When I Almost Lost My Faith

At age 34, I almost lost my Christian faith. Some people who lose their faith shrug and move on. But that wasn’t me. I was terrified.

Why? Because all my life I believed it all:

• God loves me and thinks I’m important.

• Jesus Christ, who is God, died to save me.

• I’ll live forever in joy and glory.

• My life matters and has a high and holy purpose.

• The Lord guides, protects, and provides for me.

So, I wasn’t mad at God. I was terrified He didn’t exist. But I couldn’t just decide to believe because I wanted to. I’m not built like that.

And Then I Remembered

Then during that time of scary doubt God reminded me of two things: one experiential, one intellectual. Maybe I could have denied one of them. Both? Nope.

The Miracle of Protection

The experiential piece of evidence came first. I remembered a retreat I attended in my mid-twenties at Forest Home, a Christian retreat center in the mountains of Southern California. I went with two close friends from church. One evening after dinner, the three of us decided to go to the chapel to pray. On the way in, we passed a young woman about our age sobbing uncontrollably, with a young man sitting across from her looking stunned and helpless. It was clear he wasn’t hurting her—he looked overwhelmed and worried.

We continued to the chapel, but as we began to pray, we could still hear her crying outside. The sound was heartbreaking. We looked at each other, and we knew we couldn’t just stay there, we had to go see if we could help.

They were sitting on log benches around a fire ring. When we sat down with them, the girl could hardly speak. The young man explained. She had been involved in Satan worship. (The real thing–Wicca and paganism doesn’t believe there’s a Satan, far less worships him.)

This was something much darker. She said she could feel Satan trying to pull her back in.

The three of us had never done anything remotely like deliverance or intercessory prayer on that level, especially not for a stranger. But we sat down with her and that poor young guy. We prayed. And one by one, God brought to each of us a Bible verse, a song, a word of encouragement. It may have looked like a planned performance, but it wasn’t. It was the Holy Spirit.

And then I saw something: a vision from God. I had never seen one before and didn’t call it that at the time; I didn’t define it until later. Here’s what I saw:

As we sat in the physical forest clearing, a thick, solid darkness began rolling in from my left. At the same time, a brilliant white light appeared on the right and advanced towards the wall of black.

But the two never met. As soon as the light began to move forward, the darkness rolled back like someone turning a page. The light filled the whole clearing.

No one else said they saw it, and I didn’t speak of it right away. But something shifted. The girl stopped crying. She looked up and said, “I think I’m okay now.” And we asked her, “Do you want to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

That vision—that moment—was what God brought back to me during my crisis of faith a decade later. It was real. I remembered it. I couldn’t deny what I’d seen or how God had moved.

The Miracle of Faith

The second thing God used to bring me back was intellectual. I had long loved C.S. Lewis—his Chronicles of Narnia, Until We Have Faces and That Hideous Strength. Sometime during my Lewis collecting phase, I also bought Mere Christianity, his nonfiction defense of the faith. (Also called apologetics: why we believe what we believe.)

When I read it, something clicked. The doubts I had wrestled with began to fade. You might say, “Really? Just like that?” But for me, yes. Mere Christianity answered the intellectual questions I had been too afraid to name, and reminded me why Christianity makes sense. And my vision reminded me that He does work in the world in miraculous ways.

And ever since then—even though I still don’t know everything, even though I don’t always understand why God allows certain things or answers in the ways He does—I know this:

He is the God who loves and saves me.

And I am the one who loves Him forever.