I still believe...

"So don't you think that the reason you are changing your beliefs about god is kind of selfish?"

My friend sat across from me in the cafe area of the church and said these words carefully as if to feel out whether or not the statement might set me off or hurt my feelings.  I considered the question and answered with the best response I could muster.

"It's all selfish isn't it?"  I meant to say that all pursuit of greater truth be it god or science or anything else is done with the self in mind.  If its a pursuit of god, then it might be for salvation sake, or for the sake of connecting with god as an individual.  There are definitely selfish reasons for it. That does not make the pursuit of god a bad thing though.

In  much the same way one does not read the classics in order to better the world or the people in it, but to better one's self -- to grow, to learn, to heal, to enrich your mind, to save your soul, to rescue you from evil or ignorance.   These are the reasons we pursue god, literature, science, spirituality and reason.

So the answer is yes, after a recent trip out of the country, I chose to believe in god based on a rather exclusive and subjective experience I had personally.  This decision is based on selfish observations. But that in and of itself does not disqualify the experience and choice from being relevant, meaningful and true for me.

The experience was deeply personal and it involved an answer to specific prayers, a felt sense of love by another person, an acceptance and welcoming from people I would not have expected a welcoming from, a confirmation of earlier beliefs going back to childhood, providence and protection and favor and good-timing and all of the other buzz words used to describe an interaction with god.

I would go into great detail on all of this, but I would like to refrain from over-sharing.  Let's suffice it to say that I came to see that god is real, and that god genuinely cares for people and their various plights for the sake of love and other. God showed me himself/herself/itself that night at Whataburger and I wanted nothing more to do with it.

But as they say, God aggressively pursues his people.  I was made to see and believe once again. Does that mean I have all the answers?  No, in fact I have more questions than ever.  Does it mean that god is right for you, or that I am trying to sell god to you or belief in god? Of course not, that kind of behavior irritates me when I see others do it.

What I am saying is this.  I believe in god. I choose to worship god in the context of the Christian experience because that is what I know best. Your beliefs are your beliefs and I respect that. I ask that you would do the same for me. Thanks for reading.

To be honest...

So again I was faced with new information and had to figure out the best way to deal with it.  I decided to continue to explore community.  I remember that I went to church the next week and really did not participate much.   I was there, but my head was somewhere else if you know what I mean.  I realized that to be honest with myself meant that indeed for whatever reason whether it meant my own mental departure from reality, the presence of a family ghost that would not leave me alone, or some other being that existed in the spiritual, I could not rely solely on my scientific explanation of things to inform me of all things that truly exist,

See, I set out on a personal journey about 11 years ago to pursue honesty, integrity, transparency and authenticity in my own life.  I was a Christian youth pastor at the time and up until then you might have called me a fake if you knew me well.  You would at least think that I had some sort of split personality if you knew me that well, but the truth is, barely anyone knew me that well.

I myself had a little trouble figuring out who I was back then.  I blame the church's approach to holiness doctrine mostly.  At least the church I had gone to prior to that.  It was a Nazarene church that subscribed to holiness as a way of life.  Sanctification, according to the church is a gift you receive shortly after becoming a believer that effectively seals you for work inside the kingdom of God.

So, once a person is sanctified, there is no turning back, they are now holy, set apart for all practical purposes. Except that after I declared my sanctification to the world around me at the tender age of 18, I didn't exactly feel any different. It was embarrassing.  Other members of my flock who received sanctification had become perfect models of Christianity, but me?  I was the same old John.  The same guy that made mistake after mistake and chose selfish behaviors over Jesus-like actions all the time.

So what did I do to remedy this?  I began acting holy.  I figured I could fake it until I made it, ya know? I mean I already knew the language of church, and the culture and what was expected of me. So I talked the talk and talked some more, never really able to walk the walk of true holiness.  That did not seem to matter to my Christian friends however. They accepted the "new" me and rewarded this behavior by giving me high-praise for my apparent piety.

It wasn't until I started going to a different church (The Vineyard in 2003) that people started calling me on my holy behavior. They asked me questions like "Why do you do that?"  They challenged me on things like art and music and culture in general.  One pastor pulled me aside and asked me point-blank why I only listen to Christian music.   I gave him the standard answer I had learned from my past and he seemed baffled.

This conversation led to other conversations whereby I started to pick apart the armor I had been wearing - that I myself had donned on a daily basis.  One article at a time came down and I began to realize that I used these concepts and actions that appeared holy merely to mask who I truly was inside -- that scared kid that had been mistreated by not only imaginary beasts and monsters in my childhood, but who had also been brutally mistreated in school by a number of bullies and at home by his own brother; that kid who had never been nurtured, loved, cared for; the one who had anger issues and bitterness towards men and women.  I had covered that kid up for so many years (since I was about 16) and did such a good job of it I was surprised when he actually surfaced.

He was even more angry than I could have imagined having been ignored for so long by me.  But I decided then and there I had to deal with him, nurture him and become more like him than the fake super-Christian I had created. This came as a bit of a shock to people who knew me before, but in 2004, I made an active decision to never be a fake again.  I would be who I was, who I was meant to be and if that rubbed people the wrong way, well then so be it.  I stepped down from ministry at the Vineyard and pursued authenticity and transparency full-time.

This also meant that I was questioning everything.  My faith, the way I talked and walked and thought. Everything was up for grabs, everything had to be reconsidered and evaluated. Nothing could be overlooked.  If I found I did anything one particular way because I wanted people to think I was something that I most certainly was not, I would strike it out of my life.

This period for me started back in 2004 and is still going on today.  It took me 38 years to become that way, and it will take many more years to weed out the false-piety I had grown so accustomed to. Because of the fact that this fake-self so impacted my life and because of all of the work I have done to recover from it, I have an aversion to anything that appears fake or phony when it comes to faith -- and there is a LOT of that going around.  A lot.  I will usually expose it for what it is when I see it for that reason.

So considering all of that, I have re-approached the subject of God very slowly.  And I refused to accept the blanket answers to things offered up by my fellow fakers and their predecessors.  I wanted to know the truth and I wanted to know now. What I guess I didn't realize is that there is no proof, no concrete anything, no way of showing the results, recording the findings.  God is subjective to everyone.

Ask anyone who claims to believe in god, and you will get differing accounts of god even within the same peer group of the same denomination of the same religion.  I had to either accept god's existence based on my own subjective observations (knowing full well I could not prove god to anyone and that I could just as easily be mistaken), or reject god's existence based on objective physical evidence alone.

More on this later...

God found me at the Whataburger drive-through

So there I was, feeling really smug in my new-found acceptance of the denial of God's existence. I had been going to a secular humanist community for a bit and had really enjoyed my time with these people.

Evangelical Test:  If the words "secular" and "humanist" just set off a red flag or loud alarm in your head, then you know you are deeply embedded in the evangelical/fundamentalist culture and way of thinking. I might as well have said a "Satanic, God-Hating" community -- right?  However, those words in and of themselves don't really describe anything bad.  The word "secular" merely means "non-religious", and the term "humanist" merely means "celebrating of humanity".  If you really think about it, Jesus fit both of these descriptions in his time here on earth. So don't knock it until you try it.

There was an honest approach to living that these folks had adopted that blows away most forms of community I have ever been involved with including the church.

There were atheists, agnostics and believers mixed in with this lovely group of people and they all seemed to get along fine, choosing to focus on topics of discussion that were scientific and educational in nature.  It was and still is a beautiful thing, and I am not done with those good people.

This particular evening however, I was coming home from an experimental group I belonged to.  We were getting together to try and see if we had what it took to form a quasi-religious, irreligious community of our own.  In my mind this community would be more open to issues of faith and might possibly be a blended group of believers and non-believers alike from all walks of faith and life.

The title of my message that I shared that evening was "Because the Greek philosopher told me so." This was an expose' of the Christian religion and how much of the ideas, patterns and theologies that we have adopted in our faith are not really found in the Bible, but are borrowed from Greek philosophy,

In the end, I found myself in a heated discussion with my friends that made me realize three things:

1.  I did not want to give up on the Bible, just the old ways of viewing scripture that were not entirely scriptural or considerate of the context in which it was written.

2.  I was not an atheist all the time.

3.  This experimental group would be short-lived for me, because I may have been the only advocate for the Bible as a reference.

One of the members argued that we should not even be using the Bible because it mentions things in scripture like justified rape and promotes slavery and misogyny.  I had very little to respond with except to say that we can't throw the baby out with the bath water.  All in all I was pretty disappointed in the end.  I felt that I had failed my friends and that I maybe even failed myself as a wanna-be atheist.  I was in deep thought about these things when I pulled up to the Whataburger drive-through.

My standard order? A number 2 with cheese, grilled onions, mayo instead of mustard, no pickles with a large Diet Coke.  As I rolled down my window on this balmy Summer's eve though, something strange happened.  No, I did not see a fiery chariot descend from the heavens with 14 faces and tongues of fire, sporting a goatee and a moderately large pair of Ray-ban reading glasses (I know you were thinking that).

I felt it.   You know what I mean by it?  Refer to this post if unsure (or just keep reading).  I felt that benevolent, parental presence surrounding my vehicle and enveloping all of the empty space between me and the world around me.  It was huge and powerful and overwhelming and I started to cry.

I was flabbergasted.  I was angry, and to be honest I felt a little crazy.  Like, why doesn't anyone else ever complain about feeling this presence in their lives?   Why do I have to be so damn aware of the thing?  What the hell is it?

I yelled out loud (in my mind) at the thing "leave me alone".

That's when I heard the voice.

It sounded a little garbled at first, and I had some trouble making out the words in the message, but once I recognized the sound of it's voice, I readily understood the meaning behind those words.  Here is my best interpretation of them.

"Welcome to Whataburger. Can I take your order?"

"Uh, yes, let me get a number 2..."

After talking to the nice lady over the small voice box I resumed my conversation with big and silent.

"I am trying to be an atheist. Would you leave me alone please?"

silence

"What in the hell are you anyway?"

nothing

I pulled up to the window and paid my 8 dollars or so and wondered why hamburgers costs so much and then the thing was gone as fast as it came.  It was like it was taunting me.  Staying barely in the margins, watching and waiting.  Always there, never completely gone.  It was as if the entity were waiting to be there for me, anxiously waiting to comfort me and watch over me like it did in years past.  But, I wanted nothing more to do with it.

I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous to some of my more intellectual friends (trust me I am right there with you), psychotic to those who are more in tune with mental health issues and down-right offensive to folks of faith, but I can't explain these encounters any better than to just say what I saw and describe what I felt.  I know that I risk appearing over or under spiritual. I know that this sounds like the ramblings of a mad man.   But, it is what it is.

I explained this encounter to a friend of mine from my community and she helped me to understand things better.  She said that being an atheist is not necessarily about denying that God exists.  There could very well be a god, or gods in our world, but if those beings do nothing for humanity, nothing for us in general, why waste time trying to get to know them or trying to understand them?

I truly appreciated her take on things and there is a lot of truth to what she told me.  In essence, if all God does is make me feel less afraid, but does not actually conquer evil, maybe I can do that on my own.  If all my god manages to do is help me sleep, why can't I just take a pill rather than to pay homage to the great unknown?

What good is a real God, if God does no real good?

More on this later...

I believe in God (but it's not what you might think)

I woke up scared out of my mind.  I remember that feeling like it was only yesterday.  Lying in bed afraid to move.  I adjusted only my eyes and looked around the room for any movement -- any indication that there was something there to get me -- steal me away in the night, eat me, devour me, kill me and take me away from my parents for good. 

The trees moved slowly outside rhythmically with the wind and I could swear I saw a shadowy finger brushing up against the window.  I could hear the tapping the finger made against the glass pane and it went right to my spine and seemed to irritate everything in my small system.  Listening and watching I determined that the finger was a branch from a tree, tapping away as the wind moved the tree and everything outside back and then forward. 

It was either that or some cruel beast playing tricks with me -- messing with my head, making my tiny heart race and my insides ache in fear.  Establishing that the windows were devoid of beast or entity, I took the risk of slowly moving my head towards the closet door.  I wasn't sure if I had left the door opened or closed, but either way the menacing entryway and cubby posed a threat. 

Closed the door could easily conceal a monster that would burst out at any moment to cover me in its immense size and darkness.  Open and the monster could be waiting within the recesses of the darkness within, waiting for the right moment to pounce.  Waiting until my guard was down,

I was 5 years old at the time, and this was a typical night in my childhood home.  I had been waking up regularly for days to this unimaginable fear of harm - fear of something supernatural at best that would be there the next time I awoke in darkness, be there to hurt me.  I was determined for a few days to just not fall asleep.  I figured if I remained awake, nothing could sneak up on me while I slept and therefore nothing bad could happen to me,

This particular night I remember praying.   I did not exactly know to who I was praying to, or to what, but I do remember praying.  I asked (god if you will) whatever benevolent presence I felt at the time to please just make the nightmares stop.  I implored the good of the universe to overshadow the evil that I felt was there to harm me.

I called out to the darkness and the emptiness of the great unknown and begged for a moments rest as a small child in my room that night. And to my small imagination and eager little heart I got an answer.

It was subtle at first.  The response I got back from the great unknown was a physiological one.  My body just started to calm down, my breathing slowed, my heart relaxed a bit and the tension in my belly eased.  My mind was still racing, and my eyes continued to scan the room, but I felt the presence of something really good in there with me.  Something strong, clean, and parental.

I closed my eyes and slept like a 5 year old for the first time in days.  The next night I uttered the same words to the same benevolent presence and got the same results.

Now, one could argue that my parents taught me about prayer or that Sunday school had taught me as much.  That paired with a child's immense imagination could have caused me to conjure up these feelings and the peace I felt, just as I had conjured up the feelings of fear and anxiety before.  But to me, in that room for that period of time, "God" became real.

As I grew older I learned to attach labels and names and categories and structures to this god-being. When I was a teenager, someone told me a story about Jesus and I thought that maybe, this good thing that I knew from childhood fit into the context of who Jesus was.

I mean he loved children. he stood up for the marginalized and the minority, and he confronted evils of all sorts.  So, it was just a natural thing for me to accept Christianity as my religion because well I had already experienced the goodness of God to comfort me and to chase away the bad.

Now as an adult, I have tried desperately to shake off those old ideas.  I have learned that maybe my god does not necessarily always fit the molds of Christianity, nor does it fit into most contemporary religions or understandings of God.  Maybe my god is no god at all, but the combined feelings of all on the planet who wish to do us well.  Maybe this comforting presence is a ghost of a family member long since gone from the world who has chosen to watch over me.  Maybe, it really is a god defined as good by most earthly well-intentioned religions.

I tried to be an atheist a few months back and I am sad to say that it didn't work out for me.  See I have a huge amount of respect for atheists.  I think it is because deep down, when I am honest about myself I have troubles reconciling this good god with a world in trouble.   I take issue with the descriptions that religion has constructed for God -- the excuses they have made for god's seemingly uninvolved, unconcerned, or unavailable approach to human suffering.   I take issue with believers who look and sound more like the evil presence I felt in my room than the loving, concerned and caring presence I felt back then and still feel today.

It's embarrassing to say I am Christian at times, knowing full well that others who use that label use it to bash people over the head with their own interpretations of the Bible or their own opinions and judgement about what is right or wrong.  It's a little infuriating to be honest.  I tried to run away from all of it, live in denial, steer clear of hatred in all of it's ugly forms.

More on this later...

Where am I?

It's a simple question if we are talking about mere geography, right?  Where am I?  Ask Siri and she would even give you an estimated address.  "Where am I" is a good question to ask when getting off of a city bus, in a strange town you've never been in if you are trying to get to a connecting bus or train or car. And it is usually easily answered by whomever local pedestrian you might ask.

But ask yourself "where am I?" to questions of faith, doubt, life, relationships, love, and emotion and the answers will vary from day to day for most.  Maybe even moment by moment.  It's only because we are human.   Human beings traditionally can be fickle, flippant, wishy-washy, doubtful, and undecided.  Add an anxiety or personality disorder to the mix and you will get varying results.

It makes one wonder if it is even worthwhile answering this question if the answer is just going to keep changing.   But, I still ask it.  I ask myself this question on a regular basis, and sometimes I even know the answer.  Sometimes, I am on a roll with answers, then I reach a plateau of sorts and land back into the mystery of unknowing.

When I am honest with myself (and that is pretty normal these days), I have to admit that I don't know as much as I should about life and love and faith and belief and science and things that are not so black and white.

But I do have personal knowledge of some things.

I know what it feels like to be loved.

I know what God feels like and that there is God.

I know that I have a long way to go to understand either of those two ideas.

I know that everyone else who has experienced these two ideas, is in the same boat as me.  There really are no experts in love or god.

Disagree?  Just look at all the books attributed to the subjects of love and God.  Think of all the different religions and all the different love stories.

Try to number the ways of belief found in your own religion.  Christianity for one is the most diverse of religions having over 43,000 denominations worldwide by some estimates.  It is incredibly pluralistic and varied.

To some that would seem to be a limitation.  They might even argue that Christianity is a farce because no one seems to agree on what it is.  I see it as a great advantage - an opportunity to learn and understand the god of Christianity from the view of 43,000 other vantage points.  Even within each denomination there are conservative groups and progressive groups, traditionalists and modernists, and even post-modernists.

This means that I can say right now with very little uncertainty that I am in fact a Christian.  And really, no one can argue with me about it.   It also means that there is room to grow and grasp and move and stretch and learn and study and teach and converse about the many varied approaches to god found in the one religion.

So where am I?

1.  I believe in God
2.  I am a Christian
3.  I know love first hand.

More on this later.