I am now in my fiftieth year of life and I think that my journey of faith so far, while not a sensational story nor very special, is still a story worth sharing. And I share it here because I hope that my story might perhaps support, alleviate, or inspire the believer or doubter who reads it.

My background and upbringing are in the Pentecostal movement. I was, you could say, born into this movement through my two parents who were Pentecostals, who themselves were also raised in the Pentecostal movement. Until recently, I was also a member of a Pentecostal congregation, which means I have sought spiritual fellowship and friendship in Pentecostal contexts for many years.

As a teenager, I had a rather challenging emotional life and struggled with inner turmoil and also my sincere faith in God. From an early age, I was a seeker of truth, and someone who took my faith seriously, who wanted to share it with others and who wanted to serve wholeheartedly the God I believed in.

From my youth, I have few strong spiritual experiences, but as a student, I had a period where I experienced a great joy based on the belief in and experience of a God who was love and that God loved me. It was an important experience. I remember the challenging time in military service where I read 1 Corinthians 13 repeatedly and where I learned to replace the word “love” in the text with “God”, so that the beautiful description of love became a story of my God’s unconditional love that endured everything. Now it became a story of a God who loves, and I was included.

I have many experiences at Christian camps and meetings where I remember longing for an experience of God and his love. I remember how I struggled with my own thoughts about myself. I wrestled with big questions, including the question of whether I was fundamentally good or evil. It was very serious for me, and it was quite challenging. I would actually be convinced of my own wickedness if it was the truth, rather than to live in falsehood or in a lie, as long as I could also breathe more freely in life.

This is not the story of a saint, but of a teenager and man who struggled with emotions, his faith, and longing for an experience of God. In the midst of these difficult thoughts and uncertainties, I also partially have experienced a preaching that said we are all “zeroes”, but with Jesus in front as number one, we become like a million. And when God sees you, he doesn’t see you, but he sees Jesus. He loves you (but only) through and because of Jesus. At the same time I also heard that God loved us even while we were still sinners, but in my struggle the more uplifting message drowned early on. In my longing and in my strong desire to experience love and also to serve the true God, I rather experienced fighting with myself and my own self-contempt than being too convinced of my own high value.

I cannot blame my upbringing, the preaching, or the Pentecostal movement alone for my challenges and struggles. But it is clear that this had great significance. Perhaps helped by being highly sensitive and vulnerable from the start, and not one of the strong, cool guys. In my younger days I often felt excluded and lonely. And perhaps it is precisely this loneliness that today has given me the motivation to, for example, stand on the side of gay people and demand that we include everyone, that everyone must be allowed to serve God and the Christian community, regardless of their orientation.

So far, this is certainly not a unique or very special story. But I choose to share it now in a few simple sentences. Perhaps these words can reach some of those who need to find strength either in a somewhat challenging youth life with a strong longing for God, or strengthen an adult who is in the middle of life and who no longer feels to sure of the answers to life’s questions. Furthermore, my story is a story of reconstruction, a development in and of faith.

I chose to use the word reconstructed in the title. It was entirely intentional, because it resonated positively. It tells of something being rebuilt, and something being created and developed. It also speaks of a faith in my life that has been in crisis for much of my life, from my teenage years and several years thereafter. But as is well known, a crisis is truly an opportunity to find a stronger foundation to build your life on. It’s about finding something trustworthy and valued without having answers to all of questions of life.

To be continued…

Translated from Norwegian to English by the help of ChatGPT.