By Joy Wong

When it comes to my faith, it’s certainly not the first time I’ve felt lost. Like in college, when I was convinced that God had shown me my future husband, complete with divine signs and confirmations, only to find him engaged to someone else the following year. Or when I had left my evangelical Asian American church to join the PCUSA where women were encouraged to pursue ordination, only to find it supremely difficult to fit into any existing local PCUSA congregation. I remember telling my spiritual director that I felt like a football that was thrown, but then fumbled.

Although these occasions were significant times in my faith journey, in truth there were many other times when I felt similarly lost or confused. Times of brokenness, confusion, tears — and my consequent weeping worship, or tearful prayers — seem plentiful. Many times, God met me in those times; other times, it took a while of living and perseverance to find my footing and reach a new level of maturity and faith.

These days, it’s difficult to locate myself yet again. These past four years, beginning with the election of Donald Trump to the United States presidency, to the 2020 election which revealed that so much of the nation still supported him, to the support he still garners after the Capital riot on January 6th, has left me aghast and saddened. Furthermore, the fact that so many evangelicals supported him, including those close to me, leaves me concerned. I myself grew up and identified as one of those same fervent evangelicals. I consider those times to be a foundation to the faith I’ve had my whole life, and even when I left my evangelical church for the PCUSA, I found it difficult to let go of the personal evangelical nature of my faith and spiritual experience.

However, if the evangelical faith was such that led so many people to vehemently support Donald Trump, then in my mind, there must be something wrong with this version of Christianity. I feel as if I was following a track in a maze that just led to the wrong destination, and now I have to backtrack and find the place where evangelicalism made a wrong turn. This task, though, seems daunting — more cut out for those in academia rather than a stay-at-home mom such as myself.

I am also fully aware that there are those who would think that I AM truly lost, for not seeing what made Donald Trump so great, or for believing in the lies of the media who are out to deceive me. Though this is not what I’m seeing now, I humbly realize (and ask those who support Trump to realize as well) that there were many Christians who supported slavery, as well as those who were against; there were also a majority of Christians who looked the other way or conceded to the government during Hitler’s leadership in Germany, but also a small minority who opposed him. In this day and age, though both those for and against Trump will claim to have God and Scripture on their side, time will tell as to what was the way of Christ during these times.

So in light of all this, from my evangelical roots to my grievance at where evangelicalism has led to in America, but also with a measure of caution knowing that I myself may not be seeing things perfectly or clearly, I am at a standstill. Where am I? How do I locate myself? How do I move forward from here? And who is my church — my community — now? While the whole of my evangelical experience is now under my own light of scrutiny, it is still the Scriptures that I learned during those times that keep me anchored during these times, specifically this belief: that God who began a good work in me will be faithful to complete it (Phil. 1:6).

During these times of confusion, it is this belief that keeps the hope in me alive: that it was not I who started the faith in me, nor I who keeps it going. Rather, it was God’s work in me to begin with, and it is God’s work to complete it. So no matter how lost or confused I feel, no matter if I know which direction I’m supposed to be headed, there is comfort in knowing that I am not the Author of my faith. As God is the Author, so God is the Finisher of my faith as well (Heb 12:2 KJV). And so I wait, and watch — to see how I can follow and to see what will be unfolded in me.

Joy Wong has an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary, a BA in English from Princeton University, as well as four years’ experience in industrial distribution management.  She is a contributing author to Mirrored Reflections: Reframing Biblical Characters, published in September 2010.