There was a time in my life when my biggest problem was not fitting in at the church youth group. If this isn’t proof that whatever you’re worrying about now won’t matter down the line, I don’t know what is. By the time I was in middle school, the youth program at my church was very popular in my town. Even kids who weren’t in church on Sundays would be there at youth group on Wednesdays. It became a culture. There was a sort of pre-initiation ritual where they would drop off a pizza and a poster at your house at night, scream, and drive away. Then, the actual initiation ritual involved sleeping over at the church and not much else I can remember other than being chased after and almost shoved in a trash can at one point, one of the big green ones. They had these calls and responses that were so ingrained it seemed like hive mind when I watched them say them. One person would say, “when it comes in word,” and then the crowd, in one voice: “it comes in power.” There was also a broader culture of being very amped up, all the time, even when they had to live at the church for a week while leading kid’s bible camps in the oppressive summer heat. On the only retreat I ever went on, I remember being made to play football in the ocean with a pumpkin covered in lard after sleeping on practically a gym mat. I was up the wall, but everyone else genuinely looked like stock images, laughing and carrying on. They congregated in a chattering, erratic nucleus that was almost frightening. Think the scientist from Fairly Odd Parents and how he moves when he says, “Fairy! God! Parents!” They looked like that to me.

The absolute glee with which they greeted each other and the love they held in general seemed so great I wonder today whether it was fake or not. Maybe it was. Put forty 7th-12th graders in a room every week, and suddenly it’s Bleeding Kansas. I’m sure there was some insane drama that was hidden from my outside eyes through show, and back then, I honestly would have preferred it be a performance. If everyone was faking, maybe I could have grafted myself in and matched. But it truly seemed real at the time. At that age, some of the girls who were teenagers when I was a child got married to guys they met in youth group. Their bridesmaids were girls they met in youth group. It was serious and lifelong.

I won’t dwell on it, but my shy disposition at the time was simply impossible to reconcile with these people around me. I think I went three or four times. I stood and never knew what to do with my hands, I texted my friends, I hid in the copy room, whatever whatever etc. etc. etc. In the process, maybe I missed out on some radicalizing event that would have turned me into an evangelist. I may not be too far off the mark here, really, because they all held deep, adult-like religious convictions that I did not. They were the type of people to pull you aside and pray for you or lift up their hands while singing. I don’t mean to be critical. It probably did them a lot of good- spiritual milk, and all that- and I was truly envious of them. In fact, this is the first time I remember deeply reckoning with myself, because there was this spiritual path laid out ahead of me that I could not follow anymore. “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Growing up in that church, they trained up a child on a regimen. You went to church on Sundays (and Wednesdays, and maybe Sunday evenings, too). You did the children’s ministry from preschool to sixth grade. You did Awana to learn the Bible. You did vacation bible school in the summer, and you helped run it when you were older. And, most importantly for a young teenager to build a serious faith, you did the youth program. I was supposed to do this. I begged to know why I couldn’t, because I had followed the path otherwise. I was good.

Really, my life started at that church. My mom went to her first Bible study there when she was pregnant with me. My very first memory is playing with a mailbox toy in the church nursery. I can remember being so young that I was still in a car seat, picking up my cousins from school with my grandmother and listening to a CD that the church musicians recorded of the songs they played during service. My parents carted us off to church in dresses and frilly socks every Sunday morning, and until the sixth grade, we spent Sunday afternoons memorizing verses and Sunday evenings going back to church to recite them. We earned a marble in our mason jar at kids’ church on Wednesday nights if we could say a verse or the books of the Bible from memory. I had a jar full. As I got older, I helped out with the kids and babies; everything I know about stopping a toddler from crying I learned in the church nursery. And fatefully, when I was in seventh grade, someone tasked my mom with painting murals in the kids’ rooms and nurseries. All of a sudden I had spent years staying at the church until sundown, crouching on the floor painting a minuscule grass pattern along the baseboards or scrubbing a half gallon of spilt paint out of the carpet. I’ve eaten more Chick-fil-A sitting on the floor of that church, covered in paint, than I care to admit.

I felt I had done everything I was supposed to do, and then some. In a frankly un-Christian line of thought, I felt my works should have magically borne a relationship with Christ that people could see, in the same way that I could see everyone’s faith at church. For a year or two, I beat myself to death over this. I read Job and tried to understand fortitude, and when nothing stuck, I came to the childish conclusion that not fitting into youth group ruined my chances of adult spirituality forever. I grew to be very hateful. I wallowed in my weak faith, so much so that I almost killed it.

I think not being 13 years old grants you some wisdom by default. I soon realized that if I truly wanted to have a strong and public faith, I would have one. I am just not an evangelist. I am not made to witness. When I got pulled into a conversation recently about the paradox of Christianity (how can God be all-good and all-knowing at the same time?), I didn’t even try to argue with the fool who brought it up. But I knew how I should have answered. I know somewhere in the back of my mind was some answer I have been taught over and over involving free will and original sin, and if I really dug deep that day, I probably could have parroted it back to him. But I didn’t, and honestly, I wouldn’t have even wanted to. I don’t see these as teaching moments, I’m no good in a debate, and I am not a theologian, either. For me, I think it’s best that God is between me and God. My mom would say it’s the way I’m made. Talking unprompted, face-to-face about something as personal as faith is just not in my nature. She very eloquently told me once, “I think we are naturally inclined in certain ways. You were designed to be a bit more reticent.” I think that’s true. I also think she should write a book or something, because she texted that poetry to me on a random Thursday.

I think Christianity has potential to do a lot of good. It gives people hope that their loved ones pass on to a beautiful afterlife, and fortitude to hold out during the worst moments. The church can also provide incredible community. My parents’ friends from the church have been family to us for years. When my grandfather passed, some of them were at my grandmother’s house before I was. They stayed even when the broken A/C made the house 80 degrees in May and there was nothing to do but sweat and talk. I heard once that the will of God is written on our hearts. Maybe that was proof.

Ideologically, I would say the most important lessons are pretty objectively moral (love your neighbor, think of others first, don’t lie, don’t steal) and Bible stories are easy models to teach right and wrong (be courageous like Esther; don’t be hateful like Haman). However, I really really could have done without growing up with a graphic fear of hell. There has to be a better way of teaching children. When I was very young, I had a Sunday school teacher who told us hell would hurt forever. Then she would say, “if you haven’t accepted Jesus into your heart, pray this prayer with me right now.” I was a very nervous kid! How would I know if I actually believed? Would God really hear me? I prayed that prayer every Sunday and despaired.

I also take issue with the slew of verses people have picked out to justify prejudice. I think they are sterile at this point and I will never hear a sermon good enough to make me heed them. To me, they are null and void. It is the current perversion of the religion that truly incenses me the most. People associate Christianity with bigotry and hate now, and a lot of Christians aren’t doing much to disprove that. People I know personally will say on Sunday they follow the creed of Jesus, but on Monday spit in the faces of people Jesus would befriend. Or support people who would do worse. It frustrates me, because there are more verses about hypocrisy than about any of the issues with which they concern themselves most. Dr. King was prophetic when he said, “the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.” This was true in 1963 when he wrote it in a Birmingham jail, and it is true today.

Maybe it is because of these misgivings that I define my faith narrowly and personally these days. I simply put a lot of stock in God’s providence over my life, even when I can’t see it. Especially when I can’t see it. My favorite verse is about this: “for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

There’s nothing I’ve learned better than this: some things never leave you. I will carry the things I learned in the church for the rest of my life. I can say every single book of the Bible, still. I was taught to “hide God’s word in my heart,” and it is certainly hidden. Even the most inconsequential things remind me of scripture: if I physically lean on something, what else am I thinking of other than “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” Sunday school endures forever. But it is in unexpected moments that I am reminded of my religious upbringing most meaningfully. When I sit back and watch my friends laughing and happy, I think of Mary, treasuring up all these things in her heart. All throughout my nightmare freshman year, the church bells outside my dorm window would play a hymn I loved as a kid. I mean to say that all of this is sealed forever. I’ve worn the same cross necklace since I was 15. I doubt I’ll ever take it off.