The messages in the church about bearing fruit were very strong—to bear no fruit was akin to being dead.
I’m socially awkward and sucked at bringing people in. And every moment I wasn’t bearing fruit, I felt cursed.
The branch to be cut off from the vine and burned. The one person in the camp hiding their sin, causing the whole camp to be destroyed. A dead tree. A goat among the sheep. Judas.
Every time I heard a sermon about the good people and the bad people, I thought I was definitely one of the bad ones. I started feeling like that was an objective fact that I was hiding, even while I was doing my best to do everything right.
That filled me with anxiety every day. I’d scream and cry in anguish on my long drive home. I’d expend all my energy doing missions, hoping that it would be a fraction of enough to make up for not bearing fruit.
But whatever I gave, I could always give more, and that little bit more that I wasn’t giving felt like the gravest of sins.
This was the vicious cycle of guilt and burnout that I found myself stuck in for the rest of my time at the church.