Spiritual Reboot

This is my first blog entry on my first blog site. I'm very new to this sort of thing, but I thought I'd try my hand at it.

I am a Christian. I was raised a Christian, and I always went to church with my family on Sundays. I accepted Christ at a very young age with my parents at my side. I attended youth group during high school and loved it. I made many friends within that youth group, many of which I am still good friends with.

But there was a problem. In the past few years I began to examine the church; to examine myself. Many questions entered my mind. Questions like: Why am I here? What purpose does God have for my life? If God does have a purpose for my life, why doesn't he tell me what it is? Why do I come to church, week after week, just to hear the same message over and over? In short, I began to wonder if this was what being a Christian was all about. Not to say that I was considering abandoning my belief in God and my Christian walk. I knew I wouldn't do that. My question was: Is this all that there is?

I became quite aggravated by certain aspects of church. There were many superstitious traditions going around the church body that I did not agree with. Some of this traditions were as old as the church, some were only a few years old. Don't get me wrong, traditions in the church are good, but when they don't seem to have much biblical principle attached to them is when they turn from belief to superstition.

Overall, I felt unsettled, unsatisfied, and restless as a Christian. Wasn't accepting Christ and becoming a believer supposed to end all of that? My biggest concern was that it was only in my mind, or that I was being attacked by Satan. I'm sure some might still say that I was being attacked. Fortunately, something happened in my life that changed my Christian walk forever - I went to college.

The college years are extremely integral years in a person's life, as I found out first hand. Separation from old friends and family give you the space you need to sort out who you are as a person, and not just accept that you are who they say you are. It was during the first months of college - about a year ago now in fact - that I went through what I refer to as my "spiritual reboot".

That is to say, I took the sense of knowing all there was to being a Christian, of knowing everything that Christ said in the gospels and what he meant, about knowing exactly what would happen in the end times, and cleared them all out of my mind and started re-learning everything I thought I already knew. All of Christ's teachings, the ten commandments, works of the Holy Spirit, what it meant for Jesus to die on the cross for our sins - everything was re-learned. Two things happened during this process: I understood everything much more than I ever had in the past, and I realized that I believed almost everything I had previously learned over the span of my Christian life.

As you might imagine, it was quite a relief to find out that I wasn't a heretic. But as I went through my first year at a four year college (I had previously attended a community college for a couple years) my faith became stronger than it ever had before. I became integrated into a great campus ministry almost immediately after arriving at the college, and I made some great friends through that church. Through that ministry, a few books by some really good Christian authors, and some serious research into the Bible, I became more aware of what it means to be a Christian.

The main purpose of this blog is to help others make a similar journey to discover what it truly means to be a Christian. I intend on writing many more posts that will elaborate on my experience and what I learned. My hope is to help Christians, as well as non-Christians, understand what Christianity is and begin living life in peace, not in frustration.

That's not to say that this will be a blog made up of entirely spiritual entries. I have many diverse interests that I'd like to talk about. Television, movies, music, books, and they're not all Christian themed.

I now conclude my first entry. It is essentially the basis for this blog. I look forward to seeing what kind of feedback it gets and joining you in many different discussions.