The Need to Know and the Search for the Truth

I don’t want to harp on about the past. I don’t need anyone who reads this to know me, in fact, I am feeling uneasy about my friends reading this blog and knowing it is me who writes it. If people don’t know who I am, it makes things easier for me - I don’t have to explain my views or opinions, I can hide behind a wall of words. I can be myself and not use the many filters we use in our day-to-day lives, in our face-to-face or telephone interactions, for fear of being disliked or punished or losing face or considered ‘rude’ when what you are is being honest. This blog is very much like my diary, however. An unadulterated version of how I feel, of what I perceive to be true at the time of writing. I was feeling jittery about my friends and family reading it, and mainly about my man who back then was a brand new and shiny addition to my life. I was worried about what he may think, I was worried about how this may affect our relationship, I was worried him reading it (as well as other people who mean something to me) will make me ‘write for an audience’.

Well, sod that. I have only one life and I don’t want to spend it worrying. Yes, any of the things above and a million others may happen but so what? This blog started off as a little outlet for my need to write, as a virtual memory bank of things I do, as a sort of a diary to keep track of the important things in life. One day someone may stumble upon it who may draw some help or support from it, and that day will make me happy.

Funny that, important things in life. By writing about love and kindness and diet and my family and friends I have so far managed to almost perfectly avoid what’s really, truly important - and the single most important area of my life: God.

People underestimate my ability to hide. Hiding things, hiding true feelings, hiding the truth from myself - these are the things I am really good at. Well, no more. No more hiding. Seeing as quitting is not an option for me anymore, I must march on. I must carry on in my quest for KNOWING.

I don’t display any outward signs of an OCD. I don’t complusively wash my hands, I don’t check the gas hob five times every day, I don’t return from halfway down the road in order to check the taps aren’t left on. But whoever knows me well, knows that I am a total compulsive masochist in some ways. I need to know. I seek the truthand knowledge in every situation, many times when others would have long given up and carried on with their lives. I know the truth may not be what I want to hear; I know it may mean that relationships will break and it will hurt; yet I will obsessively look for it. There are people who seek out dangerous situations; there are women who seek out violent partners; and there’s me - I need to know the truth.

I don’t want to live in the past - past is here to learn from and to let go of. But in order for this post to make sense, I have to dip into the dark place that is the past and fish out a little bit of my history.

When I was maybe around 12 , I started searching for a deeper spiritual level to my life. I innately knew there was a god, some entity that made all this, all my life, possible. Coming from a strongly Catholic country, I knew about the Virgin Mary and the story of Jesus but to me, that was what it was - a story I'd watch at Christmas with a slightly uneasy, grossed out feeling when it came to the crucifixion bit. After all, Christmas stood for happy times, not some gruesome scene of violence.

It wasn’t until I was 15 or 16 that I realised there was a God with a capital G, that the story actually did happen and that the events in the Bible have been shown to be, at times, very precise and accurate reflections of history and science. I have, I believe, glimpsed the Truth around this age and became a real, born again, Child of God. I was baptised in a Baptist church when I was 17 but I loathe to refer to myself as a Baptist. Belonging to any one denomination seems to me as a dangerous practice. I have become the sort of person who questions everything and trusts little. What if some internal practice within the organization was against the Bible? What if it was against my beliefs? What if, at some point in the future, the organization adopted a stand on a matter that I didn’t agree with? Would I still be a baptist?

The reason behind getting baptised in that church was that there was little choice in my home town or home country, when it came to religion - and I chose the one that Ibelieved was true. My town had a Catholic church, an Evangelical church and a Baptist church. There was also a meeting hall for the Jehovah’s Witnesses and one for Seventh Day Adventists. Apart from these, there were some satanists who met in the cemetery at times but I never subscribed to that kind of rubbish. I believed and trusted that at that point in time, with the teaching there was in the church, it was the place which was as close to the truth as I would ever get.

I became active in church, got really integrated into the church community and found my little place in the system, my mission and my fulfillment. I trusted the Lord with all my heart and was looking for answers only He could give me. I believed the spiritual leaders had the best intentions possible and I trusted people in the church. Some of my best friends were found at that church, my first romantic experiences happened through that church. To this day, the memory of those days is a joyful, happy, content one.

I kept my eyes on the Lord. Or I tried to, as much as I could. Trust me, it’s not easy when you are a hormone fuelled mess of a teenager. But I persevered and was greatly rewarded, every day of my life. I was getting answers to my questions and was piecing a happy picture of what my life should be. And then England happened.

Of course, the fact that I lost sight of the Lord and of what was pure and godly has precious little to do with England itself and everything to do with me. I moved to the UK and for some months managed to keep to the path that is true. But slowly, through distraction of the big city life, distraction of various boyfriends over the years, through seeing the world with the biased eyes of someone with depression, I strayed off my path to the point that I couldn’t see it anymore. It was all too hard and too much work and I wanted to have fun and pursue wordly pleasures instead.

Well, that’s exactly what I did and where has that got me? If the end of the world was to happen today, what would I say to Jesus? ‘Oops’? Or ‘sorry’? I'm afraid neither of those quite cut it.

For someone who nearly worships the truth, I hid from myself rather impressively. Of course I knew I should start reading the Bible again. I knew I should make the effort of going to church. I knew I should talk to the Lord, pray. I found a million excuses not to do either of those things. Some were better than others, but the fact remains they were excuses. They were not the truth - because the truth was that if God was the most important part of my life, then NOTHING would have stopped me from going to church, from praying, from reading. The truth was that I used to say I am too tired for church but had anyone offered me a £100 to go, I would have got myself there, one way or another. How much more is salvation and eternal life of my soul worth than £100?

It is also true that going back is hard. Going back to what you know is right, what you know is going to benefit your whole life, every single area of it, is hard. Logically, it shouldn’t be - it should be a breeze. After all, it is not going into a territory unknown and you have proof, EVIDENCE, that it is the only thing in your life that ever made you truly peaceful and happy. But the reality is that this is a hard thing to do and the hardest bit of it is to decide to start somewhere.

‘All you can do is try’, my man told me today. But I don’t want to try. I don’t want to start this with the back door open. I want that back door shut, no, let’s nail it shut. In fact, let’s concrete it over. Because I know how weak and stupid I can be - I know if I think ‘well, if this doesn’t work out, I can always go back to hiding’, I will end up losing the motivation or the drive or the will to live. That’s why quitting isn’t an option - because if I allow myself to think of it as an option, it will eventually become the one I choose. I vaguely remember someone once saying ‘there’s always suicide’ ironically.. but I don’t want to go there. Some things should be steered clear of and left alone.

So I started reading the Bible with my lovely man, and have been enjoying it very much. We may not agree on the finer (yet fundamental) details of what we believe yet, we may not even have the same version of the Bible, but we have taken the plunge. We have started somewhere. You cannot read the Word of God and walk away unchanged. That’s why I say ‘yet’ - because things will be changing in my spiritual life, and that’s a fact. It doesn’t mean that we will definitely agree - we may never agree. But, as he says, that’s also a resolution of our problem.

Tomorrow, I am going to church with him. I haven’t set a foot in a church for about 3 years or thereabouts. I haven’t gone properly for about 9 years. This is scary and yet exciting. I am swerving between ‘Yay!’ and ‘Panic!’. This is due to something I will write about next time, and it’s closely linked with my need to know the truth and my lack of patience. But that’s a story for the next post.

No more hiding.