I sometimes track my faith journey by Easter Sundays.

Two Easters ago, my husband and I, as well as the growing baby inside me, were church shopping with an enthusiasm that would quickly wear off.

It started out exciting. Google Maps showed hundreds of red dots when we searched the term “church”. Each red dot represented so much potential for friendships, belongingness, home.

Easter snuck up on us that year, just four weeks into our church hunt. We were a little bruised from our experiences at the first three, but we were determined to try again.

Springtime on the central coast area of California is beautiful, and this resurrection morning was especially stunning – all green rolling hills and chirping birds and gentle breeze. The earth knew it was Easter and she celebrated with us that morning as we drank our coffee in our backyard.

Google told us that Calvary Chapel’s Easter service began in a half an hour.

“It’s Easter,” I told my husband. “We can’t just not go to church.”

So he threw on a pastel button down, and I, a soft pink summer dress.

A smiling usher handed us each a color bulletin with a photo of an empty tomb overlaid with silhouettes of worshipful raised hands.

The church was dark, not a window in the entire sanctuary. The lights were dimmed, with lights only shining on the band. We couldn’t see each other, or anyone else around us. We found our seats and sat there awkwardly until the rock-concert style worship began.

The church raised their hands around us, singing:

The time has come

To stand for all we believe in

So I, for one, am gonna

Give my praise to You

My heart started beating fast and my palms got sweaty. I couldn’t shake this sensation that we were in a tomb. I tried to breathe slowly. (I hadn’t yet learned the art of leaving.)

As soon as the service ended, we bolted out to the parking lot. Our eyes were assaulted by the bright spring sunshine.

“That was terrible,” I said.

We spent the rest of the day at the creek, catching small rainbow trout and releasing them back to the rushing water. We knew being in the dirt would help us heal.

We stopped church hunting for a few months after that.

I am now beginning to understand what I could not then… that Calvary Chapel church wasn’t terrible. It was just a group of people who like Hillsong songs and preferred to sing them in the dark.

The problem was me. I was church shopping in the wrong mall. Despite my confusion and shifting theology, I continued to look for some variation of the nondenominational evangelical mold because, I don’t know. I just couldn’t conceive of anything else.  We tried a church plant. We tried a megachurch. We tried a “community church.” We tried a “Bible church”. They were all essentially the same thing with different packaging. And each time I left feeling more beat up, angry and confused.

I’ve heard it said before that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  In this case, I was insane for trying assimilate in a world that no longer made sense to me.

A year ago Easter, another beautiful morning, we loaded up our three-month-old daughter to visit a Presbyterian church we found on Google. We hadn’t been to church since Christmas – we were officially those “Christmas and Easter type Christians” I used to mock pray for.

I didn’t know it then, but that Easter was the beginning of my spiritual rebirth. We stood and kneeled. We came forward for communion. We sang the Doxology. Although we didn’t end up staying at that Presbyterian church for long, it helped put me on the path to what I’ve been searching for.

“I love that they read the same creeds together every week,” I said on our way home, after our third or fourth week visiting. “There is something so…safe about that.”

As I migrate away from evangelicalism, I have found it difficult to not succumb to anger for my old ideology. But I think of the way the people in that dark Calvary Chapel so passionately and sincerely sang their anthem to Jesus on Easter Sunday. They aren’t terrible. They just approach God in a way that doesn’t make sense to me right now.

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This post is a part of Kathy Escobar’s April 2014 Synchroblog: Bridging The Divides.

Here’s the list of other bloggers contributing posts related to Bridging The Divides this month:

• The Virtual Abbess – Abi and April’s Synchroblog – Bridging the Divides 
• Caris Adel – Emotional Pacifism: Laying Down My Weapons 
• Ty Grigg – Speak Truth 
• Jon Huckins – Gay Marriage, World Vision, and a Unified Church? 
• Mark Votava – Faith Presence in the Parish 
• Mary at Lifeinthedport – let us meet in the borderlands
• Michael Donahoe – Healing Divisions in the Body of Christ  
• Jeremy Myers – Unity vs. Uniformity in the Church 
• Juliet at Still Learning – A Catholics Love Letter to Evangelical Women 
• Dago at Scripture Insights – Jesus the Divider 
• Glenn Hager – The Lowest Common Denominator 
• Sarah Quezada – Standing on Church Bridges 
• Doug Webster – Truth Is Not a Process, Belief Is
• Michelle Van Loon – Bridging the Divide 
• Happy at Simple Felicity – are we there yet? 
• Travis Klassen – The Church: Coming, Going, or Being 
• Bec Cranford – Biblical Interpretation and Inerrancy: Moving beyond myopia to a grander vision of unity
• Teresa Pasquale – Bridging the Divide: Translating Between Dialects, Culture Contexts, and Heart Stirring 
• Miguel Labrador – I might be willing to reconsider church hierarchies, if…
• Paul Meier – Healing the Divides Begins Within 
• Liz Dyer – You Can’t Get There From Here 
• K.W. Leslie – Humility 
• Kathy Escobar – 10 ways we can build bridges instead of bomb them 
• Loveday Anyim – The “non-Gospelized Rituals” of Pentacostalism 
• Caedmon Michael – Bridging the Divides
• Carly Gelsinger – “Church Shopping” at the Wrong “Mall”: A Story of Easter Sundays
• Mallory Pickering – A Splintered People
• Pastor Edwin Fedex – Tearing Down Fences and Building Sidewalks
• Jen Baros – Bridging the Divides: How to Heal 
• Burning Religion – The Impossible Space Between Us 
• Bronwyn Lea – When My Children Squabble