In 2020, I typed two lethal words: F— God. With that, I resigned from Christianity.
As the world was falling apart from the pandemic, so was my faith. Some call it deconstruction, but for me, it was an all-out demolition.
I wasn’t carefully examining the seams of my faith in community; no, I was feverishly cutting each thread until my faith was no more. I stripped my vocabulary of the term God because it was soaked in the oppression of my past. I wanted no part of that religion, that control, that guilt.
I was angry.
I’d been introduced to ideas, theories, and beliefs that challenged traditional Christianity: Sexuality might be a spectrum. Original sin could be debatable. The Bible contradicts itself. Yet it wasn’t freeing to learn of affirming communities and nontraditional churches. As someone who’d wanted to explore sexuality but had suppressed the desire to do so, I felt like I’d been robbed of pleasure.
The rules I did not agree with but had to follow began to feel like a difficult yoke and a heavy burden.
The desires I had buried deep within me—to experiment, to question, to challenge—all clashed violently with the doctrines I’d preached privately and publicly for the past decade as a writer and youth leader. I was now caught between the God of my faith and the woman I feared I truly was. What if I couldn’t enjoy life and enjoy God? What if I could no longer deny myself for God—what would happen if I instead denied God for myself?
I chose myself.
For the next two years, I embarked on what I can only call a “world tour”—a tour of all that I believed the world had to offer: queer love, polyamory, sex, drugs, and the worship of other gods. I said yes to everything I had once denied myself. And in saying yes, I thought I had found freedom.
For a while, it felt good. There’s a rush that comes with rebellion, a thrill in doing the very things you once feared. No longer restrained by the looming gaze of God, I allowed myself to indulge. All those Friday nights I spent in Bible study instead of at campus parties seemed like a joke now. I had missed out on life, or so I thought, and now I was making up for lost time. I believed I was living my best life.
But soon, the high faded. The freedom that once tasted so sweet became bitter.
The relationship that I thought would be my safe haven began to crumble. Anxiety crept in like an uninvited guest and made itself at home. My mind became a battleground of racing thoughts, doubts, and paranoia, especially after I dabbled in psychedelics that I’d thought would expand my mind but only left me adrift, untethered from reality. The drugs, the sex, the defiance—none of it brought the peace I had been searching for.
Instead, I found myself floating, not on calm waters but in a vast, empty darkness, like outer space. There was nothing solid to hold on to. I looked free from the outside, but I knew the truth: I was lost. I was scared.
And more than that, I didn’t want to live anymore. Life had lost its meaning. What was once pleasurable had become purposeless, and without that pleasure, I saw no reason to exist. I had defined my purpose by my rebellion, and when the rebellion no longer satisfied, I had nothing left. No God, no faith, no love, no peace.
The thought of suicide became a quiet companion, a whisper in the back of my mind that grew louder with each passing day. It seemed logical, even rational, to end it all. If life had no meaning, why continue? I weighed my options: overdose on antidepressants or slip into a warm bath and let go. I prepared myself to vanish, to slip into nonexistence, because living in this confusion, this depression, felt unbearable.
But as I stood on the brink of ending it all, fear gripped me. It was the fear of eternal separation from anything good, anything warm, anything real. I had rejected the God of the Bible, but now, in my deepest despair, I found myself crying out to him.
God, help me! I hadn’t called that name in years, a name I had tried to erase from my memory. But it was the only word that seemed to fit in that moment.
And then, the phone rang.
It was a Christian friend who had kept up with me throughout my world tour. She called at that exact moment, as if she had known. She asked me if I was okay, and I allowed myself to admit the truth for the first time in a long time. No, I was not okay.
I spilled my heart out to her and told her everything I had been carrying. She listened, and her presence on the other end of the line pulled me back from the edge.
When we hung up, I collapsed onto the floor, weeping. What had just happened? I wasn’t supposed to be alive. I didn’t want to be alive. But I was. I had cried out to God—the God I had renounced—and he had heard me. In that moment, he showed up. The God who exists outside of time and space reached into my darkness and pulled me back into life.
Not long after, my sister came home and found me lying on the floor, tears streaming down my face. This was the sister who’d once credited me with helping her grow in faith and who’d watched me walk away from that same faith, all while living under the same roof. She knelt beside me and asked, “Do you want to surrender?”
It was the invitation I’d been waiting for my whole life, and I hadn’t even known it. I said yes.
I said yes to surrendering my pride, my pain, my confusion, my frustration, my rebellion, my emptiness. She prayed over me, and my tears turned to smiles. For the first time, I felt alive.
The following day, everything was different. My life had changed in an instant. The God I had walked away from, the God I thought I had rejected, had never left me. He was there, listening, waiting for me to call on him again, perhaps in a way I never really had.
Since that day, I haven’t stopped talking to God. I tell him everything: my fears, my doubts, my questions, my pleasures, my weaknesses, my aches, my desires. Everything I once tried to hide, I now bring to him. I don’t pretend anymore. Instead, I let him into every part of me, and in return, he gives me peace.
Self-denial sounds oppressive to the self. It seems like saying yes to every thought and every feeling will lead us to discovering our true selves, but that will only lead to the soul’s decay.
I am convinced that I do not know what is best for me. I thought I did, but pursuing happiness apart from God led to disillusionment. I realized that if there is no God, then life has no meaning, so I’d rather opt out.
But God refused to let me die in my disbelief. And because of that, I now know that the only way to find your life is to lose it.
Caresse Dionne Spencer spends her days enjoying God, sharing her story, and breathing life into old things as the owner of an online vintage clothing shop, Revival.
