Hey there, welcome to Christianity.com. My name is Meredith Mills. I'm a writer. I'm also a Christian and today I'd like to tell you why.
My parents were the first to introduce me to Jesus. I remember praying with them as a five-year-old church kid to receive Jesus as my savior, and they just continued throughout my childhood to teach me about Jesus and to lay the groundwork for faith in my life, and I'm really thankful for that. As a teenager, I started taking my relationship with God seriously. I spent time reading the Bible and praying, as well as developing some spiritual disciplines that really helped me begin to get to know this God that I had decided I wanted to follow.
When I was growing up, I married my husband, Nathan. We've been married for almost 19 years, and for the first seven of those years, we were in some sort of ministry. Most of the time in church ministry, he was on staff as a church worship leader, and then I just volunteered in various capacities, mostly with the women's ministry.
We also had three kids during those seven years, and so life was busy, and we were exhausted. If I could title those years, I would call them the try-harder years. I was busy trying really hard to live up to the expectations I had for myself, what it looked like to be a good Christian woman, a good Christian wife and mom, a good Christian church member, and a good church staff member, and I was very quickly wearing out.
In 2013, I hit burnout. I was struggling a lot with depression and anxiety. Our marriage was struggling, and in the midst of all of that, I learned of the betrayal of a spiritual leader whom I had really trusted.
I had known him in my teenage years and young adult years, and so I hadn't seen him in years, but his teachings have really shaped a lot of my spiritual formation, so for me, that was the breaking point. I began questioning almost everything I believed; my life felt in pieces. Reflecting on that time, I imagine a house of faith I had built for several decades. During that season of brokenness, it was like it all just fell to pieces around me, and I was left standing in the rubble, trying to figure out where to go from here, and in that season, I realized I only had two choices, really.
I could either walk away from faith altogether and just say, you know, this Christianity thing is not what I thought it was, and I'm just gonna walk away, or I could start over, and one of the scriptures that kind of helped me during that time was Psalm 34:8. It says, taste and see that the Lord is good and I had tasted of the goodness of God and yes, I was living the try harder life and I was exhausted and I had burned out and I was disillusioned and had lots of questions and doubts, but I had tasted of God's goodness and I didn't want to walk away from that and really in that season, I experienced the goodness of God like I never had before. There's a verse in Matthew 12, verses 20 and 21, and the Living Bible paraphrases it beautifully. It says he does not crush the weak or quench the slightest hope.
He will end all conflict with his final victory, and his name shall be the world's hope. Those verses summarize the God that met me during that time in my brokenness. He was gentle, he was compassionate and he just instead of condemnation met me with an open-hearted welcome and back to that house of faith image, it was like he stepped into the rubble and first he just sat with me and allowed me to experience his kindness and his gentleness and his compassion in that broken season and then it was like he began picking up the pieces and inviting me to walk with him toward a healed and restored faith and the guiding practice that I had during those years was a search for God through scripture.
I realized that I was disappointed in myself, and I was really surprised that God, I did not sense condemnation and disappointment from God. I had expected him to kind of meet me with, all right, quit asking all these questions, quit doubting, pick up the pieces, pull it together, and get back to work, and that was not what I sensed from God, and that's not what I found in scripture either. So I spent seven years reading through the Bible and just noting who I discovered there of the God that the Bible describes. It was absolutely transformational for me, and along the way, the Lord rebuilt my faith, but it was not; it was so different from what it was before.
The object of my faith was the same: that relationship with God through Jesus, but where I had been busy trying really hard to live up to all these expectations, God taught me instead to live from a heart at rest. Matthew 11, 28 and 29 says, it was Jesus speaking, he says, come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I'm gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, and that is the God that I discovered in my brokenness.
He's the God who rebuilt my faith, and that's why I'm a Christian.
Photo Credit: SWN Design
