My spiritual jouney: Learning the religions

From college days an onward for a while, I sought new ideas. Learning new things was actually a lot of fun, and even interesting in most cases. I found there were a lot of interpretations and variations on religion in my area, even though this was southern Appalachia where it is pretty much all Christian.
I studied some theology in college and found it fascinating. There was also the general study of religion itself, which was also interesting. I Checked out a lot of groups over a few years, staying with most a few months.

Each group thought it was the best of course, and they wanted you to join up with them. That wasn't really enough though, in most cases they wanted you to also help them criticize the other groups.
I saw that a lot, but it wasn't always the case. And I had my own legalistic moments I'm sure.
There were some groups I liked.

The Presbyterians and their systematic theology appealed to me in a great way. Theology should make sense, they said, and that sounded great. I had always wanted for it to make sense and be at least for the most part reasonable and logical.  So we interpreted the Bible in that light, and we studied theology. It was good, but it was academic in many respects. That was partly because it was at university, but it was also partly because of the people involved. I was as guilty as any of them of just focusing on the mental aspects, and even denigrating the emotional aspects.

Maybe God was telling me something by then exposing me to the charismatics. They believed you could "name and claim" anything you wanted because you were a child of God. If you had enough faith you could move mountains. It didn't help much that the person telling me all this had a cold the next day and could not just make it go away.  But I did like their spirit and their music.  I liked the way they seemed sold out to what they believed in. There were some good things here, and they had the spirit. There was a lot I liked about them, but the glaring problem was that "name it and claim it" just didn't work. It also was not in the bible as far as I could tell.

Again a great divide was presenting itself.
Should I go with the systematic theology that appealed to my brain, or with the name it and claim it crowd that appealed to my emotions.  What I really wanted was a church that had both. A place that could engage the mind and heart as one. I found a few places that claimed to be that, but eventually, they would lean far to one side.
Of course, there were other groups. There were the fire and brimstone, hellfire preachers, but they didn't grab my imagination at all. There was the middle of the road groups like the Baptists or Methodists, or even the non-denominational groups, and they seemed ok. They just didn't inspire me the way the Presbyterians or charismatics did.

As time went on I started noticing a strange thing inside myself. Whenever I would meet a new group there were be a sort of "inner witness" or inner voice that either said yes or no. It seemed to tell me to listen to this person but not that person. Very often I would find out the voice was correct and that the one it warned me about was not real or true.
I didn't have words for this at the time, and could barely even consciously notice it, but at the same time, I knew it was there. I didn't know what to make of it and didn't understand it enough to even talk about it.