Bit disjointed here - musing "aloud"
- but my thoughts:
There is a difference in our *response* to our faith in God - what we believe, how we worship, how we act - and our faith itself. God creates and sustains faith - it exists apart from our response to it. The faith of a little child is just as vital and real as the faith of an adult - their respective abilities to understand it and express it and live may be wildly different, but the core reality and meaning of it is the same
.
So when we grow up and start examining our parents' beliefs and practices, experimenting and exploring to see if we want to make them our own - in short, starting to make our *response* to our faith our own - that does not mean we are making our *faith* our own in some new and qualitatively different way
. It is just as much ours, just as real and vital and powerful, at 18mos as it as at 18 years
. We are just relating to it, experiencing it, in a new way.
And so I don't see any of that process of exploring our faith and what it means to us as "leaving the faith"
. Might lead to it, but isn't itself anything of the sort
. Leaving the faith is just that - rejecting God and one's salvation (or declaring that one never had it in the first place and has no desire for it).
I too had a crisis of belief in high school (which I pretty much worked through in my head, that being how I deal with things
- I was very fortunate to be in a church that welcomed questions and did not cause me to equate my doubts about my faith with my faith being in actual jeopardy
- things could have gone ever so badly otherwise), but though I doubted all over the place, I never left the faith - and in fact it never changed a whit - God was right there the whole time
. And it was a beneficial, if angsty
, experience
.