Looking for a Story That Matches Mine

You have read about forty of them by now. Threads, essays, long comments underneath other people's essays, three books.

You are not reading them for interest. You are reading them the way somebody reads case law.

Because you left, eleven months ago, and you still do not know what that makes you. And every account you open is checked, quickly and almost automatically, against your own: how long were they there, what happened, was it a scandal or was it small, did they go somewhere else afterwards, did they stop believing.

The ones that involve something dramatic are no use to you. Yours was not dramatic. Nobody did anything you could put in a sentence.

The ones where the person walked away from God entirely frighten you, and you close them quickly, and then you think about them at two in the morning.

The ones that end with somebody happily settled somewhere new leave you flat, because they are describing an arrival and you are describing a corridor.

So you keep going. Forty accounts, and not one of them has quite matched, and each near-miss leaves you slightly less sure than before.

What you are looking for is not information about churches. You know a great deal about churches. You are looking for one story close enough to yours that its ending is allowed to be yours as well.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you whether you were right to leave. I was not there. Nobody who was not there can tell you, and the ones who do it confidently are usually settling their own account through yours. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 32:8, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

I am not going to send you back. Not to that one, not to any one, not this month, and the pressure people put on the de-churched to reattach quickly is one of the reasons some of them never do.

I am not going to tell you the church was wicked, either. I do not know, and the reflexive villain does not help you.

And I am not going to call you backslidden, because you did not move away from God. You stopped attending a building after something in it went wrong for you, and those are different events however often they are treated as one.

You are not outside anything because of a postcode you no longer drive to. Scripture says the Lord knoweth them that are his, 2 Timothy 2:19, and the knowing is His action and does not depend on your attendance, and the Holy Spirit is not keeping a register.

The verse is guidance by eye, not by map

There is a line in Psalm 32 that most people read as a general comfort and that is very specific if you look at the picture in it.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.Psalm 32:8

Four verbs, all of them God's. Instruct, teach, guide, and the last one carries the image that matters for you.

I will guide thee with mine eye. Not with a rope. Not with a wall down one side of the path. With a look, which means the guidance is available continuously to somebody who is turned toward the one giving it, and it does not work at all on somebody looking somewhere else.

Now notice where you have been looking for eleven months. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

At forty other people. At their timelines, their reasons, their endings. You have been trying to work out where you are by triangulating from strangers, and the guidance in this verse does not arrive that way, because it is a look and not a document.

You are not being left without direction. Scripture says I will guide thee with mine eye, Psalm 32:8, and the guiding is described as personal and continuous rather than as a story to be located, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present to a person turned toward Him at a gate at dusk.

Why none of them fit

The reason no account has matched is not that you have not found the right one yet. It is structural, and knowing why will save you another forty. It is written, in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Every account you read is written afterwards. It is shaped, because writing shapes things: the person knows how it turned out, so the details that led there get more weight and the ones that went nowhere get dropped. What you are reading is a corridor that has been tidied into a road by somebody standing at the end of it.

You are in the corridor. Untidy, unfinished, with no ending to organize it around. Scripture settles that in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Of course it does not match. You are comparing a live thing to a finished one, and the live thing will always look worse, because it has all its loose ends still in it. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

That is not evidence about you. It is a fact about what happens when experience becomes an essay.

You are not further behind than the people you have been reading. Scripture says for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face, 1 Corinthians 13:12, and it is a description of everybody's present position rather than of a defect in yours, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the middle of an unfinished thing as much as at the end of a tidy one.

The question underneath

Here is what the forty accounts are really being asked, and it is worth saying it in plain words, because you have never quite said it. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Am I still one of His?

That is the question. It is not about churches at all, and it has been dressed as a research project because the plain version is too frightening to hold up to the light.

And you have been submitting it to strangers on the internet, who cannot answer it, who do not know you, and who are describing their own lives. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 32:8, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

The answer to that question is not in a thread. It never was. It is not even, in the end, in your own assessment of your last eleven months, because you are not a reliable witness about yourself at two in the morning. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 32:8, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

It rests on what He has said and on what He has done, and neither of those has been amended since the day you last went through a door.

You are not in doubt about your standing because your standing is doubtful. Scripture says neither death, nor life... shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, Romans 8:38-39, and the list of things unable to separate is deliberately exhaustive, and the Holy Spirit has been the one holding a person through eleven months in which she assumed the question was open.