Posts

Big Feelings

​ Late at night my chest cracks open and all my unwanted thoughts about death pour in. The panic builds until I leap out of bed and creep silently into my children’s rooms. I stare at their small bodies, curled up and tangled, soft mouths slightly open. Little chests rise and fall, a hand twitches. Velvet cheeks, rosy with proof of life. For now. How am I supposed to live with what I know? Someday they’ll die. Someday I’ll die. The veil that usually hangs in a thick swath over the terrifying portrait of my own mortality has swung aside, and I can’t seem to tug it back into place. When I believed in heaven, I was able to deny how scared I really was. I choked down the bile every time it rose and pretended the taste didn’t linger, bitter in my mouth. Now nothing stops the guttural fear from retching out of me. I walk down the street and I want to scream at everyone—“Don’t you get it?!” There’s no opt-out form, no box to check that lets me say not just yet, thank you. I can’t hold anybody

Thoughts on Noah and the Ark

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  My four year old son and I have a game that he likes to play in the car called "T-Rex and Garbageadon." In this game, I am both the T-Rex and Garbageadon, one dinosaur and one "dino truck," and I'm always hungry. Garbageadon likes to eat trash, so my son will look for objects around him that he pretends he can feed me. "Garbageadon, here's some paper! Garbageadon, there's a car you can eat!" I gobble them up with loud "Om nom nom" noises and he giggles in delight. T-Rex is a little more tricky to feed, because T-Rex is a carnivore, and wants to eat people. My son usually solves this problem by pretending to go through the Chick-fil-a drive thru (I adopt a pleasant voice and ask him how I can help him today; if there was an Emmy for acting while driving, I'd win it) and ordering thousands of chicken nuggets. Actually the number he orders is "twenty-six thirty-one," which is the number he uses to represent the concept of

The Parable of the Sower and the Seeds, Extended Edition

 Luke 8:4-15 (NIV) 4 While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: 5 “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. 6 Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.” When he said this, he called out, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” 9 His disciples asked him what this parable meant. 10 He said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, “‘though seeing, they may not see;     though hearing, they may not understand.’ 11 “This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. 12 Those along the path are the ones

Hey, Podcast Friends!

 I had the opportunity to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, The Graceful Atheist, this week. It was so much fun to have a conversation with David and to share my story. I think other people who are post-faith will identify with this: there are so few people to whom I can truly tell my story, that it felt really cathartic to just lay it all out there. Most of the important relationships in my life are with people who do still believe in God in some form or another, and so even if I can be honest with them in general, I'm holding back out of respect for the relationship. So sitting down to talk to someone like David just felt really good.  If you're here because of the podcast, hi! David was so kind to give a shout-out to this blog on the episode, which honestly surprised me, because I don't usually share my writing with anyone. I started this blog as a private, anonymous sort of processing tool. But if there are other people out there who can identify with any part

Not My Circus

 When I was a Christian, it felt like I had to be God's defense lawyer and PR person. For reasons unknown to me, a mere mortal, it was my responsibility to represent the all-knowing, all-powerful deity to whom I owed my worship. Why couldn't he just appear to the world and say, "Those people don't speak for me," I wasn't sure. We weren't supposed to test God. But all I knew was that I had to be a good witness, to always be ready to give a reason for the hope that I had, and in general to live in such a way that the gospel was shared and Jesus was glorified.  This was a big responsibility, and it shaped the way I interacted with people who were not believers. I couldn't ever be fully and completely myself—I was representing God! I had to be on the lookout for opportunities to share about God, to talk about how peaceful and joyful I was, and to distinguish myself from others. Not by mere behavior or following rules, of course. We weren't legalistic l

Just a Human

 One of the big unspoken truths that was impressed upon me while growing up in Evangelical (or, as I like to call it, Protagonist) Christianity was that people who aren't living their lives based on the gospel have terrible lives and relationships. I don't know if any adult who was teaching me would have actually come out and said that—but it was definitely the message I, and many other young people, received. We stayed away from the outright prosperity gospel, so I knew that God didn't promise Christians a good or easy or rich life. In fact, he promised suffering. Just look at Jesus! But through that suffering, he promised joy, fulfillment, and rich purpose. The inherent lesson there was that people who were NOT suffering for Christ did not have joy, fulfillment, or purpose. They were building their houses on the sand. Marriage? Probably going to fail. Kids? Most likely going to turn out badly. Friendships? Shallow and fake. Since literally none of my close friends were no

My Experience in Protagonist Christianity

I’ve been thinking recently about my upbringing in the evangelical Christian faith and how I would characterize it. After hearing many stories from other people who were raised in stifling religious environments, I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasn’t raised in fundamentalist Christianity. I was raised in what I’ve decided to call, “Protagonist Christianity.”  What is Protagonist Christianity? In this subculture, I wasn’t controlled by fear (at least, not overtly). They didn’t use fire and brimstone speeches about hell to force us to comply, and “legalism” was a dirty word. In Protagonist Christianity, we didn’t follow God’s laws because we were afraid of punishment; we followed them because this was clearly the best way to live. God’s ways (which is to say, our ways as handed down by our interpretation of what God wanted) were obviously the best: the best way to have relationships, to live, to work, to be joyful and fulfilled. Everyone else—from non-believers to adherents of other