My Faith Journey

My faith journey has been a rollercoaster. I suppose that’s the nature of faith though, isn’t it? It goes through peaks and valleys, moments of blind belief and others of complete doubt. We revel in the answered prayer, wonder where God is in moments of turmoil. I’ve started and stopped this piece a few times over the last several months, lost my words, and abandoned it. Lately though, I’ve felt called to try again. To put my faith journey on digital paper and share it, an urge helped along by a recent sermon on opposition and the ways the enemy will try to distract you from your calling. I’m not sure if I’m going to have the right words this time, but I’m going to try.

Little White Church In The Vale

We went to church most Sundays when I was young. It was a small church in the Virginia mountains, the congregation even smaller and skewed older. They took attendance and recorded it along with the offering on the wooden board at the front of the church each week. I think they still do that. I went to Sunday School in the basement where I learned about Jesus through craft projects and bad skits while the adults listened to the preacher upstairs. There was Vacation Bible School for a week every summer. I can practically taste the dollar store cookies and the fruit punch mixed from a powder as I type this. 

We moved to the farm my dad worked on when I was five. It was only a half hour away from church, but that felt like a great distance on a Sunday morning and so we fell out of the weekly church routine and became those people who went on Easter, Christmas, and Homecoming. It was a Baptist church where there was a lot of fire and brimstone preached. God was to be feared and we were all bound for hell – or at least that’s how I interpreted things as a young girl. I knew the stories from the Bible, but I didn’t see God as the loving, forgiving God He is. I was afraid of Him. I thought He was some faceless entity, waiting to strike me down for refusing to eat my tuna fish sandwich.

By the time I was in middle school, church was an even rarer occurrence. We still found our way to the occasional Easter service, maybe Homecoming, sometimes Christmas, but there was no rhyme or reason to it, just a “yeah, I guess I’ll go to church today.” We had long ago stopped praying before meals and the Bibles in the house served as paperweights and maybe a coaster on occasion. 

Yet I still felt a pull towards God. I was in fourth grade when I started to pray before bed. They were the prayers of a ten year old, asking God to help her remember how to spell a challenging word on the next day’s spelling test, to not have to run a lap around the baseball field during gym, for the boy to like her back. I remember it well, making the conscious decision to say my prayers before bed, not really knowing “how,” but just talking to God as I drifted off to sleep, a habit I would practice from then on. 

I read the Bible for the first time when I was in eighth grade. It was the King James translation and I didn’t understand a word of it, but I read it cover to cover. I didn’t know there were other translations – I had only ever seen King James Bibles at that point in my life – and I had no idea it didn’t have to be read from Genesis to Revelation, first page to last, that one could simply open it to a page and begin.

My faith fell to the background as I got older. It was still there, but I had other things on my mind like how I was going to wear my hair for Friday night’s football game, if we should use the green or the gold color chips in our cheer shoes that week. Of course there were boys, trying to fit in with the popular crowd, tests to pass, essays to write. I wiggled out of those rare church outings more often than not, but I still prayed, maybe not as consistently, but prayer was always there. 

A New Age Detour

Fast forward to ‘The Great Breakup,’ when I was twenty years old. It was a bad breakout, the kind that left me wrecked. I was in a deep depression, having panic attacks, struggling to make it day-to-day. It was so bad that I withdrew from the courses I was taking at the local community college and took medical leave from work. In the midst of it, I discovered The Secret and latched on to the concept of the Law of Attraction, particularly the use of Matthew 21:22 – And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer – in the book. If it was quoting the Bible, surely there was something to it. And so, down the manifestation hole I fell, making vision boards, using affirmations, and journaling like my life depended on it. 

You know what? 

Manifestation worked. 

I know now that it worked because I was actively praying and taking action. I was following the guidance of that small, still voice that was so loud and prominent at the time, telling me to follow this career path, start this website, apply to this school. I did all of those things with blind faith. Faith and action. I didn’t know James 2:22 at the time – You see that faith was active together with his works, and by works, faith was made complete – but I was living it out loud. 

“Manifestation” continued to be something I would come back to throughout college, but once I was at the University of Tennessee, I again found myself “too busy” to put in time doing things like vision boards and writing out my intentions. I would pray on occasion, maybe jot down a list of details I wanted in a given scenario, but that was about it. It continued in that vein for several years as I graduated from college and moved to Nashville for the first time. I went to church here and there, journaled once every few months, made the occasional vision board. I read a lot of books on spirituality and manifestation, implemented bits and pieces of what I read although nothing ever seemed to stick long term. During the last few months of living in Nashville that first time, I bought my first Bible not gifted to me by someone else. 

It was the first time I realized Bibles came in different translations. 

I can’t remember the translation I purchased, but I do know I only sort of read it, usually when I was down and needed a pick me up. I would open it up and read a passage or two, see if it resonated. It was 2013 and I felt lost. I would come home from work and spend part of the evening in tears of frustration from my job and the other part trying to decide if I stayed in Nashville or returned to my hometown. I prayed a lot. I made a list of things I wanted in a new job. I applied for jobs in Nashville in the music industry I was so desperate to be a part of at the time and back home in Charlottesville, trusting one of them would come to fruition.  

The job I really wanted in Nashville fell through. 

The job I got back home in Charlottesville checked off every box of the list I had made. In hindsight, I can’t say it was the best job I’ve ever had, but it served the purpose I needed it to serve in that particular season. I was still a casual practitioner of faith at that point, even went to church a few times mostly because a guy I liked went. I just – didn’t commit. If asked, I would have probably told you about manifestation instead of Jesus. 

What is this knowing?

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but I started to grow curious about the fact that the seemingly random things I would think about would somehow happen. I would think about someone I hadn’t spoken to in years and hear from them a few days later. I’d think ‘so and so is pregnant’ or ‘so and so is leaving their job’ and I’d find out about a pregnancy or a resignation soon after. It was something my grandma has done her whole life. I have so many memories of her standing to answer the phone before it rang or telling me a “coincidental’ story that wasn’t coincidental at all. I decided I wanted to know more. 

Through Google and reading still more books, I developed what I’ll call a spiritual practice of waking up every morning, writing in my journal, sitting quietly in prayer for several minutes, and then pulling a few oracle cards. Not tarot cards – oracle cards. These were beautiful cards, more mystical than anything, and I can admit they often gave me guidance or clarity. I even pulled them for other people on occasion. When I would pray, I would pray to God, and I would ask “Spirit” for guidance. I would often address my journal entries to God or ask Spirit for discernment within the pages.

I sometimes wrestled with the idea of God versus some of my more new age practices, but I didn’t spend a lot of time stewing on it, perhaps because I didn’t want the answer. My intuition – that knowing – was still there, still making itself known on occasion, but I wasn’t any closer to understanding it. I had just settled into a routine that was bringing me peace and at least some clarity.

Then I had The Dream. 

Dreams, Podcasts, & the Holy Spirit

It may seem silly to you, that a dream had such a profound impact on me. But it did. This dream, which you can read a little about here, was so vivid, so real. I’m not someone who dreams and if I do, I don’t remember them. If I do remember a detail, it tends to flutter away to wherever dreams go within minutes of waking. Not this dream, though. I can remember nearly every detail of this particular dream and it was a continuation of another dream I had a couple of years earlier. I don’t remember much of that first dream, just the who and the where, but I’m certain they were connected. This second part dream wrapped around me like a cloak and it wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t shake it. I still can’t shake it. I won’t think of it for months and then it creeps back into the forefront of my mind. I shared this dream with a friend who said “that sounds prophetic” (little did I know, she was intimately aquainted with the Holy Spirit) and the wheels began to turn. 

I remembered a story I read in Lauren Akins’ book, Live in Love, about Kailey Dickerson, wife of country singer Russel Dickerson. Kailey has prophetic dreams and while asking her if she’d had any dreams about her and Thomas Rhett adopting, Lauren ended up getting a “word” from someone else in attendance. It was Lauren’s first encounter with the Holy Spirit and the first time I’d read or heard anything like that. It also reminded me of a Caroline Hobby podcast episode I’d heard Kailey on a couple of years earlier. I found the episode and listened to it again. 

It was like the floodgates opened. 

Lauren announced a new season of her Live In Love Podcast not long after. It reminded me that I hadn’t listened to the first season all the way through. I thought I left off on episode three, but was surprised to find I had only listened to a few minutes of episode two which features her father and sister. I hit “play” and wouldn’t you know it? Her dad shared a powerful story about God – and dreams. It felt like a sign.

In the midst of playing catch up on Lauren’s podcast, Kailey announced her own podcast, Coffee with Kailey. I devoured it. Week after week, I couldn’t wait to hit “play” and hear the wisdom Kailey had to share. She talked about spiritual gifts, about her relationship with Jesus, about lessons learned and prayers answered. And she spoke a lot about the Holy Spirit. 

Meeting The Holy Spirit

I knew of the Holy Spirit in a theoretical way. “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” I knew the Holy Trinity was “from the Bible” and that Jesus was the son of God and that the Holy Ghost arrived on the scene after the Resurrection. That was about where my understanding of the Holy Spirit ended. Listening to Kailey, I started to understand that the “Spirit” I had been leaning on, that I addressed when I journaled and prayed, was actually the Holy Spirit. It opened up – everything.  

You see, I knew there was something supernatural at work in my life. I could feel it and at times, I’ve even heard it. I have two very clear, specific memories from my childhood of being on the verge of a panic attack. As my heartrate picked up and my breath shortened, I felt the most complete, all-encompassing sense of peace wash over me with a cool breeze. I can’t put it into words, but it was clear and distinct and the panic just – disappeared. I knew I was safe. A few times, I’ve heard a voice as clear as though it were sitting next to me provide direction that never made since at the time, but always panned out down the road. It was the Holy Spirit all along, waiting patiently for me to really, truly recognize it and let it in.

Discovering the Holy Spirit and how it moves and works in our lives and in the supernatural answered so many questions I’d been searching for answers to over the years. It explained my gift of knowing, of being able to walk into a room and literally feel the environment, of being able to discern if a person is sad or happy or mad or unkind. It explained the times I felt that cool breeze of peace, of the times I heard that voice or words just fell out of me as I journaled that didn’t feel like my own. It just made sense.

Finding City Hills

While living in Nashville, I started attending Kailey’s church, The Belonging Co. I grew in my faith and learned more about how God works in the supernatural. When I moved to Knoxville, I tool a few months to just *be* before I went in search of a church. I made a list – an actual list, written down on paper and everything – of churches to try around town based on friend recommendations and Google searches and headed to my first one: City Hills. 

I didn’t try another. 

City Hills feels good. For the first time in my adult life, I’m excited to go to church every Sunday. I’m in a small group, planning to lead a small group this summer, and overall enjoying learning more about Jesus week after week. I feel the Holy Spirit moving in me and around me, and it’s a really beautiful thing. 

It’s because of a recent sermon at City Hills by Pastor Brandon Shanks that I decided to finish writing about my faith journey and share it. The sermon was on opposition and how the enemy will do whatever he can to stop you from stepping out in your calling. One of the things he said was “if God can’t lead you out of your comfort zone, how are you going to lead others out of theirs?” and I couldn’t stop thinking about that line afterwards. Whenever I thought about writing and posting my faith journey, I worried about what people would think, if they would call me crazy, judge me, whisper and gossip about me. That, my friends, is what opposition looks like. 

I’ve felt like God is calling me towards something for a while now, like something is there, bubbling just below the surface, waiting to emerge. I’ve been leaning into that feeling, exploring what it could be, asking God for guidance, to show me where He wants me to go, what He wants me to say, what He wants me to do. I don’t have anything other than a feeling that whatever it is starts here, with this post. So here I am, posting it, hoping my testimony – that feels like such a big word – inspires you. 

A funny thing happened as I typed what I thought was going to be the final sentences of this faith journey – for now, at least, as we know a faith journey never ends. I wanted to close with how City Hills encourages us to be bold in our faith week in and week out. It was one of the things that resonated with me the most during my first visit on the first Sunday of 2024. The verse I try to build my life on is 2 Corinthians 3:12: 

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.

I googled “act with great boldness” to get the exact wording – I often find myself paraphrasing it or mixing translations – and instead of 2 Corinthians 3:12 popping up like it does every single time I google that phrase, I got Acts 4:29-31 instead: 

And now, Lord, consider their threats, and grant that your servants may speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand for healing, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” When they had prayed, the place where they were assembled was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the word of God boldly.

You may call it a coincidence, but I don’t believe in those, not when City Hills is working our way through the book of Acts this year. Not when I’m speaking boldly in sharing this. 

That’s God, friends. Showing up in the details. Always.