For people who are fully immersed in the evangelical Christian lifestyle, Easter weekend is intense. I always envied the people who would just show up for Easter service and move on to brunch with no plans to come back to church before Christmas. That’s because I was spending the entire weekend obsessing over the validity of my faith and the dangers before me if I didn’t believe enough or prove my faith was genuine.
It’s one thing to repeat the platitudes about Jesus meeting you where you are or everyone going through the same thing. It’s a much different task to find peace in the middle of that. When I fought this battle every day for years and years and years, that was my normal . . . but it never felt normal. I never felt normal.
After I started the deconstruction process, I eventually felt peace. And when I felt peace, I finally felt like it was something I could talk freely about with anyone. And then normal almost felt like it was within my grasp.
And then I heard someone describe their journey this way: “I deconstructed my faith, but it’s not my whole personality.” And I felt SO deflated. Before deconstruction, my faith WAS my whole personality, and within the evangelical community that felt like what normal was supposed to be. But since it never actually felt normal, I envied the people on either side of me, the people who seemed at peace being all-in for Jesus AND the people who could walk in and out of an Easter service without a second thought.
Then I deconstructed (somewhat disastrously) and went into spiritual hiding. Then I finally get to a place where I feel comfortable talking about deconstruction, and the normal people tell me not to make too big a deal of it?
Sigh. It really is a journey. I think I finally got to a point where I’m okay not being normal. I’m not here for the normal people. I’m here for the people who feel like they don’t fit. I’m here for the people who feel like there’s something wrong. I’m here for the people who are downright phobic about what the normal people would say if they really knew what was going on inside your heart.
You can find your normal. You will find your way. Even if it doesn’t look like anyone else’s picture of what faith, hope, and life are supposed to look like, you’ll know it when it feels peaceful. You’ll know when it feels like home.