I grew up around faith before I knew what I believed. Church gave me language early. God. Sin. Salvation. Heaven. Hell. Obedience. Judgment. Scripture. I knew how those words were supposed to sound in a room full of believers. I knew when people lifted their hands. I knew when to clap. I knew what good Christians were supposed to say about God, and for a long time I repeated what I had been given because questioning it felt dangerous. I had been taught that the Bible was the infallible word of God, but I was confused by what I read and even more confused by how people decided what was literal and what was not. There were questions living in me, but I did not feel free to ask them. So I did what people often do when belonging feels connected to agreement. I learned the language before I understood the experience.  

The God I carried in those years was frightening. I believed in a powerful invisible being who watched closely, punished the disobedient, and rewarded the people who got it right. That kind of belief can produce behavior, but behavior is not the same thing as transformation. I wanted God’s love, but somewhere inside I also felt like I had to prove I deserved it. I had zeal. I could talk about faith. I could participate in worship. What I could not figure out was how to turn all that religious knowledge into something that actually changed my heart. That gap bothered me long before crack became the obvious problem in my life. I could say things about power while feeling powerless. I could speak about freedom while not knowing what freedom felt like inside me. Looking back, that contradiction was one of the first places where I learned how easy it is to perform a character because the people around you already know the script. 

That is why my relationship with religion became complicated. I do not say that because I hate the church or because nothing good came from being raised in faith. My mother keeping us in church gave me a language for a dialogue I would eventually have with something deeper inside myself. Scripture stayed with me. Images stayed with me. Stories stayed with me. But I also had to admit that fear had become mixed into what I called faith. I had learned to repeat answers even when the questions in me were still alive. I had learned that challenging a religious narrative could make you look dangerous to people who needed certainty. Long before I understood addiction, I already knew what it meant to be taken by something outside myself and to arrange my identity around it. In my own language, religion became the first monster when dogma demanded obedience without understanding.  

Then life complicated everything. Trauma did not behave neatly. Addiction certainly did not. I watched the difference between what I said I believed and what I was actually able to live. Crack had no respect for my religious vocabulary. It did not care how many sermons I had heard. It did not care whether I knew Bible verses. When that substance took hold of my attention, I discovered quickly that memorized language was not the same thing as inner authority. That was painful because it forced me to look at whether I knew God or whether I knew what other people had told me about God. Those are not always the same thing. I had spent years locating the divine outside myself, somewhere above me, judging me, watching me, waiting for me to get it right. My suffering forced the search inward. 

That inward turn did not make me stop caring about God. It made the question more serious. I began to see God less as the figure I was terrified of disappointing and more as a Loving presence that had not abandoned me even when I had abandoned myself. That change was not a theological argument I won. It came through experience. There were moments in the darkness when something in me knew to move, knew to listen, knew danger before my intellect could explain it. There were times when kindness arrived through strangers and touched me in ways I could not manufacture. There were questions that rose in me when all the old answers stopped working. Slowly, God became less connected to terror and more connected to the presence that kept calling me inward.  

That also changed how I read suffering. Earlier in life, I had a simple system. Good things came from God. Bad things belonged to the devil. That arrangement was easy until something I had called bad produced something good in me. Addiction was bad. The damage was real. The people hurt by my behavior did not need a philosophy lesson explaining why it was secretly wonderful. But I could not deny that walking through darkness had eventually exposed things about me that comfort never had. That complicated the old categories. Maybe every painful thing did not mean God had left. Maybe every comfortable thing was not proof I was walking correctly. Maybe faith required enough honesty to admit that life did not always fit the boxes I inherited. 

I still respect the role scripture has played in my life, but I no longer believe faith means silencing the questions. Questions became part of my faith because they forced me to stop pretending I knew what I had never experienced. They made me examine what I was saying. They made me separate fear from reverence and performance from knowing. If a belief cannot survive an honest question, I have to ask what kind of belief it was. The God I came to know through the hardest parts of my life was not made smaller by my questions. If anything, the questions stripped away some of the smaller ideas I had carried about God. 

Faith stopped feeling like fear when I stopped treating God as another cage. I had already lived in enough cages. Addiction had one. Shame had one. Identity had one. I did not need religion to build another and call it salvation. What I needed was truth that could be lived, not just repeated. I needed a relationship with Love that could reach me in the jungle, not only inside a church building. I needed something that did not disappear when I was at my worst. That search changed the way I understood God, and it changed the way I understood myself. I no longer needed terror to keep me close. The presence I had been afraid of losing had been there through the entire road, waiting for me to stop running long enough to notice it.