My Investigative Judgement

Welcome to my blog entitled "The Bubble Bursts: My Journey of Deconstruction and Growth." Let me tell you a little bit about me and what I hope to accomplish with this blog.

My background is stanchly Seventh-day Adventist. I am at least 5th generation Adventist and grew up in the denomination. My family was somewhat conservative, although at the time I would have considered us "middle-of-the-road." I have always been interested in spirituality, church history, and theology for as long as I can remember. For my third birthday I received a children's illustrated Bible, and when my mom had her devotions I would sit down with my Bible and "read" with her. During my Primary Sabbath School years (around ages 7-9) I started thinking about baptism. Once I realized that you did not have to read the entire Bible before getting baptized (which seemed like an impossibly hard task), I got baptized soon after.

Due to finances, I did not attend an SDA elementary and high school. Instead, I did about 50/50 homeschool and public school. Outside of that, I was involved in Adventurers and Pathfinders from age 5 through 17, which is where most of my good friends came from. In Pathfinders I was always on the Bible Bowl team, where we deeply studied/memorized a book of the Bible for 4-6 months and won quiz competitions about it. Additionally, I was heavily involved in church throughout my teenage years in playing music, typing/printing the weekly bulletin, leading Vacation Bible School, and even occasionally giving a sermon.

During high school, I started working at a local Adventist organization in the shipping department. I continued working there all the way through attending the SDA college nearby. Near the end of  college, I took a year off to be a student missionary. When I graduated from college I taught at an Adventist elementary school and was heavily involved in the local Adventist church as a pianist, adult Sabbath School teacher, occasional preaching, and making the weekly bulletin.

After a few years, I realized teaching wasn't a career I wanted to continue in. Unsure what to do next, I took another year and a half off to go as a student missionary. After that, I returned to the same SDA college to get an additional degree to start my new career trajectory. While in college the second time, I also worked part-time at a local grocery store. This was my first time ever in a non-Adventist workplace environment.

All of this is simply to illustrate how entrenched in the Adventist Bubble I have been for my whole life. It wasn't until Fall of 2022 when I began my graduate studies at a "secular" university that I have ever been outside the Adventist bubble on a daily basis.

The title of this post is a play on the Seventh-day Adventist doctrine of the investigative judgment. Here, I use it to describe the process by which I am processing some of the beliefs I grew up with in the SDA church and evaluating what value (if any) they still hold for me.

For the last several years I have been on a journey of deconstruction. Though I didn't always call it that, at a certain point I realized the term really was a good fit for my shifting way of thinking about God, the world, and the church. So, here I am.

If I'm honest, I don't actually know what I believe anymore. I know the way I think about certain doctrines and rules has changed, but I haven't been able to fully process these changes. Writing has always been a way that I am better able to process my thoughts, though, so primarily this blog is simply for myself.

If someone is reading this, welcome. You are seeing a very personal side of me, and I hope it is helpful to you in some way to either figure out your own thoughts or give you a better understanding of others' beliefs.

R

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