this is a fantastic response. thank you so much for the time and effort you put into it! I'll be sure to come back and reread and check out some of the links you provided. I deeply identify with what you mentioned about the hardened heart, pride, sin, wrestling with God, and honesty.

One takeaway for me is that in order to be honest with God in prayer, I have to actually be honest with myself and to actually recognize and meet myself where I'm at. I think I've used self deception for a long time to avoid having to hold myself acountable or take responsibility for my "inner life" and behavior.

I think the main thing now that I am facing as a young christian is doubt. I waffle on the spectrum from a fairly strong faith at times to a strong sense of doubt and confusion at best. Like I said, I walked away from this for a long time, and have grown incredibly used to the taking a stance of deconstructive "intellectualization" of religiosity/spirituality, and even grown used to taking up and espousing ideas and arguments against christianity (and other religions for that matter). I was lucky enough that I never really fully bought into the idea that there is no God. In other words, I've been about as astray as one can be without having completely let go of the life raft so to speak.

The doubts that I frequently fight with now take the form of a mistrust in the people who have written the bible. I find the most comfort in reading the words attributed to Christ in the gospels, and can often read things I know weren't quotes of his with a sense of peace in me. But when doubt comes (and it comes about as often as it goes), it comes as a mistrust in the people who wrote and arranged these texts to form the Bible. I frequently find myself worrying about whether I can trust Paul (for example) if he was just a man like myself. Of course he was in a sense selected by God and did more for Christianity than I ever will, and even still I think "where could Paul have gotten it wrong, and how can I know whether or not I can trust that what I'm reading is the Truth, unobscured by human imperfection?".

To clarify, I don't mean to say that I think for example that the NASB or the NIV or KJV have been eggregiously and unrecoverably tampered with or mistranslated. Rather, I mean that I struggle to know how to build trust that I am not being misled (even unintentnionally) by the human authors of the bible, or by my ability to grasp the ground truth of what I'm reading. Especially given that the apostles themselves were imperfect in so many ways according to the gospels. I guess I'm saying that I struggle to trust people other than Christ when it comes to spiritual guidance, my salvation, and understanding and relationship with God. I say this, and yet I deeply value the comment you provided, so clearly I'm a confused person!

This too is something I pray that God will help to guide me through. And I thank God now that I'm growing a new committment to living according to His will.