Hi,
I posted this over in the advice forum as well, but found this place and thought it might be good to post here as well (as I’ve been dealing with OCD since high school). I don’t quite know where to begin, but for the last few days I’ve been feeling awful/terrified and I am more in-doubt than ever as to my salvation/the state of my soul. I apologize in advance for the length - I know it’s VERY long and I don’t blame you if you don’t read it all.
TL;DR I was raised in a Christian family, got to college/grad school and entered a very sinful lifestyle. Last year I started changing and taking my faith way more seriously than ever before. Does Hebrews say it’s too late for me to repent? Am I doomed to hell? :/
(Part 1)
Some backstory about me: At the time of writing this, I’m a 27-year-old guy. Growing up, I was raised in a Christian (Baptist) family, and we went to church every week. I “asked the Lord Jesus into my heart”/“got saved” sometime in elementary school; don’t remember the exact year but I remember praying privately and then going and telling my family about it later. For most of middle/high school I outwardly probably seemed a good Christian boy (and I attended a Christian private school), but I didn’t much enjoy going to church, and I got involved in watching inappropriate contentography (including some gay inappropriate content - so I had some struggles with orientation). And then I wound up fooling around some sexually with my high school girlfriend - though she was a Christian too and we both wanted to save “actual sex” for marriage, so we somehow managed to not go all-the-way in our 3-year relationship.
I also began to struggle with OCD/anxiety (which I still deal with some and is perhaps relevant to my freaking out?), and was convinced at the time that my obsessive thoughts were some sort of demonic attack. ...Though it didn’t really lead me to get closer to God. I did get baptized (on the beach on Easter Sunday; was a cool experience) when I was 16 or so - and while I did “believe,” honestly I’m ashamed to say that part of the impetus for me to do it was that my girlfriend did it the year prior, and I felt like an inferior Christian to her because she had been baptized and I hadn’t.
Aside from saying evening prayers every night with my parents when I was a little kid, and silently praying along when my dad would bless the food during family dinnertime all my life, I really didn’t pray all that much. Didn’t regularly read my Bible either. Basically, I don’t think I really had a whole lot going on spiritually. And that’s probably why it all came tumbling down when I went away to college up north, out-of-state.
My first year of college I was pretty much the same, and at my parents’ urging I did try to attend a church as well as the school’s InterVarsity group. But I wasn’t exactly consistent in going, and by sophomore year I stopped altogether as I got involved with a new girlfriend. This girl was agnostic/practically-atheist (bad decision to even date her), and for some crazy reason I was convinced that because I had fallen head-over-heels for her, she must be “the one.”
After only about a month of dating her, I lost my virginity to her. I had wanted to wait for marriage, but I was so deluded into thinking she was “the one” and furthermore was devastated to learn that she had only just lost her virginity to a fellow student who she dated in the few months before dating me - so I was intensely jealous of him getting to know her in that way, and it led to me easily giving in. I did feel guilty for doing it, and knew there was no putting that genie back in the bottle - I felt like I was lost and there was no hope for me anymore, and that it didn’t really matter anymore what I did since I had messed up so badly. This was the major reason I stopped going to church at all.
Over the next year-and-a-half, she basically lived in my dorm room with me. I was completely living a life of sin, and I knew I no longer fit in with Christians. However, I didn’t actively renounce God or stop believing in him - in fact, one of the biggest sources of contention between she and I was our disagreements over religion (as she was agnostic). We would debate over it, and the few occasions on which I did pray, I prayed that she would see the light and realize that God was real.
The relationship ended with a sudden break-up, and I was devastated - since again, I had thought we were meant to be together, and had used that as my excuse for all the sex. “I know it’s wrong, but we’re going to end up getting married anyways so it can’t be that bad.” (What a lie!) Again though, I felt that I was too far-gone, and spiraled into a deep depression.
I foolishly decided that I might as well give in even further, and explore my sexuality curiosity that had been tempting me on and off since middle/high school. So I downloaded a gay hookup app, and impulsively wound up walking to a local hotel at 2am one night to fool around sexually with a man. (Looking back, that was obviously extremely dangerous.) Of course I felt even more guilt from having done this, and told myself that I had no desire to ever do it again. I felt absolutely disgusted with myself.
About a year later, I started grad school in NYC. Basically, long-story-short(er), over the course of the next few years in grad school and afterwards, I had a couple friends-with-benefits-turned-relationships (one of which again involved a live-in girlfriend, for my first 4 or so months living in the city), a couple basically-one-night-stands with women, and a handful more experiences with men (never “all the way” but enough).
These gay hookups always happened the same: I would download the app very late at night, find someone (thank God I often *didn’t* find someone) willing to meet up to have some fun, and then either they would come over or I would walk ~10 min away to their place. On each occasion, I felt *extreme* guilt afterwards (and in the case of the couple times in which I walked to their place, I had this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach the whole walk, and almost turned around and went home - I should have). There was one occasion when I got up and left (said I had to go home) shortly after getting there, just because I felt *so* terrible about what I was doing. A few times, I broke down crying as I walked home afterwards. After each occasion, I would delete the app and tell myself I wouldn’t do it again. …That obviously didn’t last, as I would eventually re-download the app and do it all over again.
It was a cycle of self-destruction. I kept screwing up, and I was so sick of myself. I tried to tell myself it was okay, and even tried to find excuses online for my lifestyle & behavior (like super-Progressive sites that said homosexuality was actually okay for this or that reason - which is ironic since I’m very conservative). But these excuses never sat right with me, because I knew in my heart that they contradicted the Bible.
In early 2019, I met a Christian girl in NYC. She was unlike any girl I had ever dated. Was extremely serious about Christ and her faith, and for the first time in ages I found myself actively thinking about God, praying to him, etc. We dated for a month-and-a-half, even wound up doing devotionals together. We both seemed to think we were “meant to be,” but it ended up falling apart for reasons which I will not get into in this post (another long story).
But in that month-and-a-half, I experienced for the first time in my life the feeling of what it would be like to be with a true believer who was on fire for God. And it was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and it was addicting. She had a bit of a dark past herself (in a different way), but you never would have guessed from talking to her; she just seemed radiant, as though you could tell Christ/the Holy Spirit were with her. What’s more, she forgave and looked past my own past sins and faults, and she wasn’t bothered by them even though I had obviously messed up *a lot*. I didn’t feel I deserved someone like her.
Well, when it ended I was extremely heartbroken (ironically even more than I was for the girl who I dated for a year-and-a-half who I lost my virginity to - and yet this girl and I didn’t even hold hands/kiss!), and I felt like I could never find someone like her again. But then I got to thinking, and wondered if maybe this was God trying to bring me back to him - showing me the joy that I could have if only I would give myself to him, and make *him* the focus of my relationships (and my life!). Because up to that point, he was nowhere to be found in my relationships. While I never outright denied the faith, I had pushed him out of my life time and time again, in as many ways possible.
So I felt like in a sense maybe he was saying “See what you can have if you put me first and rely on me? Life with me is better than anything you can find on your own, looking elsewhere.” It was a tough lesson, and admittedly there was some time I spent being mad at God for taking her away; I felt like he was trolling me by even bringing her into my life. I even wound up slipping up sexually again a couple times, to try and “forget” her. That didn’t work, and only made me feel immense guilt.
For example, shortly after the break-up, I had a dumb one-night-stand. It was my first time actually having sex in 3 years, and the girl texted me later saying that she would love to come over again sometime - out of guilt and a horrible pit-of-my-stomach feeling, I told her no, and deleted her number. I just didn’t want to get sucked into it all again. Nothing I could try and do/find on my own would ever measure up to that month-and-a-half of a (sexless!) God-centered relationship which I had gotten a taste of. It felt like seeking after anything else on my own was totally worthless - because it was.
