When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I wasn’t sure of much except that God was real and at some point in the day I would watch The Little Mermaid for the 50th time on VHS. As an adult, only a few things have changed since then; I know slightly more than I did when I was 8, and I have The Little Mermaid on DVD now. The God thing, however, is a little more complicated.
I grew up in the Christian faith, going back and forth between the Seventh-day Adventist life that my grandmother followed and the Sunday Bible church time that my mother inhabited. Both were Ghanaian-led and denominations of Christianity, but they couldn’t have been more different.
As a Seventh-day Adventist I had to wear skirts and dresses to church (trousers for girls were forbidden), I wasn’t allowed to wear earrings, and we were there on a Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It was like a full-time job, even though as a kid I spent most of the day hanging out with the other kids, singing in the youth choir and daydreaming about boy bands whilst the grown-ups prayed the time away.
In Sunday Bible church there were still dresses, but there was also jewelry and perfume, gospel singing and dancing, and only a half-day of church on a Sunday followed by a family dinner.Even though I had a best friend on Saturdays at my grandmother’s church, I think I preferred my mother’s because it was shorter and it gave me more time to watch Disney films (it should be noted that Disney ruled most of my childhood and shaped the slightly unrealistic person that I am today). But I never really knew what any of it had to do with God.
I went to Sunday (and Saturday) school and knew all the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the Whale etc., but these stories were taught as different lessons depending on which church I was attending. On Saturdays, Eve was the evil temptress who ruined not only Adam’s life but the lives of all the generations to come; especially women’s lives because we were told she was the reason we would have painful periods (to pay for her betrayal — reading this back I can’t believe I ever accepted such misogynistic rhetoric). But on Sundays, the same story became a parable about following God’s word and not your own free will, because he knows what’s best. Ergo, if you don’t do as you’re told, you will be punished.
Both versions of the story brought me to the same conclusion however; that God exists and He is terrifying. Thus followed years of childhood and then adolescent guilt just for existing as an imperfect human being, hoping that one day I would do something that didn’t disappoint Him, despite never truly believing that was actually going to happen.
As I got older, my experiences naturally expanded, as did my mind, and I began to give in to the doubts I had had about my religion for years. I still almost desperately wanted to believe that God was real and ever-present in my life, but it became harder and harder to do so. Yet somehow, in moments of high distress and depression (especially in my early 20s) I still prayed to that elusive all-powerful, all-loving God, hoping that He would come forth and show Himself to me. In a way, it helped to relieve my stress to think that somewhere out there was someone looking out for me, even if it felt like no one else on Earth was.
And you see, that’s the thing about growing up in religion and losing the faith that isn’t always clear to those who didn’t grow up that way.
When you lose your faith, it’s not necessarily God that you stop believing in; rather it’s the God that has been created by the men and women around you, following rules and regulations made up by men that came before them.
Suddenly you might see the pastor that cheats on his wife, the sexual abuse of young children in the church, and the self-professed “Prophets of God” who steal from the congregation, and you think, “if there really is a God and these are His messengers, that is not a God I want to follow,” or “if there is a God, why doesn’t He punish all these people?”
It doesn’t happen as simply or as quickly as that of course, but for me, when I lost my faith, I lost it in people. God hadn’t changed in my mind — He was always a projection of whatever other people wanted Him to be and what they told me He was. I had no real proof that He was or was not who I was raised to believe in; I only had evidence that people weren’t who they said they were.
So I lost faith in them first, and the original idea that I had about God changed and morphed into something else until eventually it dissipated completely. The hardest thing about losing my faith was losing the construct of God that I held in my mind. Because despite all the church hypocrisy I witnessed, I slept safe in the knowledge that God still had my back; that I still had my own personal bodyguard. But losing that reassurance that once kept me so warm at night was one of the coldest and loneliest feelings in the world. I wouldn’t even wish it on my worst enemy.
Perhaps that’s why I still wonder at that belief I had, at the faith I tried to nurture without much positive reinforcement; I’ve noticed I still grasp for it. And I’m trying to figure out who left who first and what exactly went wrong between us — me and God that is.
Maybe I’ll never know and will always be hoping that one day we’ll get back together again. Sadly, I fear that I have already become one of those people who had a life-changing but ultimately failed relationship, but who still wonders about The One That Got Away.
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