It has been a wild road that I have been on, yet one thing that I have relied on throughout my life is my home faith community. Even as I have explored other churches, faiths, and even non-faiths, it has always been there to welcome me back and provide a sense of comfort, faith, and family in me.

I started my faith journey in the same small town that I grew up in at an incredibly early age due to my family being involved in the church that has always seemed like home to me. Throughout my upbringing, attendance has been very sporadic for me. Yet, I attended Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, was baptized confirmed and even became a member of that very faith community that I now routinely attend.

Growing up, it was extremely hard to conceptualize what faith, understand the stories that I was told or even memorize books of the Bible or Bible Verses. Before being diagnosed under the autism spectrum at 13, attending services was a challenge. Because the suggested age for confirmation was the midst of puberty, which was an incredibly challenging time for me, I was not able to be confirmed to the church, nor for many years could I attend church as often as I needed to. It also was not helpful that I was attending other churches because I was obligated to because of traumatic therapies at the time.

Eventually after things in my life settled down, I graduated from High School and Vocational Training, I went back to church for some time. While it was enough to get me into getting confirmed and becoming a member of my church, eventually the pastor at the time was retired and another one entered the congregation (something that happens typically every 10-12 years.) We could not find substance from the messages, so we went to another congregation and again the same thing happened and eventually life circumstances occurred that made attending difficult.

I would sporadically attend my home church after being independent, yet I would try to find others as a way of reliving what I had believed was imperfect experiences of my faith upbringing of the past, eventually, COVID happened and the way that church was attended had changed greatly. That, along with many life experiences at the time, had distanced me further from my home church. I found my need for faith in YouTube and even communities that were far away from my beliefs.

 Last year, I had come across a Facebook reel of the need to come back to church by my Pastor, how COVID had distanced the world from faith communities. I would return to my home church that following week and having a one-third of the congregants that it had when I was growing up, it had made me feel more comfortable. I do my part to help when I can and even being greeter twice in the past few months. My attendance and attention and understanding of my faith has been much more grounded in the past year than it has ever been in my life.

Life has been quite the experience for me, but I have allowed myself to know that I can always have the faith in my own faith community and life the life as I have destined for me.