Creeping Towards Faith
“I’m a creep; I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”This is the refrain of one of the band Radiohead’s biggest hit songs, “Creep.”There are two kinds of people who listen to Radiohead: the first are the people who listen for the aesthetic, know the music from movie soundtracks, or listen just because it sounds cool. The second kind listens because the music reaches something painful inside them, something almost spiritual. I was definitely the second kind, and to a degree I’d say I still am.
When I first moved to Bethany, I played “Creep” on repeat. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but looking back, I realize how much the music I was listening to, along with some other habits, began to affect my attitude, how I went about my day-to-day life, and most importantly, my faith. I’m not saying this is how it is for everyone; this is just my experience. My family moved to the United States in 2022. I went to Pierre Moran Middle School in Elkhart and moved to Bethany Christian Schools in Goshen that fall. At the time, I felt completely disconnected from the person I had been. In South Africa, I knew who I was. I had friends, family, community, a culture, confidence, a sport that defined me, and while it wasn’t always the perfect place to live, to this day, I feel like it is the only place where I have felt I truly belong. But when I came to the United States, everything changed so fast that I barely had time to process it. At Pierre Moran, I ate lunch in the library and kept to myself because I was scared of being made fun of. Adjusting to Bethany wasn’t any easier because everyone seemed to know each other so well already. At school, I struggled to understand people, and it felt like nobody understood me either. Outside of school, it seemed that everywhere I looked, people were so emotionally distant, exhausted, or angry, and eventually, I became that way too. I stopped seeing life as something meaningful and started seeing it as something you simply tolerate and try to survive. The more I felt this way, the deeper I buried myself in my music, which helped shape my increasingly negative mentality.
Growing up, faith had been central to my life, or at least I thought it was, because my dad was a pastor and my family was heavily involved in the church. But truly, I was what my pastor in South Africa would call a “Christian with a closed Bible.” I wanted God to give me blessings, but I didn’t really have a personal relationship with God; church was more of a social event, an obligation. So, while I thought I had lost everything, moving to the United States helped me reflect on what God meant to me on a personal level. Once I started to question my faith, I started questioning everything else, too. If God had brought my family here for a reason, why did I feel so empty? Why did we leave a country where we were attacked for being foreigners, only to face an even scarier hostility towards immigrants here? If God really had a plan for me, why was every opportunity being taken away from me, no matter how hard I worked to achieve these things? And if life could change this quickly, what actually gives it meaning? All of these questions led me to think that maybe I was the problem. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for God, and God had abandoned me, and maybe, just like in the song “Creep,” I really didn’t belong here.
It was during this time that I decided to get baptized at my church. I thought that maybe God would love me again if I got baptized and all my sins would be forgiven. This interpretation was not due to bad preaching or me being taught the wrong Gospel, but more just my stubbornness to accept what the truth was. So, on May 19, 2024, I got baptized. Nothing magical happened; in fact, things just got worse from there. I struggled to read my Bible; I prayed but only for things that concerned me, and I felt more and more worthless as time went by. I also noted that all the things my parents had taught me about faith, prayer, and resilience had been forgotten, because when they were teaching me these things, I felt like I was being punished. This backfired because in my time of crisis, I had nothing to fall back on. This is why I believe that “your attitude determines your altitude,” and a bad attitude can directly affect one’s faith.
To forget about my faith problems, I immersed myself in my extracurriculars and academics, taking online classes, joining clubs, so that I could feel more accomplished. None of it helped. In my four years of high school, I feel like I did nothing, because none of it felt like it had any meaning. My junior year, I pushed myself particularly hard and hit the lowest point of my life yet. Not only was I doing too much in school, but my family was having a hard time, too. We were constantly stressing out about visas, and I often felt like I was the root cause of every conflict in our family. By the time I hit the summer of that school year, I broke. I felt like I was a burden to everyone around me; I seemed to make everything worse. At school, a couple of my friends said they didn’t want to hang around me anymore because I was too negative. At home, I wasn’t being “a good African child;” I was “losing my values,” and I wasn’t going to change the world or make it out of high school with good enough grades to go to college and start a career that would provide for my family later on. At this point in my faith and life crisis, I just wished I was dead.
I don’t remember much of this darkest day of my life so far, but I do remember waking up in my bed thinking about Psalms 23. When we were little, my dad made my brother and me memorize the entire passage. In that moment, I remembered the verses that say, “He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. … Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me. Your rod and your staff they comfort me.” I think in that moment God was with me, and I believe that God has always been with me. As humans, we are quick to blame our problems on God instead of evaluating ourselves. I believe that I have been restored by God; He hasn’t forgotten my sins, but through Jesus, my sins are forgiven. But I also think that confession and acknowledging our sins are an important part of our relationship with God. I still don’t really know what the meaning of life is, because I don’t think we all have the same purpose, but what I do know is that I was created for a reason, and while I don’t know that reason for sure, there is beauty in the unknown.
The most immediate unknown I will face now that I’ve graduated from Bethany is college life. In the fall, I hope to attend the University of Ottawa in Canada and pursue a joint honors degree in Philosophy and Political Science with the goal of becoming a lawyer. If I do not get my permit to study in Canada, then I would like to attend Goshen College and study criminal justice and restorative justice. If I don’t get my U.S. student visa, well, I trust that God will lead me through this valley, too.
About the Author
Eviella Sefu
Eviella Sefu is a graduate of Bethany Christian Schools and an incoming criminal justice and restorative justice scholar at Goshen College. She is originally Congolese and was born and raised in South Africa. She hopes to be a lawyer one day.
