When I left the formal ministry just under a year ago, it was with an incredible sense of relief. Incredible not just because of its magnitude, but because of the hurricane of angst and doubt that led up to my decision.

I wasn’t walking away from my faith. Not at all. The angst arose from the idea that leaving the pastoral position I was in would offend God and derail me from the plan He had for me. I was afraid that I would be failing my God, my family, my church, and myself. I was afraid that I would be ruining my life.

Just under a year later, it hasn’t ruined my life. It hasn’t demolished my faith or my family. It has, however, exposed a whole lot of damage that I couldn’t see clearly while I was a pastor. Not that the position was the problem — it was my perspective on it.

My pastoral career was marked by more fear and misery than joy. As afraid as I was to fail in leaving my position, I was constantly afraid of failing while I was in the position. Any criticism or correction confirmed my greatest fear, over and over: that I had become a spiritual leader not because of a divine calling, but because of a clerical error, a flaw in the process.

I was neck-deep in impostor syndrome, and it was draining the life out of me.

I had been living with unanswered doubts around my call to ministry ever since it began. When I initially interviewed with my local church board to be included in the ministerial preparation process, I was sure they would tell me to come back when I was more sure that God was directing me. When an experienced pastor told me that “you have to know that you know that you know” that you’re called to ministry, I froze inside. I never, at any point, had that level of confidence or clarity that God wanted me to become a minister.

I constantly judged myself based on those questions. As I learned and tried my hand at ministry, every failure, every mistake convinced me that I wasn’t where I was so that I could become a productive, fruitful minister. After several years of being a pastor, and, in my eyes, dramatically underperforming, I had all but convinced myself that God has brought me to where I was so that I could serve as a negative example to the other ministerial students around me. I thought I was a living illustration of what not to do.

I literally thought that my purpose in ministry was to test the patience of the “real” ministers around me, the ones God had actually ordained to succeed.

Paradoxically, I never doubted that God had called me to the church and the situation where I became a pastor. I still don’t, though I think I may understand His call better in hindsight.

A group of us were considering leaving our current church to go to this new church, possibly to take on leadership positions. We weren’t going to make the choice lightly. We had gone over to the church property to pray over it and listen for God’s direction. As I prayed, I asked God if I should make the change.

There are only a few moments in my life where I am fully confident that God spoke a particular phrase to me such that I heard it distinctly in my mind. This was one. I asked, and God said, “You don’t have to do this.”

I knew exactly what He meant. I had been praying for weeks for opportunities to commit to Him more deeply. I knew, in that moment, He was giving me the chance to do just that. And as He does, He left the choice to me. He was offering me the choice between comfortable familiarity and adventure. Between the mundane and the mysterious. Between the theory of faith and its crazy, difficult reality.

So, I went. And now, six years later, I’m trying to figure out what happened.

I’ve found out in this past year that so many of my attitudes about and approaches to ministry were flawed and unhealthy. I’ve learned that I was mentally and emotionally unhealthy in ways I didn’t understand at the time. But I learned and did a lot of good things, too. I’m just having a really hard time discerning between the two. I don’t know what things God allowed to be difficult to grow and mature me versus the things that were difficult because I wasn’t doing things His way. I don’t know whether I’m a failed pastor or… something else.

It’s in incredibly uncomfortable position to be in. Especially now that I’m going to be teaching a class on apologetics in the church I’ve been attending for just under a year. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Moreover, and more importantly, I don’t know what I am. My identity got deeply tied into my position: I was a pastor, an official minister. Now I’m not. Am I going to be again? Is this class a step in that direction? Or will it confirm, through its inadequacy, that I was never meant to be a minister in the first place?

I’m knee-deep in questions whose immediate answer is all the same: listen to God. I have to accept, in the meantime, that I don’t know the answers, and keep following as best I can. That’s one big lesson I can definitely take away from all this: sometimes, you have to carry your questions with you as you walk and trust God to correct your path if you make a mistake. That’s essential to faith.

If nothing else, I’m learning to live by faith, not by fear. And if, for the rest of my life, that were the only thing I ever mastered, that would be enough.