It's been awhile, but bare with me.

[nightblade]

This marks the first post that I've made on these boards in over three years. I feel as if I need a forum to which I can feel encouraged by intelligent and mature Christians who have gone through my spiritual struggles who can identify with me and help prod me (if not hogtie and drag me) in the right direction.

A little back story below.

[spoiler]I'm 21 years old, three years out of high school and I've done very little since. In high school, I became a Christian in my sophomore year and quickly took to joining a bible study with some awesome guys, took up leadership positions in my youth group and youth choir at my local church. Even though, perhaps, my relationship at home with my parents was very unstable, I felt like I was on top of the world. For my senior project, I choose to do a career exploration of a pastor and did a lot of reading of my bible and other texts such as Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell and spoke three or four times to my youth group numbering approximately 50-60 students. I also began dating a young woman by the name of Aubree who I found a kindred spirit in and slowly began to fall for.

I attended San Diego Christian College with an eye on Biblical Studies for one semester, on fire for God and wanting to make a mark on the world for Jesus. Between mandatory chapel attendance (three times a week) which seemed more chore than the four or five times a week I was spending at church while in high school, the jaw-dropping amount of drama between Christian students, and lack of patience, tolerance, and forgiveness, I started to question my own calling and faith. Sadly, I was one of the 40% Freshmen Failures and my parents wanted me to go to community college until my grades came up. I became very angry at myself, my parents, and God for this change of events. It wasn't in my plans and it didn't seem fair. This anger turned to depression and I continued to do poorly in school, not obtaining any credits for almost two years. Aubree and I continued to fall in love and though we broke up on occasion, we always came back to each other, trying to build our relationship on the only solid rock on which we know to stand upon.

During these two years, my faith continued to slip. I believed in Jesus, but following him is so difficult sometimes. I had told my high school youth pastor to expect a resume to be a youth counselor in two years time. In less than six months, I was attending the same church barely speaking to a soul. Judgment seemed to lurk in every person around me, except Aubree and some close friends who had attended local schools. The teenagers who would not even attempt to be subtle about talking about who was sleeping with who and sending text messages during worship and the sermon would irritate me to no end. I stopped attending all together. Aubree and I, who had attended Flood once or twice a month for a time during my senior year, began coming again. In the last year, I started getting my act together and gathered 13 units over a period of two semesters. But my faith began to slip, and Aubree and I were still together through all of this. Flood began to feel uncomfortable, almost as though your eyes bore into me even though I knew you probably couldn't make out a face in the crowd. I made excuses not to go and Aubree attended a few weeks on her own.

During one of the sermons she listened to that I didn't attend, our pastor spoke on the sacrament of marriage and he said something that struck her. "Ladies, don't marry a Christian guy, marry a man of God." This became the catalyst for what has recently happened, though I place no fault in the pastor for teaching truth and God's word.

About two months ago, something seemed strange with the way Aubree acted around me. I asked her about it, and after a little bit of talking, she relented that she wasn't sure if the relationship was heading the way she wanted it to. She loved me dearly but had just graduated from college whilst I was barely a semester of units in, three years after graduating high school. While she wanted to try classical acting for a time, she didn't want to keep waiting for me to become the man that I would need to be for our relationship to become a marriage, despite wanting that. Simply, love wasn't enough is what she told me. I was not the man of God she started dating those three and a half years ago, she didn't want to wait longer than she had and find out things weren't going to work out, and I was simply not responsible enough. Two weeks later (six weeks ago), she broke things off.

*Flood is another ministry in the area.
www.diveintoflood.com[/spoiler]

Now there are a variety of things that I have to ask. I don't really have anyone (anymore) to talk to about the truly hard things to ask concerning faith.

The questions are these.
1) What kind of steps should I take to become a man of God again? I doubt myself too much to guess.

2) How can you build a healthy Godly relationship? Both as a foundation for the relationship and continuing to strength it?

3) The cliche "you have to love God to love yourself and love yourself to love others" I've never believed to be true. I loved Aubree with the kind of self-sacrificing love that God calls us to. I gave entirely to her, to the detriment of myself. From what I've heard from others and found out by myself, loving yourself is accepting yourself, loving yourself despite all your flaws. How do you do this?

I tend to be fairly intolerant, quick to anger, quick to judge, I'm not physically fit in any means and getting a bit of a belly, I'm not terribly disciplined or intelligent, I'm not terribly deep, I've never picked up anything naturally, I've never been decent at any of the numerous sports I've tried playing (and I've tried a lot of them), I've never been very good at any video games (FPSs, RTSs, RPGs, etc), I've never been good at role-playing in the context of forum games or pen-and-paper games, I've never been terribly good with computers, I've never had any sort of group that I fit in with, and I've never had motivation to do much of anything. The only two things that I thought I was good at was listening to people and I was good with my hands, but even those of late has receded to "below average" as far as I see it. I'm always found it hard to accept these things about myself. I've always wanted to be good at something that I could use to feel good about myself, sometimes to the point of desperation. I don't know the cause for such a desire, though I could probably relate it to my upbringing, I can't shake that want for longer than a few days at most, until it comes back stronger for a good while. /rant

4) Does coming back to God require one of the life-changing experiences that many Christians seem to identify with, or can a mental/emotional/spiritual decision suffice? I've never heard of the latter, but I'd prefer it over being a "drama queen".

5) One of the reasons I left my church is that others judged me, and I judged them for that. Vicious circle, I know, but I'd like to break. How can I go about that?

For anyone who responds, thank you in advance. I've been stuck in this rut for sometime now (two months), trying to change my life in my faith and in my academics simultaneously, and both are suffering as a result :\