I’ve heard so many sermons in my lifetime. Many I’ve listened to by choice. Many while making a paper airplane out of the program. Many while feeling so at odds with God. Many while feeling so close to Him. But never the less, I went.

Throughout every one of them, I heard words like “faith,” “grace,” “sin,” “love,” and on and on so much that they seemed to leak of their meaning. They were buzzwords that I felt like were demanding something of me that I didn’t know how to give. My systems would shut down and I would fake it as best as possible. I didn’t know what else to do surrounded by people using that language while I was feeling so out of place among it.

I think many people often blame the church for things like this. I don’t believe the church did anything wrong. There was something deep down in my soul that felt absolutely despised by my Maker. So much so, that the words “grace” and “love” could be used and I felt they said “shame” and “fear.” Listen again, this is nothing they forced on me. This was inborn. I didn’t want to love God. I didn’t know how. I felt like I could never give enough. The Christian life was simply feeding the dog of condemnation enough to satisfy him until he came barking again (I even picture him as one of those three-headed dogs from Harry Potter).

In the last year of my life, I’ve learned a lot about faith. I didn’t really understand what it meant because I was so afraid of it. It was intangible, a little crazy, and seemed too easy. “It can’t be just faith, right?” I thought. “I must do something else! I have to look like that guy!”

Recently I heard another one of those sermons I was talking about earlier, only this time something was different and it wasn’t the message. I’ve heard the same message nearly as much as the amount of days I’ve been alive. This one in particular focused on why God chose faith as the means to His grace. “Why not another form of grace?” the message asked.

It boiled down to this: faith is entirely trusting upon God alone and entirely mistrusting of the person who has the faith. Faith in its nature is saying, “Wow, I am so incapable on my own” while simultaneously saying, “Wow, God is so capable on His own.” This simple truth blew my mind. God designed it all this way. He knew you would have to be seen as a fool to have faith in something you can’t see. Of course! But that is exactly what God is asking us to do. Stake being cool, being intelligent, being put together, being normal, or being self-sufficient and place all trust on Him, no matter how foolish it seems. Faith in itself is humility when it is true faith and we can only approach such a God with the deepest humility. I hope you can resonate with where I was for so long and also understand this truth in the way that I did in the car on the way to Franklin, Tenn.

If you want to watch the sermon, you can find it here.