I have always been, above all, a seeker. My thirst for truth was woven into my flesh. At the age of 10, I would call out to God in my bedroom telling the I Am that I wanted to serve him. I had an ache within me that needed to connect with this truth, this All.

I was raised in spiritual environments that engendered an awe in God. I often felt the oneness and beauty of something penetrating my heart with pure love.

There, I helped as a teacher and mentor to the teenagers. But as I grew into adulthood, I sensed the misalignment between how people acted and what was being taught. It became apparent that people didn’t really believe what they said or taught. There was much emotional catharsis but little embodiment.

I moved away from home to get a bachelors in Humanities, and I found the space to form my own thoughts and convictions. My thirst for truth led me to a lot of philosophy courses. It is a subject that requires a reverent attitude towards the nature of truth and an aptitude for rigorous questioning.

It was the first time I began to doubt the accuracy of what I had been taught. And without those previously sturdy beliefs, I found myself “sinning” and doing much of what felt meaningless to me.

During a semester in Argentina, at the height of my partying, when I couldn’t feel more empty, I returned to prayer. I found a book that someone had handed me from an organization called Campus Crusade. The book was called “The Case for Christ”. A book which systematically attests to the historical accuracy of the New Testament.

I was back! I could open my heart again to the bible, because it wasn’t a farce. Jesus was resurrected, and their was plenty of evidence to believe so.

I began reading about Jesus with fresh eyes. His warmth was palpable, his teachings on love and service, radical. That yearning for God I had felt in my youth returned, and once again I began cultivating that longing to merge with him, this time with a fervency for Jesus.

When I graduated, I moved to a new city. There, I encountered a group of people who were actively proselytizing. They made claims of knowing “the truth,” and from what I could tell, they were living out those convictions. My hunger for community and truth led me to go through their process of studying their foundational teachings, a format I later learned was replicated in hundreds of churches around the world.

This was the first place where I found people living what they taught. There I learned about what it meant to be a student of Jesus. I learned how to audit my own intentions, how to create intimacy in friendships, and how to be hospitable to strangers. It was truly a brotherhood.

But as time went by, I felt the life of my faith being squeezed out by dogma and calls for obedience. The mystery of God was replaced with logic and rules. In hindsight, I believe they were afraid of what they would do with a sense of autonomy. To avoid sin and therefore hell, we should “help each other get to heaven.”

I stayed there for 10 years. During which I led small groups, spoke at events, and helped convert new members. There were always calls for more service. That is what I had asked for after all, was it not?

In 2017, I was finishing a Master’s in Social Work, doing an internship, co-leading a house church, and in charge of spiritually mentoring about 6 or 7 women.

I was exhausted. More than that, my previous doubts resurfaced. They had never fully gone away, but I didn’t have any energy left to prove them wrong. I had to accept that I didn’t believe everything I was supposed to. I recognized I wasn’t fooling God about my doubt anyway.  I told God, “If you want me, you’re going to have to come get me. I have nothing left.”

I left the church as quietly as I could and with a fear that I would unduly influence another person’s spiritual path.

For the next 5 years, I went through the destabilizing experience of leaving a spiritual community I had been a part of for 10 years. At the beginning of that time, I tried to live my best with the question, “Am I on the wrong path that is going to take me to hell?”

What I couldn’t know then was that the willingness to risk it all, even my paid membership to heaven, for the sake of truth, would take me further into the heart of God and more committed to the teachings of Jesus than ever before.