My 2022 Journey

2022 has potentially been the most spiritually eventful and transformative year of my life. I know that sounds like a big statement to make, but as I reflect on my life I can't think of another season in which my soul has been on such a journey. Because this journey has been spiritual and therefore largely internal, my guess is that even those who are around me regularly weren't aware of the change happening inside me.

I want to share a bit about what this 2022 journey has involved, at least on a general level, partly just because it's helpful to share our stories with one another, but also because it has been closely connected to the resources I've been looking into. In the upcoming weeks and months I'll be posting about some of these resources, and what I share here will provide context for what I share in those posts.

I began 2022 at a low point. I've dealt with mild-to-moderate anxiety and depression off and on for about 10 years now. My mental health isn't always bad but at that point in time it was. The next layer was that, like so many of us, I was dealing with the effects of two years of the pandemic. Even though we were emerging out of the worst of the pandemic, all the anxiety, effort, and fatigue of the past couple years were weighing on me. And then the last layer adding to my situation was a very discouraging and draining chronic illness that I'd been grappling with since September 2020. Those three layers together created the perfect storm that left me feeling sad and pessimistic, without any clear hope of things improving.

This emotional weight is what led me to seek God harder than I have in a long, long time. I want to make it clear that this intense year of spiritual seeking (and subsequent spiritual growth) were not motivated by some saintly desire to be more righteous. I was looking for rescue. I've done a lot of counseling, and I've been on antidepressants for over six years, and although both have been beneficial neither one seemed to be able to go deep enough to get to the root of the problem.

My journey onward from that point has too many aspects and mini-phases to it that telling it as a step-by-step story would be too difficult. So here are the general threads of what I've been working through over the past year. You'll notice that they are largely related and overlapping with one another.

Praying Honest Prayers

As I alluded to a second ago, the thing that paved the way to everything else was learning to pray honest prayers. I've always known in theory that we can be honest with God, but I rarely did because I felt like telling God how I honestly felt and what I wanted was self-centered or selfish. It took the difficulty of my situation to push me to pray different prayers. I got into the regular routine of doing a body-scan and emotion-scan and then naming those feelings to God. And then I would tell him what I honestly wanted. I needed a change in my emotional life. And I needed more from God Himself.

A year later I still find myself sometimes slipping into prayers that I feel I "should" be praying, but I have been praying honest prayers much more now than I did before. And this is something I really appreciate. It can feel good to name the feelings I'm feeling or the issues I'm facing, give them to God, and then ask Him for what I genuinely want.

Feeling My Faith

Another major thread to 2022 was opening up to (and even actively pursuing) the emotional side of my faith. I'm an INTJ, Enneagram 5 for those that are in to personality tests. In other words, I've always been very thinking-focussed and have neglected the emotional side to my life. I was in the unfortunate position of being able to feel anxiety and depression but being relatively numb to most other emotions.

My faith in particular was almost entirely intellectual. Faith has always been very important to me, but to me faith primarily involved learning, books, beliefs, and trying to live a life in line with Jesus. I knew on an abstract level that God loved me but I didn't feel loved by God. I knew in my head that God was with me but He didn't feel near to me in my heart. And to make matters worse I believed that to expect or desire anything different would be misguided at best or selfish at worst. I had always thought that emotions weren't solid: they come and go, so they aren't stable things to build a faith on. And emotions weren't trustworthy: if I knew factually that God was close to me, then I thought that whether he felt close to me or not should be irrelevant.

But again the difficulty of my situation in early 2022 forced me to change that mentality. It simply was not sustainable anymore to continue in my faith by grit and willpower alone. I needed my heart to be in it too. So I started using the words of Ezekiel 11:19 to pray on a near-daily basis for God to turn my "heart of stone" into a "heart of flesh". And I prayed Ephesians 3:16-21 for myself (again near-daily) asking for God to help me grasp His love "that surpasses knowledge" and to be "filled to the measure of all His fullness". And I'm thankful to say God started answering my prayers! It's still a total work in progress, but over the past year I've been having more moments of knowing God's love in my heart and feeling his nearness. These moments have been so nice. Experiencing the reality of my faith has given an extra boost of life to my faith when I really needed it.

For the record, I still wouldn't suggest anyone make emotion the basis of their faith. I also don't believe we should be chasing emotional experiences for their own sake (that would be missing the point). But I have found it absolutely vital in the past year to activate my heart and to have times of experiencing in my life what I believe in my head. Now I feel like I know God better than I did, and it feels like a genuine relationship rather than a set of abstract doctrines.

God's Kindness

I realized my image of God had slipped into viewing him as a God of "tough love". I had known from the time I was young that "God is love", but I interpreted that to mean that he wanted to make me a better and stronger person. This was partly an overreaction on my part to what is called the "prosperity gospel", the popular but entirely unbiblical view that God promises "health, wealth, and happiness" to all who believe in Him. I knew the prosperity gospel could not be true for a number of reasons, one of which was that the bible is clear following Jesus will involve hardship and suffering. After all, one of Jesus' main calls to anyone who wanted to follow him was "pick up your cross" (i.e. submit your life and desires to God and live a life of sacrifice). James 1:2 says we should "consider it pure joy" whenever we face difficulties because it produces perseverance. So I believed that God wanted what was best for me the way a strict drill sergeant might want the best for his recruits: he wants them to grow in obedience, toughen up, and develop their skills, but he's unconcerned with their emotional or mental wellbeing.

Thankfully with God's help this image of God I had changed over 2022. I will do a whole other blog post about the reasons behind this specific shift because there isn't space for it all here. But suffice it to say here that it became clear to me I had been believing a really harmful lie about God. Of course I would struggle to feel any warmth or intimacy with God if I viewed him as a drill sergeant. And of course I would struggle with anxiety if I believed the world is nothing more than a series of trials and difficulties to be endured as God develops my holiness.

While it is undeniably true that the world is fallen and contains suffering, it has brought me a great amount of hope and emotional freedom to see that that is not all the world is. Jesus says he came to bring "abundant life" (John 10:10), and so abundant life must be possible (at least to some extent) in this life in the midst of the difficulties we face. There is a paradox at the heart of the Christian faith in which we find life when we lose it (Matt 10:39), and that when we are weak is when we can most encounter God's strength (2 Cor 12:10). So I still experience ups and downs like I always have, but increasingly when I experience a "down" I am able to have a bigger perspective that still sees the good and hope in the world. Moreover, I have come to appreciate God the more that I think of Him as someone who likes and wants to give "good gifts" to His children (Matt 7:11). While I don't expect His good gifts to come in the form of health and wealth, I do believe he sends me little reminders of His love, like a smile from a neighbor or a quiet afternoon to read a book.

An Interactive God

The last thread of 2022 I want to touch on has to do with to what extent we should expect to witness or experience the supernatural. Even beyond 2022 I would say this question has bothered me since the time I was a young teen. Whenever I read or heard a story from the bible I couldn't help but notice how different my experience seemed to be compared to the bible story. I haven't witnessed any seas parting or water turning into wine! For over a decade I felt somewhat uncomfortable with this discrepancy (between the bible and my life), but I just told myself that things must have changed for some reason between then and now.

But things began to shift for me specifically in the area of hearing God speak. Again this is something I'll expand upon more in upcoming blog posts, but through 2022 a number of different books, podcasts, and webinars seemed to "coincidentally" discuss the real possibility of hearing from God, and that this is something all Christians can experience and should seek to experience. And this is something I have longed to experience for a long time! It has never made sense to me how we might have any intimacy or relationship with God if he didn't communicate with us somehow. Now I know many Christians would point to the bible as God's once-and-for-all communication to us, but I think if we're honest with ourselves we'll admit that reading the bible in and of itself is a far cry from having the sort of relationship we would have with a friend or family member.

More importantly, it strikes me as ironic that the people who most believe in the authority of the bible are often the ones who get most uncomfortable/suspicious at the thought of anything from the bible happening nowadays. I think many of us (myself included!) have slipped into believing Christian doctrines but being "functional atheists" (i.e., in practice living our lives as if the natural world is all that exists). We pray prayers without expecting God to answer them, we make decisions without expecting God to guide us, we attempt to spread God's love through word and deed without expecting God's empowerment, and so on.

I digress. To return to the topic of hearing from God, the common denominator of essentially any main bible character is that they heard from God. God communicated to them. I could go on rambling about the theory behind this idea, but the important point is that I started seeking God's communication. I want a 2-way dialogue with God, to whatever degree that is possible. And I realize that may sound strange to many people, and it may make alarm bells ring for other people. I know that people claiming to have "heard from God" have said all sorts of incorrect things or done harm. But the antidote to misuse is not no use but correct use.

Don't worry: I'm not seeking to predict the end of the world, start a war, or tell anyone they're destined to marry me (I'm happily married!). I'm starting small. For example, in my prayer time I might ask God who needs prayer right now and then wait a few minutes in silence to see if God brings the name or face of someone to mind. And if he does, then I pray for them. The beauty of trying to hear God on small things like this is that I can't go wrong! Let's say the name of a friend comes to mind because of the supper I just had rather than coming genuinely from God. Well in that case there's no harm done! That person could probably use prayer regardless of God gave me their name or not. So it's stuff like this that I'm experimenting with. And even though it's still a total work in progress (like everything else in this blog post), it's something that I've already been encouraged and spiritually nourished by. I've had times in which (I believe) God has brought a certain song, bible passage, or words to mind that have been perfect for the situation I'm in. It makes me feel like I am living my life with God and not just for Him.