According to what the Christian teachers of my youth told me, life with Jesus was relatively simple: God blesses the obedient and spurns the rebellious. As long as you trust God and allow yourself to be guided by those put in positions of authority by God himself, you will have life in abundance.

To translate, this “wisdom” equated to five simple commandments…thou shalt not look, thou shalt not listen, thou shalt not touch, thou shalt not speak and thou shalt not taste. As a devout teenager, these simple equations formed the basis for my relationship with God. As far as I was concerned, Jesus was the great mathematician. Christianity worked like a calculator and so life was supposed to be fairly black and white.

For example, Ask = you will receive, knock = the door will be opened and seek = you will find.

Applying this formula to life became increasingly difficult as I grew up. Everywhere I looked I saw anomalies, I saw questions that needed to be asked, people who needed to be heard, experiences that needed to be tasted to be truly understood. However, within the confines of my church and the “wisdom” of its appointed leaders, this journey was the first step on the “wide road” to destruction and involved shunning the difficult path. Seeking higher education, for instance opened my soul to the “spirit of intellectualism”, and asking hard questions invited the “spirit of rebellion”, which, I was told at the  time,  was  the  first  step  towards witchcraft (!)

Confused, I wrestled the angels. Who was I in the parable of the sower?  Was I the seed thrown among the thorns? Or the seed fallen beside the road and eaten by the birds? These questions plagued me and ate away until I accepted the only way to truly know God was to “deny myself” and “surrender all”. And so I did. By conscious decision, I ignored my questions and my desire to understand in return for the security of the community. God stayed simple, I stayed blind. I became tortured by conformity.

Ultimately, the sums failed to add up.

It is tragic that sometimes it takes a total collapse, crisis, or personal breakdown before we find the courage to admit that the concept of God we have been following is merely a product of wishful-thinking. For me, a personal crisis and reversal of those fundamental beliefs about “how God worked” has taken me on a journey that I will not return from.

I stopped believing in the God I had been taught to believe in, and set out to discover who this Jesus was to me. I made another conscious decision - to relish the mystery of spirituality rather than allow myself to be cornered by ill-informed suits wielding fear as their weapon. I left the community (or did they leave me?) and went looking for those like-minded people who would be prepared to put God in the docks and let him defend himself.

It did not take long for me to discover a new community. This one characterised by its fearlessness and honesty. The people involved in this group offered a platform for discussion where nothing was sacred. I entered into it whole-heartedly, and as a result I was able to discover a new faith. A faith where mystery is celebrated rather than spurned. Where “back-sliding” doesn't exist, and acceptance of doubt and anomaly only make the journey more rewarding.