Hi Ron,
Thanks for sharing all of this. It’s good to hear that you’ve managed to come through the time of testing. I think this will help you understand what you’ve been through:
It’s called the Gartner Hype Cycle, and although it was originally designed for the context of information technology, I think it’s also a fairly vivid illustration of how each of us develops in our Christian faith.
The “Innovation Trigger” here corresponds to when you get saved. There’s often a lot of joy and excitement, you’re learning fresh new things all the time, you’re soaking up the Bible and your expectations and faith level are high. This is a phase that’s often characterised by young-earth creationism, the prosperity gospel, an excitement about things such as the Rapture, and preaching the Gospel to strangers in Sainsbury’s whenever you go shopping.
Sooner or later though, your faith starts to get tested. For me, the testing came in the years after my father died. I was working for him in the church supporting his Bible teaching ministry in his final years, and after he died I found myself really struggling to make sense of everything. Unfortunately, the support I got from the church at the time left a lot to be desired, but I can’t really blame them – they’d never had anyone on the church staff die in service before, and I don’t think they knew how to handle it any better than I did. But I ended up questioning all sorts of things, and when I left the church staff about four years later to go and work for a web agency, my faith was hanging by a thread. This is what corresponds to the “trough of disillusionment.”
Fortunately, that’s not the end of the story, because the next stage is the “slope of enlightenment.” It’s where God starts to pick up the pieces of what’s left of your faith, putting it back together piece by piece, but leaving out the superfluous bits, until eventually you reach the “plateau of productivity.” So for me, while my patience for young-earth creationism, prosperity preachers with private jets, pseudo-prophetic newspaper eschatology with its repeated failed attempts to predict the date of the Rapture, and any kind of anti-intellectualism in general are gone forever, and while I grieve for my brothers and sisters in Christ who are being led astray by the current idolatry with Trump and Brexit, I can still now say, with Job, that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end, He will stand on the earth.”
