Imposter Syndrome

Hiya!

Today is going to be a story time.

Imposter syndrome – many of us have felt like we didn’t belong in certain rooms or gatherings, and this usually shows itself in professional settings. I know that I have felt this in my workplace. However, today’s story time is not about that. But it’s about imposter syndrome in spiritual things.

I always felt like a fraud in this Christianity thing. Mostly because I didn’t have any great encounter neither did I hear God’s audible voice. Also, I would go for Christian events and people would receive revelations for everyone in the gathering apart from me, and I would just be wondering how I got there.

I felt like I wasn’t a real Christian, and the real ones could smell my fakeness from afar. In fact, I tried to stay away from prophetic people because I just felt like God was exposing my fakeness to them.

This began to change when I went for a worship event in December 2018.

I had just come back from the first semester of law school, and I was extremely angry with God for a lot of things that were happening in my life at that moment. The first was that He deemed it fit to actually send me to Yenagoa campus for law school and not Abuja as I wanted. I hated my first semester at Yenagoa and even the things I thought would make it bearable were not working. Also, I was in a relationship that was falling apart. I had convinced myself that God had ordained that person and I to get married. But reality was saying something else. I told God I hated Him.

I decided to go for the worship event to try the God-thing again. Maybe I would stop hating God. Also, someone encouraged me to go. Now, I am not sure why I agreed to go because the worship event was one of those events where people would be slain in the Spirit and none of that used to happen to me, so I’d look at all those people wondering why God was angry with me.

When I would go for these kind of events, I’d try to do something spiritual to encourage God to fall on me and not pass me by. So I tried to read my bible but that wasn’t working. I tried to listen to worship music on my way there, but I just paused everything and was like, “Abeg, abeg, if God wants to meet me, He will meet me.”

I got there late, and everyone was already praying and singing and talking to God and being cute with Him and all that. I slid into the back of the hall and tried to hide so that no one would spot me as the fake person in their midst. I looked around and wondered what I should do next. I tried to sing along but the words were not flowing out of my mouth. I tried to pray, but all I felt was anger. People were being slain all around me and I was just there staring.

Suddenly, the person leading worship pointed at me and asked one of the other people at the gathering (let’s call him Greg) to bring me forward. I thought to myself, “Alas! It has happened! They have realised I don’t belong here, and they will throw me out of their midst.” I began wondering why God hated me so much that He just had to single me out to embarrass me.

When I got to the front of the hall, the person leading worship told Greg some things that I could not hear. Greg then took me to a corner of the hall and started praying with me. He asked me if there was anything I wanted him to pray about and I told him that I was lost and I didn’t know how to find my way back. He then read Romans 8 to me (which is one of the most beautiful scriptures) and I began to cry – ugly cry. I was suddenly overwhelmed with how lost I was and how God was intentional about finding me.

Once the prayer was over, I went back to my seat at the back and replayed everything that just happened in my head. All this while, I felt like I didn’t belong in the group of believers, and I thought that they had finally caught me and were about to embarrass me, but it was anything but that. That was the beginning of my reawakening with God.

The imposter feeling continued for a while after that, and because of this, I felt the need to prove that I really knew Jesus and Jesus knew me (I have a blogpost on this).

God is working in me to not be bothered about these things again. He reminded me of John 15:16 (NLT)

You didn’t choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name.

He chose me. He chose you. Not sure if anyone has experienced this as well, because my problems tend to look very unique. But even with respect to professional and academic settings, God chose you to be there. You are not an imposter.

I love you and God loves you more.