I grew up in a church that called itself "Christian Fundamentalist," but I lost my faith in my early teens.  I saw bad things happen in that church and saw my family break apart, and I blamed God.  At first I thought I hated God, then I decided there just could not be a God.  I lived the next 16 years or so like that, hating God, and especially hating myself. Pretty much any caricature of an "angry atheist" you can think of embodied me.  Oddly enough, it didn't stop me from looking for God elsewhere.  I studied other religions, half tried a few of them, hoping to find something that made sense, but I remained steadfast that I didn't believe in God.  I even joined an atheist organization.

Years later I woke up one morning, and for reasons I couldn't explain I wanted to go to church.  I did not know what church or why; I just had a desire to go, and I did.  I found something close to home and very different in its tradition to the church I grew up in, and I went to Sunday morning service.  I entered nervously and left confused,  questioning why I had gone and why I had been the way I was for so long.  I drove around for a while not knowing what to do about it, and finally pulled in front of a restaurant to get lunch.  In a moment of desperation, I prayed to God to tell me.  As I was praying, I heard the familiar sound of my cellphone buzzing when I get an email.  I finished praying and checked my phone: it was an invite to my atheist organization's next meeting, at the very place I had just stopped in front of for lunch.  I realized the folly of being an avowed atheist who woke up wanting to go to church and then sat down to pray to the God I claimed didn't exist.  It was a life-changing moment.

I went back to that church for the next few months, and while I liked the pastors, its dogma and history bothered me.  I could see when they had made changes to their faith and when they had simply invented new facets to it.  That seemed disingenuous to me, and I started looking for something else.  I wish I could say my first visit to an Orthodox Church was all it took, but that was not the case.  My first visit to an Orthodox Church seemed alien to me.  I went during Vespers and nothing made sense.  A few weeks later I tried another local Orthodox Church for vespers and it made more sense, but I found the congregants to be more interested in their ethnicity, which I did not share.  I started reading about the Orthodox faith around then, but I kept attending my old church.  Reading about Orthodoxy was an eye-opener for me. Most everything in Christianity as I knew it was from a Roman Catholic point of view or a Protestant reaction to the Roman Catholic church.  I never learned as a child or even in college that another option even existed.  This church I knew little about had existed for almost two thousand years and did not have the changes and inventions that bothered me about my church.

Attending my first Divine Liturgy made up my mind forever. It made the liturgy at the church I was attending seem empty and incomplete.  In Orthodoxy, I finally saw a faith, doctrine, and worship that were all complete.  Moreover, I felt Christ was there for the first time in my life.  I never looked back.  Being Orthodox is not easy.  It is a difficult path to stay on, one that has had painful consequences in my life, and I often miss the mark.  No matter how far off I get, I still can find my way back there to Christ.  He is always waiting for me to come home to Him.