Growing up in a Christian home, I accepted Christ at a very young age. Throughout most of my adolescence, I was at church two to three times a week for various youth groups and church activities, in addition to church and Sunday school every week. It was through these experiences that I developed an extensive knowledge of who God was, which would later prove beneficial in a lengthy battle between my head and my heart.

In high school I continued to be heavily involved with the church, joining worship teams and leading a middle school youth group in addition to participating in my own bible study. It was in high school that I began to rely on my head knowledge of God and the church, rather than really experiencing it from my heart. My faith was stagnant, and while I could answer any question in a bible study and give great spiritual advice, none of it impacted my heart.

Coming to college, this separation of knowledge vs experience continued to negatively impact me. I often found myself comparing my faith to others, wondering why I didn’t seem as joyful or outwardly expressive in my faith. This came to a head over winter break of my sophomore year. I was at a winter conference with a Christian organization I joined in college, and during one of the sessions I realized nothing the speaker was saying was hitting me. This continued for the rest of the conference, where I just felt empty and void of any emotion during sermons and worship. I went home confused but assumed it would pass. It didn’t.

The following spring semester was one of the darkest times in my life, as I sunk into a deep apathetic funk, a trait I later realized had marked most of my Christian faith. During this time, I essentially lost the ability to feel emotion, whether it was related to my faith or not. The emotions I did experience were almost always negative, manifesting themselves primarily through irritation and bitterness. I didn’t want to hang out with my friends because I knew emotionally I couldn’t support them or would have to fake being happy and began to isolate myself because of it. I felt suffocated and stuck, shackled to myself and oppressed by my own emotional state. While I kept forcing myself to have quiet times and continued going to church, God felt extremely distant and silent to me.

I can’t pinpoint a specific time or experience when this period of extreme apathy broke, but it finally did in the fall of my junior year. Despite not having feelings and not experiencing Christ, I clung to the head knowledge I had gained through the years and forced that logic to reckon with my emptiness. God was faithful, patient, enduring, and cared when I couldn’t. Since then I have found a renewed desire to seek Him wholeheartedly, and this has produced a deep sense of joy in my life, one that comes not through being able to spout off all the “right answers” but through a fully abandoned pursuit of Jesus Christ. While there are certainly still days I struggle with feeling apathetic, God has demonstrated time and time again that choosing Him and the joy that follows is so incredibly worth it.

“Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.” -Psalm 51:12