I had initially planned how I wanted to do this, the parts that I would tell and the parts that I wouldn’t tell. I was going to begin it with last year when I felt a sudden, almost violent urge to buy a copy of the Holy Bible and study it. However, with the act of my utterly raw revelation that I came to, I thought it better to start from the start.

Or near enough, at least. I’m hardly going to sit here and tell you my life story. This isn’t an “I’m hard done by” post, this is a “how I got here” kinda post.

I have always low-key believed in God. I would happily go with my childhood friends to social groups at churches, I willingly chose to study religious education at school (I don’t know how major that is now, but ten years ago that was a big deal!) and I would openly argue the truth of God with my atheist friends who were determined to prove me wrong (spoiler alert: they never did). Yet it was all very dialed down. It was something to make a joke about it. Or I would pray, when I remembered to. And then after leaving school, I didn’t really remember to.

It was about 2 years after leaving school that I found myself in an abusive relationship. I’m not going to go into detail, because you don’t need that and I don’t need that either to be quite honest. It was 3 years later that I left it. It took me a long time to realise all that I went through wasn’t how I – or anybody – should be treated. You would expect that anybody getting out of an abusive relationship would become a recluse, an absolute shut-in refusing to be around anybody else. I went the other way. For me, it was all about control. It was my turn to control things. And if other people didn’t like that, then they could leave. So, I continued to stay off the rails. I wasn’t doing anything mad, but I also wasn’t really being myself, because I didn’t know myself anymore. I had to rebuild myself and throughout that I found myself hiding moreso than building.

It was a slow burn and a lot of the time I would physically hide away in my room. It helped that I had returned to university to study my postgraduate year so my room was only mine and nobody would knock on your door so I could sink deeper into my depression as I struggled to come to terms with me and who I had become and who I had lost (in myself). I was sinking deeper into the darkness until one day, I saw a light and felt a hand push me up, out of bed, standing up. From then on, I remembered to pray again. But… I still kept it lowkey. I didn’t tell people that I prayed to get by and I didn’t really listen to God in any way. Essentially I just put it all on Him without really acknowledging His existence.

Fast forward to 2023, and I befriended a ruddy Christian! And I kept thinking back to all the times when I did speak to God and how good that felt. Then the final thing it took for me to be like, “aight God, I hear you”, was watching Narnia, the first one, on New Year’s Eve. From that I fell down an absolute rabbit hole, from Aslan accepting Edmund back, to buying a really nice leather-bound Bible, to finding out about the earliest translations of the Bible, to learning about the Apocrypha and the 400 years of silence. To this blog about the book of Malachi that suggests (spoiler alert) that God is essentially saying that He has explained how to be and have a relationship with Him and then His people are not doing that and blaming Him for their wrongdoings or misfortunes and how He would send Elijah when the time was right but for now (then) it wasn’t the time to try to teach them anything because people weren’t willing to listen. I’ve yet to get that far in my own reading, but the more I read, the more interesting it all gets.

And, ultimately, the more peace I find too. I have been through 3 counselors and 1 therapist, yet after 2 hours of speaking with God, I’ve been able to overcome years of trauma. I cannot stress enough how much peace I find openly having God in my life.