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You realize things are going badly when you no longer remember how to pray, when you no longer sing the songs in church with interest or sometimes even sincerity.  You know that things have gone wrong when you leave church discouraged and fighting for faith, when your struggle to believe in God becomes more apparent with each passing week, and is particularly obvious in those lonely hours after leaving the church building.

And so you leave church.  You don't leave church because you're done with God, you leave church because you are absolutely desperate to find him.  There is so much to work through, and you do the hard work of processing your disappointments and wounds as well as the things that were good about that season, about that group of people, about that place.  You're trying to rediscover God, rediscover prayer, rediscover what you really believe when the doors close and the lights go out and you're by yourself.

At the core, you never lost your faith.  You just lost faith in those who call themselves His people.

And it's in those hopeful moments after you begin once again to pray, after you begin to re-imagine, after you begin to truly allow yourself the grace to ask the questions and come to new answers that you realize yet again and with a new perspective just how bad things were.

They weren't bad, but you certainly were bad with them.  

You realize that you spent most of the past years fighting an intellectual battle rather than doing anything.  You realize that it was more important for them to defend marriage between one man and one woman than it was to fight systemic injustice, racism, poverty in this nation.  You realize that in remaining among them all your energy was spent fighting this, if only in your head.  You realize how not okay you are with this.  You realize that the persecution complex was driving you away from church and ultimately God, not simply because it was annoying or because you didn't agree with it, but because it was a fundamentally different way of looking at the world, a way that says "my political views are the only ones that matter and this nation is only free if it leaves me free to press my views onto others who do not claim the name of God."  You realize that even now as you write you're still fighting those intellectual battles, still trying to defend your basic instinct that to clothe the naked and feed the hungry is so much more important than defending marriage.  

You realize when you listen to sermons online that you love Jesus more than ever.  You realize that you stopped praying and you stopped believing but that you never really stopped hoping.  You realize that God is more near than ever, he has just changed his way of being near.  You realize that he's taken his hand off the bike and is letting you ride without the training wheels and that maybe, just maybe there is freedom and hope on the other side of this divide.

You realize that you may not understand how God works in the world, that you may not have the correct views, the most godly views, and that none of that matters.  

God's got you.  He's guiding you.

You gotta stop fighting it, daughter, you gotta stop fighting.

Sanctification is happening.  It's messy and it's not always uphill.  But it will come around in waves, and it will make you new.