My spiritual journey

So I've majorly neglected this blog. I guess I felt like I had nothing to write about. Now I feel like I do. I didn't know whether blogging about this part of my life would be helpful but I just really want to share it. Over the past year I've gone on a major spiritual journey. My relationship with God and more so religion has always felt complicated. I grew up going to church, but only ever Sunday school, and going to a church primary school but with non-religious parents. I've never really known what I believed. That religion box on questionnaires was always hard for me because I felt like attending church made me a Christian but I didn't actually hold any fundamental Christian beliefs. In college I got to a point where I just believed in being a good person and was very unsure about the existence of God.

Then I came to university. I thought about going to the Christian Union: it was something that I had a bit of connection to that I could meet new people through, I wanted to give it a go. I did try at the start but we always got the wrong room and eventually gave up trying to go and therefore I never really bothered about going to church. It was always at the back of my mind though. I had a really tough time in my first year of university and knew that something had to change and that was always one possible way to open up more doors for me. Eventually when the CU ran a games night that I went to with a friend, I got some contact with some of the members and plucked up the courage to go to my first CU meeting. I was out of my depth. I'd never done Bible study before and didn't really know what I was doing. It was an evangelical culture which wasn't something I was used to at all. They took me to Alive church and I started going every week. Even then I was completely unsure of what I believed and I'd been struggling through it from that point last year until around January this year.

Slowly I came to believe. Slowly a relationship between me and God grew. Things felt quite rocky, quite unsure, but things were happening inside me that I couldn't deny. I became a Christian. The church I go to talks a lot about being 'saved' and I wouldn't say there was one moment that I was 'saved'. I think a series of moments happened and when I went away with my church student group things really started to click. Being in a focused, spiritual learning environment with concentrated worship time helped me so much. I saw the wonders of God and how much he had done for people and how much he could do for me. My walls and reservations started to crumble and they still are to this day.

I guess I just need an outlet for this journey. A lot of the first stages of gaining a relationship with God have been completed but I know that this is a lifelong process and relationship that will help me through everything. I want to keep this up. Things are still very muddled in my head but thats okay. I am getting to know God and it is the best thing. One last thing I want to share is the reason why I decided to share my story and start blogging about this journey I'm on again. About a week or so ago in church we were singing and I just felt like I really needed to pray for an old family friend. This person used to be one of my best friends and we loved each other like brother and sister for a while before he got caught up with a girlfriend who isn't good for him. This triggered a string of events that mean we no longer talk. I still care for him but, because of his decisions, we don't have a relationship anymore. Anyway, this situation is far from my ideal and so when I felt like I needed to pray for him I did, with more desperation than I ever have, I poured out all my feelings about him to God in the middle of worship, gave it up to him and waited. Today I talked to my mum and found out that things have been moving in the right direction for this family friend: he's finally found some employment and has the motivation for it which he hasn't had in years. Its amazing, this improvement that I never thought possible has happened, God is good all the time. I pray that things will carry on progressing and that God can work in our relationship.

That has been a long, brief, synopsis of my spiritual journey. I definitely find writing and sharing to be helpful so I think this blog may come alive again through that.
God bless.