My Revoice Experience
On the other hand it was also super convicting and confronting. I can wallow at times that making friends as an adult who just moved back to the country is a lot more difficult than I expected, but at the same time I have almost completely given up in making an effort locally and it was something I was just beginning to think about not long before the conference. It also woke me up to the reasons why. On the one hand my online community is a good one and they have been there for me when I needed it so if it couldn’t work locally I had them to fall back on. On the other hand I realized how much internalized shame I still carry with me that I hadn’t noticed. I can repeat back to you all the discussions and blog posts and lectures we’ve gone over the past few years on deep friendship, but none of that knowledge prepared me for the sinking feeling that I would have during the conference that I was doing something wrong. I was at a Christian conference seeking the presence of God amongst other believers and I felt some weird version of guilt! And I realized that I had buried that notion deep inside of me that I could not be trusted - it had been ingrained in me through experience...
