Thanks for sharing. I can very much relate to the roller coaster of attitudes toward God/god and my own spirituality. I especially like your line “A woman who has been so broken and beaten down her entire life that she has no energy left in her to put into a God but needs that energy to put into herself.”

My Before….I was raised in an evangelical christian church, but with a family who did not openly pray or talk about it. I have had anxiety around religion for as long as I can remember. High school was a disaster for me, and after an attempt at suicide, I decided the reason my life was such a mess was that I needed to submit to God’s will for my life. So I jumped head first into the kool-aid. I even married a guy from church right out of high school. And in eventually turning my back on that marriage I also turned my back on anything that resembled religion. I don’t have a specific after because I lived like a yo-yo between hyper spiritual and spiritual avoidance.
The truth is that in the naivety of my early years I believed in a creator that was also a personal God because wasn’t that what I was taught? About a God who is a PERSONAL lord and savior, someone who cares about everything that matters to you. And yet, I was also taught this same God could not tolerate my “depraved” presence without Jesus’s perfect sacrifice. So how is one, particularly a child, supposed to feel when they are not inherently “good” enough to be tolerated by their protector and comforter? I’m not great with feeling words, but “fragmented” is what comes to mind. I have never fully recovered from the betrayal of my well meaning teachers and I still bristle when I hear people spouting legalistic stupidity. As my experience of betrayal was unintentional, I can only imagine the hurt that could result from the ways in which you were intentionally exploited.

Because NOW…I do believe in a creator, we can call him God or god, or whatever you like. And I do understand him from a perspective that is basically biblical simply because that is what I know. I actually thought I was atheist for a long time until I realized I was no more sure there was NOT a creator than that is a creator. To me it is just the unknowable. So then I thought I was an agnostic, and maybe I am, but I think of agnostic as indifferent. I’m not indifferent. So I choose to believe there is a creator who I see as benevolent but not intimately involved.
And I’ve noticed I am drawn to some of the ideas of Taoism , a return to ideas of an interconnected whole and unity. It seems to be corrective to my earlier tendencies to “split off” things about myself that felt bad in some way. I feel more “centered” when I try to accept all the good, bad, and ugly that I truly am. I no longer believe a creator made us “bad” in any way(I know that’s an oversimplification, but I think that’s the heart of it). I try to think in terms of potential to do good or cause harm.

And you brought tears to my eyes talking about how you miss God, miss your old faith. I miss that, too, along with the innocence that once allowed me to believe so simply. But like you, I can’t go back. But I have found a new version of faith, I suppose. I don’t pray, at least not in any way that most people would recognize as prayer. But sometimes I find that my desires line up with something in the lyrics of a song and it becomes like a prayer. Or maybe it’s just something someone said that struck me as true in ways I didn’t understand. I feel like reflecting on those things is a version of prayer.

And I always feel closest to the creator when I am experiencing nature. Thunderstorms are my favorite. They are potentially a dark and destructive force of nature that has the result of balancing the atmosphere and nourishing the land. (Hence the user name SummerStorm, lol!)

Best of wishes embracing a new, more matured spirituality and self!