how to regard those dreams (let alone how to keep them out of my head and faith).

But for now, maybe I don’t need to know. Maybe it’s enough to take stock of what I do know.

And go figure! It’s a pretty decent list.

A Faith in Recovery | What Was It All For?

It’s not enough for me to recover from this crisis of faith. I want to recover well. I want my faith to be stronger than ever, unshaken and unperturbed by the tremors of doubt and fear.

But that raises huge questions: Why did it happen? What was the point?

And what am I supposed to learn from it? Surely it wasn’t for nothing, was it?

Right now, I couldn’t tell you.

A Faith in Recovery | An Act of the Will

I just came out of a 40-month crisis of faith, and I don’t think I’ll get over that anytime soon. It’s bad enough that I even went through it, but rebuilding my faith from the ground up feels like a bad sequel to a bad movie. My faith and worldview were blown up over a 40-month period, and very recently have I put some pieces back together. All the while, I’m doing everything I can think of to avoid a relapse.

Faith is no longer this blissful thing that gives my life meaning and pleasure. Instead, it feels like a bitter pill that I have to choke down for my own good. After spending almost five years living as if God ministered to me in dreams of lions, I’m finding myself having to give that up for my own good. That right there is pretty distressing, frankly. Granted, I’m not in danger of losing faith, but I am in danger of losing heart.

But that’s where the first difference between my old faith and my new faith becomes abundantly clear, and that’s where I feel as if I actually have a fighting chance. I don’t follow God because it feels good. It doesn’t. It’s giving me pain and grief. But I choose to follow God, because I know He’s telling it straight and I know He wants what’s best for me.

I’m choosing to believe, whether my feelings want me to or not.

A Faith in Recovery | May I Say This?

I don’t do PR for God. Ever since I launched this blog, I’ve made it a point to call things as I see them. I don’t try to market God, preach the Gospel, or defend the tenets of the Bible. All I do is chronicle my journey.

Ex-Narnian is not a ministry. It doesn’t do apologetics. It just tells the story of my journey of faith. Whether it’s about God or myself, I will always tell it like it is.

This post, however, might be a step too far.

A Faith in Recovery | The 4:8 Test

Joyce Meyer calls the mind a battlefield.

It’s hard to find words that get any truer than that.

Our thoughts are the engine that drives the rest of our lives. Whatever we think about and meditate on always affects how we live.

And if your brain is anything like mine—if it takes in tons of information but doesn’t always know how to process it—you need to have a strategy to rein it in.

This is something I’ve learned after spending years at the mercy of a mind running amok. I’ve learned the hard way that some things need to be fought, while others deserve to be ignored.

A Faith in Recovery | I’m No Hero

Christian culture has its own celebrities and underdogs. We esteem C.S. Lewis and the prodigal son. We love Tim Tebow and the woman who poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet. We sing along to Switchfoot and Tenth Avenue North, and we laud the persecuted church for its strength and courage.

I’m no celebrity. I’m no underdog, either. I’m a Ph.D. student with a mild form of autism, and I’m a former Narnia fan whose faith was thrown into crisis because of Narnia and the Bible. I don’t have any accomplishments to brag about. I don’t have any laurels to rest on. You know how many people I’ve led to Christ? None.

There’s a category for people like me: antihero.

A Faith in Recovery

Whenever you’ve hoped for something big to happen, you’ve probably spent hours daydreaming about it. You’ve thought about what it would look like, how it would feel, and what you would do if it ever came true. One day, it happens. The big wish comes true. The waiting comes to an end. Your whole world has changed, and life has just entered a whole new level of better. You want to shout and sing so the world hears. You feel so glad, you want the world to join the party.

But then reality sets in.

All of a sudden, the thing you wished for looks bigger and more challenging than you thought. You’ve stepped into this huge new world, and you feel like an alien. Now, you’re starting to wonder if this really is the grand new life you dreamt about, and you’re tempted to long for the good old days—even if those old days weren’t so good.

That’s my life in a nutshell.