Paths To Truth

Yes it’s true, there are many people who saw through the COVID agenda who are now discovering Christianity. Some people think we’ve lost our minds. As I read a commentator mention on another post, a ‘trauma response.’ Hmm, where have I heard that kind of mass pathologising before? Oh yes, a blanket statement about people declining the juice.

I thought I would share a bit about my thinking process to those who would like to understand more of what lies behind it. In Spring 2020 I was looking for hope. I found hope in the spiritual narrative about the ‘great awakening’ and ‘new earth.’ These views merged in well with my own spiritual beliefs, and I happily continued on my way, content that even if life was challenging on the surface we were shifting to a better place.

In early 2021, a lie detector in my brain was going off. Something didn’t add up to me. I kept learning and thinking, and in 2022, the lie detector was blaring. There was something deeply off with aspects of the ‘great awakening narrative,’ and meanwhile I was finding something that felt more accurate, that filled in the spaces and joined up the dots of the narrative full of holes I’d been working with for the last year or so. 

I cannot speak for everyone, but I know that many others who are new to Christianity have come along a similar path. We did not come to Christianity because of trauma. We came because we were seeking truth.

If you want a fluffy, everything’s going to be easy, trauma-soothing kind of narrative, Christianity is not it. Although when you get deep enough it offers another kind of reassurance.  

Every day since I discovered it, I’ve had an inner battle going on, falling down rabbit holes that would try and disprove it, coming back over and over again, to the fact that I believe it. And there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to.

There is a film called A Case For Christ about a journalist called Lee Strobel, who was devastated when his wife became a believer. He decided to investigate the facts in an attempt to disprove the Jesus story. He ended up doing the opposite. I can relate to his story. Christianity is not cool. It’s not fashionable. It comes laden with the baggage of religious abuse.

I believe the story of Jesus to be true, and yet I do not want to be rigid. I am an imperfect human, seeing through my lens. If I’ve got something wrong, if there’s new information, I haven’t considered, then I’d gladly hear it. To be honest in some ways, it would be a relief, to believe something more palatable.

But yet here I am. And my sense is that I am at the end of seeking truth, that though I may stray here and there, and consider new trails from time to time, I don’t think I’ll be leaving this track.

I guess I’m writing this in defence of my own ability to critically think, and all those other ‘truth-seekers’ who have found their way to a belief in God through their own search for truth. Does it mean we are right? Who am I to judge? I know there are many others out there, whose own critical thinking and truth-seeking leads them down completely different paths. There is an element in which we critically think and an element in which we take that ‘leap of faith’ and believe, and I honestly don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

I don’t know if it fits my view of reality to believe there are multiple truths, or that we can all be right. But I do know we are all imperfect, all looking through a different lens. I certainly think that it is completely inaccurate to pathologise an entire group of people simply because they believe something different.

I do get it must be weird, that a bunch of people are gravitating towards ‘religion,’ but I see it more as searching for the true story of what happened here on earth. Believing the story doesn’t mean joining a church and being told what to do by some bossy, oppressive, hypocritical leader. Yes we might find community, but we don’t need to let go of our natural, personal connection with the divine. After all, in the end, that is the gift we have as human beings. To be able to connect with something beyond ourselves. One day perhaps we will know for sure, the true story about it all.