I was 18 and home, face planted in the pillows strewn about my bed. My Bible lay open next to me, each verse a reminder that I’d lost God’s favor. Each kind promise reassured me that it wasn’t mine.

For many years, I lived in a world where failure cordoned off God’s presence, in a world where I was either better or worse in God’s eyes depending on the effects of my Christian striving. I could recite “by grace, through faith” as the foundation of my salvation, but my heart shouted otherwise—I labored for God’s approval.

My life was perpetually an imbalanced scale—on the one side, the good that I did. On the other, the bad. The scale always tipped mercilessly toward the bad, a reminder of what God saw each time I approached him. This is why I hid my face from God in the pillows, mourning his rejection of me. This is why, some years later, I uprooted pillows and blankets—searched under chairs and in drawers—for lost keys. I was going to be late for my job waiting tables, so I searched for those keys with a steady cadence of contrition, convinced God was punishing me for something I’d done.

This is why salvation’s assurance was shaken when things went wrong—surely God was just as tired of my sin as I was. Surely he’d unchosen me. Many days brought an unhealthy fear, nestled in my uncertainty of who God was and what he was like.

Some years ago, I began meeting others who put into words what I felt.

Historical Uncertainty

William Cowper, the writer who penned the words to the classic hymn, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” also struggled with whether God had actually chosen and saved him. At one point, he wrote:

“I [once] thought myself secure of an eternity to be spent with the spirits of such men as He whose life afforded the subject of it. But I was little aware of what I had to expect, and that a storm was at hand which in one terrible moment would darken, and in another still more terrible blot out, that prospect forever.”

In other words, he vacillated between certainty that he was saved and certainty that he wasn’t. At one moment, he felt secured of eternity with God, yet in another moment, he thought he had lost that security forever.

More recently, I was introduced to Sarah Osborn, a seventeenth-century Christian woman who journaled her struggles with perfectionism. (Now, she didn’t say this outright, but I recognize a fellow perfectionist when I see one.)

She recorded her balancing act of identifying as a sinner saved and a sinner forgotten in her journals. This eventually culminated when revivalists George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent came to town. While spiritually stirred up by Whitefield’s preaching, a crisis of faith followed Tennent’s preaching.

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