Hostage to fear

[Nope]

I'm sorry if you feel my answer was inadequate. I'll try again.

I agree that belief is a choice, and choosing is an act of the will - not a matter of the intellect or the emotions. This is why I think it is fair to begin by asking: Did or do you even want to be a follower of Christ?

I know you were trying to please various people, but were you really willing to follow him?

I'm not accusing...I'm trying to understand your experience.

I can't answer for the OP but I wanted to provide my own experience.

All my life, I easily believed in a higher power. Even when I went through periods of doubt, I still thought that there must be something bigger than humanity. It wasn't until my early thirties that I could be called a Christian. Until that point, I had read a lot about other religions looking for one answer. They couldn't all be right, I thought. Around the age of thirty, I met a very sweet, gentle woman who seemed to be happy most of the time. I thought, I want that kind of happiness so I 'realized' that Christianity was 'true'. In a very emotional moment, I invited Jesus into my life and begged for forgiveness of my sins. Up until that point, I was a happy but not content person. After that conversion, the opposite happened. I was content and had deep moments where I thought I felt the presence of god but I can't say that I had the same level of happiness that I had as a non Christian.

Damn it, I thought, if I am going to be a Christian, I am not going to be lukewarm so I began reading both the bible and what other denominations believed. It seemed to me that under the umbrella of Christianity there were many different religions. I didn't know which church was best but started attending a very small Independent Baptist Church in Iowa. I had no idea that the church was fundamentalist but I also began reading anything online about how Christian wives should act. My mother had been married many times so I didn't want that to happen to me. Also, I wanted my children to have the stability that I did not have as a kid. So, I fell into a lot of fundamentalist thinking and behaviors: long dresses, not cutting my hair, submission and homeschooling. It was terrible and I was miserable.

I will finish this in another post because it is too long