"Testimony"

Ok, because I think you may see this elsewhere, I'll put it here too.
One thing I hate about this is hurting people I love, so if this hurts anyone, I'm very very sorry, but I can only speak the truth.

I was a Catholic Christian and just a year ago I was devout and my life revolved around God. I prayed when I woke till when I went to bed and my social circle, my family, friends were all from a similar background. God was the centre of my life and the thing that kept me going. Life had not been easy- too long to go into here, but my son had a serious psychotic episode at the age of 12 onwards and I had spent many hours holding and comforting him as the voices in his head taunted him and threatened to destroy him. That had severely tested my faith but I had passed through it, finally placing my hope and trust in a God I thought was one of love, all benevolent, who would not let me down.
As part of my search for something to help me through the difficult times, I used the internet and found a Christian forum. In the evenings, in the gaps between looking after son1, I was able to read and take part in conversations about God and to find support and fellowship there. I ended up a mod and spent time moderating the apologetic forum.
Now there I was faced with a lot of the questions I had previously asked myself together with new information and thoughts I’d never had before. It set me off on a bit of a quest to search for truth, reasoning that the God I believed in would not let me down.
But instead of certainty, I found more and more doubt, more and more holes in my faith.
Until finally, one day in the beginning of December, while driving to work, I looked in the sky and realised there was no God.
My world sort of crumbled for a while and I thought I was going to fall apart.
But I didn’t.
I tried so hard to get my faith back with no success, until I realised it wasn’t going to come and I would have to accept life as it was.
And through that, I have finally found peace and contentment, strangely more so than I had before.
Maybe because I was always searching and asking for God to solve my problems, relying on something outside myself.
I still have days when I yearn for my faith and my social situation is anything but sorted, but the days on which I am glad this has happened are increasing and my angst about it all far less. So thank you to those who have helped me in this difficult time, appreciated beyond words. And here’s to the future, for all of us, whether we are Christian or not, that our friendship might remain and we still see in each other the people that we are....