Different Doors, Same Destination

I have compared myself to other people for most of my life.

Not out loud, usually.

Not in a way I'd admit at dinner.

But it's there, running underneath everything like a current I can't fully step out of.

Someone posts a win, and I do the math myself. A guy I came up with lands a big client, gets the house, looks like he has it all mapped out and something shifts in me. Not pure jealousy. More like a quiet question I didn't mean to ask.

Is this enough?

Am I enough?

Is this what it's supposed to look like by now?

I compare content. How it lands. How it performs.

I compare timelines, paychecks, and the general shape of other people's lives against the shape of mine.

That's the thing about comparison, it doesn't care what category it's working in. It just finds a door and walks through.

But faith was different.

I spent the better part of last year figuring that out.

It started with a conversation (or inquisition) with Fr. Rob, then another with Josh.

Long talks. Honest ones.

The kind where you're not performing or trying to sound like you have it together, you're just asking what you actually want to ask, and seeing what comes back.

I joined OCIA without knowing exactly where it would take me.

I just knew I needed to move toward something instead of standing still, watching from a distance, wondering if there was a version of this that was meant for me.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the classes, the conversations, the sitting with questions I'd been carrying for years, but really never asked... I noticed something.

I wasn't comparing.

Not once did I look at someone else in that room and think, their faith is further along than mine.

Not once did I scroll past someone's testimony and feel behind. The competitive frequency that hums under almost everything else in my life just... went quiet.

I think it's because faith can't be benchmarked.

Someone else's certainty doesn't make your doubt a failure.

Someone else's peace doesn't mean you're losing.

The person who grew up in the church, who never wavered, who has a quiet confidence I sometimes admire from the outside, that's their path. Not the standard. Just theirs.

The person who grew up in the church and left, then came back and still questions every day, that's their path too.

My path has many detours.

Years of keeping God at arm's length because I wasn't sure I was doing it right. Saying I believed in God but not Religion and using Sunday mornings as just another day.

Saying Prayers that started with I don't even know if this is working.

Then there is the story I'd told myself for years about being baptized twice, Methodist, then Baptist, that turned out not to be true at all. I'd built an identity around something that never happened.

So, the baptism at the end of this road means something I don't yet have the words for.

It's mine.

Not borrowed.

Not inherited.

Not performed for anyone in the room.

The people in OCIA with me each had a completely different story.

Different starting points, different doubts, different reasons for being there. None of the paths looks the same. Not even close. And that's not a flaw in the process.

That's the whole point.

Faith isn't something you can reverse-engineer from someone else's testimony.

You can be moved by other people's stories.

You can find comfort in knowing the questions you're carrying aren't yours alone.

But at some point, you have to close the door and figure out what you actually believe.

That is a simple definition of Faith. Faith is not built by what sounds right in the room or what you were raised to say.

It is however, what you carry when it's quiet and no one's watching.

That's what this last year gave me.

Not certainty.

Not a finished answer.

But a path I can actually stand on, because it's the one I walked myself.

Expectations kill joy because they hand you a life that was never yours to live.

Comparison is what keeps that theft going.

Except in the one place where I, without planning it, just let it be what it was.

Which makes me wonder... what would open up if we did that everywhere?