Where were you, God, the night I screamed out for you?

You saw my heart race as my father’s voice downshifted. I knew from the sound of it what was coming, the way my chest had learned to know. I rushed to intervene to protect my mother and my family.

I watched in horror as my dad began to drive his head aggressively through the wall and felt the panic wash over me. This night was different and more dangerous than previous ones.

I had never screamed out for you to stop him before. I had never prayed out loud, and never like this. I was so embarrassed for my family to hear me, but I was so desperate for you to protect me that I pushed past it.

I was sure that this night, my father would kill my mother or one of us. I needed you to protect us, to protect me.

The damage that was done that night is still having ripple effects thirty years later.

How could you stay silent that night! You had the power to stop him! Are you not the defender of the weak and the broken!? You could have done any number of interventions to change what happened to me.

How do I move forward with you when you are silent? How can I ever believe that you really cared about me that night! What am I to do with the fear my body learned at nine? How my brain wired me for survival? I’m here at thirty-nine parenting that nine year old boy and caring about him.

How I still carry this wound into all of my relationships. How I can’t believe that anyone is truly safe. How this lack of trust shows up in a fight with my wife. How my fear of the world’s danger is projected onto smaller incidents with my children.

How do I see you as a good father when you saw the suffering that night?

I would never let my daughter go through what I went through! I would never intentionally let her suffer as she screamed my name out for help! Even being in the other room and wanting to act and not being able to help her would destroy me in a way emotionally that I’m not sure if I could recover from it.

The only way I think I could have gotten past that is if I was able to hold her after and begin to soothe the pain that she went through when I couldn’t be with her to protect her.

I needed someone to hold me after that night. Someone that I could trust would no longer harm me. Someone that would guarantee me that I would be safe and that I wouldn’t have to endure this type of suffering again. But that embrace never came.

I still need you to hold me. To allow my body to release this pain. To grieve what happened to me as a child. To mourn the childhood that was taken from me and the safety that never came from my biological father or from you.

Was I not important enough to you to protect? Did you not care enough about me to stop the pain I was going through? Was my prayer not done correctly? WHERE WERE YOU!?

You know how long I’ve carried this question in my body and how badly I want to release it but can’t.

Believing you are not a present and personal Father is emotionally safer for me than believing that you care about what’s best for me. If I allow myself to think you are a Father that truly cares about his creation and can intervene, I’m left holding a question that crushes my soul.

That nine year old made sense of that night by believing that you were absent or not real. I couldn’t carry the weight of the thought that you were capable of stopping my father, but chose not to. So as a nine year old, I decided you didn’t concern yourself with human affairs.

When I stepped away from you again after all of those years in the faith, it was because my pain began to mirror this reality I felt as a child. I could no longer keep asking why you felt so absent from me and why you still feel so absent in a way that felt safe to do.

My heart wants to believe you cared.

My heart wants to believe you were angry.

My heart wants to believe there was a reason you allowed the suffering. Not some pat answer that people give me to try and bypass my pain and the uncomfortable nature of what I went through. But a reason that actually allows me to believe you deeply cared about me still, even while you watched me go through that.

But I’m not sure there is a reason, and trying to force one can feel like I’m preventing that little boy from grieving.

My heart wants to believe you could be present with me.

That you chose to be physically present in Jesus. That you understand suffering in a way that can truly relate to what that abused nine year old boy felt.

My heart wants to believe that you want to connect with that boy so much that you intentionally entered into history in a shameful manner. Through a pregnancy that would be assumed to be illegitimate, being born in the most embarrassing of places, and connecting with humanity through being identified with the lowest in society.

I want to believe that is who you really are.

That you chose to suffer with your creation so that the lowest among it can see that you care and that you see us. That you identify with us. That we are important to you.

I still weep at the thought of you being like this.

I loved that there were moments after I first understood who Jesus was that I was able to take this into my body. That the beauty of this story had the power to begin to soothe that scared young boy.

But you know how quickly it came under attack. When I got back from church camp at fifteen, after tasting it for the first time, my mother shamed me for my newfound hope.

At seventeen, my body could only let in the safety of that story if I could be certain it wasn’t a lie. You know how afraid I was that it wasn’t real and what it would have done to my sense of meaning in the vulnerable state I was in, being a child that was passed from house to house.

I so badly needed to believe this that I became rigid and unable to hold it with nuance. You know I couldn’t sit and cry about the complexity of saying I’m unsure how to make sense of what happened to me.

I now have the emotional tools and resources to be able to mourn what happened to that little boy and I’m ready to tell you how you let me down.

But I’m also ready to address this wound with you again.

To grieve this little boy’s pain together. To invite you to sit with me in this pain and cry with me.

To allow myself to ask you to show me that you are here and that you were here all along.

I’m still scared that you aren’t there and that this is just me writing to heal that little boy’s need.

Maybe that is all this is. Me parenting that scared little boy.

Either way, I want this work to begin because this nine year old in me needs to believe he is safe now.

I’m ready.

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

John 20:25 ESV

I still remember the night my certainty in the resurrection collapsed. It was late and I was running a bath after a long day at work. While I was filling up the tub, I was listening to Alex O'Connor talk to Bart Ehrman about the reliability of the resurrection accounts. They were talking about Paul's vision on the road. Ehrman did not doubt that Paul had it. What he did was lay out how that vision could be explained and still not have been Jesus. The part that was devastating to me was this. Paul's experience was not the same as what the disciples had. Paul did not interact with an embodied Jesus. He saw a blinding light and heard a voice. For most of my Christian faith, Paul's conversion had been the bedrock I built my certainty on. His historical credentials felt more secure to me than anything else in the New Testament.

Bart did not disprove the resurrection in that podcast. But he did take away my ability to be certain of it.

The moment his argument about Paul landed, the floor dropped out from under me and the room felt like it was spinning. I had to sit down because of how disorienting it was. To me, this wasn't just a faith I believed in. It was a fact I held with an intensity that kept me alive. I was afraid that if I ever lost this certainty I wouldn't want to stay on earth any longer.

What let me survive it was learning that my safety had never actually been resting on the certainty. It only felt like it was. Once I could separate those two things, I was able to come back and do an autopsy on the faith I had held for the past twenty years.

I was brought up in a chaotic childhood with two parents who were meth addicts and who were not religious in any way. When I was twelve, I got set on fire after I smoked pot for the first time and denounced God's existence. I won't go into that night here, but it shaped everything that came after. What it left me with was a God who was deeply dangerous, who would destroy me if I disrespected him, and who had the means to do it in the most horrible ways possible.

So a year later, when I was thirteen and planning to go do things I felt were wrong for me to do, I asked my mother what she thought about the Bible. I still remember riding in that old grey Oldsmobile, and the justification I received as she drove me.

"I think it's made up, like the story of Santa Claus, to make us behave well."

Hearing that come from my mother was deeply comforting and stuck with me. That was all I needed to feel good about the choices I was about to make.

At fourteen our house was raided for drugs. I was held at gunpoint, handcuffed, and left in a cop car outside the house for over two hours. By fifteen I was smoking pot again, and one night I smoked some that was laced and had a panic attack and thought I was dying. A girl who liked me had told me over and over that I needed to ask Jesus to save me from my sins, and I had never understood what she meant. But on that couch I reached for anything I could before I thought I would face God, terrified I was going to end up in Hell. I prayed to Jesus to save me.

I woke up the next day on that couch. I felt a deep sense of relief and swore off drugs. I still wouldn't have called myself a Christian. I didn't know what that meant and I didn't tell anyone what happened.

That same girl who told me about Jesus found out I was moving and invited me to a summer church camp. I didn't care about the camp. I wanted to see my friends one last time before I left for good.

I went with no plans of telling anyone about the prayer I had prayed while high, or of getting close to God in any way. What I didn't know was that my body would listen to the story in a way I never had before. When the youth pastor talked about Jesus and my need to ask him to save me, I didn't understand the theology. I was a hurting boy who hadn't lived with either parent full time in almost two years, who had been using drugs, who had been through the public humiliation of a drug bust in a small town, and who had been suicidal.

What that youth pastor was offering was not just eternal salvation. He was offering me something I deeply yearned for, that God actually cared about me in a way my family never had. Most of what he said I didn't understand. What I did understand was peace with God, forever. So when he asked everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads and raise a hand if they wanted it, my hand shot up right away without hesitation. My body wanted this more than any objection or skepticism could stop.

And that week gave me the embodied safety I had been yearning for. All the adults were safe. The kids at the camp didn't mock or use insults, but encouraged one another and genuinely sought to care for me. I came home with what felt like evidence that this faith was the solution to my family's brokenness, and that if they experienced it, they would all change and we would be a family again.

This faith was the first hope I had ever been handed. I had no reason to believe my life would get better on its own, and I had already attempted suicide once. I don't think it's dramatic to say the odds were good I would have tried again.

I didn't become a committed Christian at that camp. It wasn't until about a year later, when a close friend died in a motorcycle wreck, that I was confronted with death in a way that made me ask whether this faith was something I actually believed and whether it actually had power. Around then I got my hands on a teen study Bible and began in the New Testament, and for the first time I read the words of Jesus.

I remember being enthralled with him. I couldn't believe how life changing his ideas truly were. I had never heard anyone talk about loving my enemies or living in a self sacrificial way. My parents never discussed these ideas with me.

I had the thought, this was who I asked to save me?

Once I discovered his teachings, it was like I unearthed treasures that I had inherited. But they were too valuable to risk losing, and I needed to know they were irrevocable, so I demanded to audit the will and make sure that these were actually mine to have. And the only way that could be true was if I could verify that this Jesus was real and his story wasn't fabricated.

As a child who had lived most of my life in deprivation of safety, I developed distrust and hypervigilance as my greatest tools to protect myself. Not because I wanted to, but because my survival depended on it. I had moved in with my grandmother by then, and for the first time I wasn't worried about whether I would have food, whether violence would randomly break out, or if the police were going to burst in at any moment. That was the space I needed to actually look at this. I started pressing my history teacher at school on whether the gospels were historically reliable. He was also the youth pastor who had led me in that prayer at camp.

I read these stories alone in my grandmother's house. There was a moment where I hugged the Bible as I read it because of how deeply I longed for Jesus's physical presence. Jesus to me wasn't just someone dying to save me from Hell. That was who he was at first, for sure, but once I had read the stories of who he was, he represented the perfect image of what a man should be. I saw him as the ideal father figure, leading me to live in a way that was counter to everything I had experienced.

So once I had enough to say I was certain of Jesus's life on earth, I allowed myself to feel like I could have certainty of his resurrection.

The faith wasn't optional for me. It was lifesaving. It let me reinterpret my life, gave me hope for my family, and gave me a future to look forward to.

Then I entered college and was exposed to worldviews that threatened my safety. In order for my faith to survive them, I doubled down on the inerrancy of scripture. I needed it to be literally true to keep me alive and these professors didn't know the weight the faith was protecting me from.

How could they?

So I built the wall of certainty. The more certain I was in my interpretation of the Bible, the more certain I was in the story of Jesus, and the safer I felt. By the end of college I had decided to pursue a PhD in theology instead of nutrition.

Two things began to break the wall down, and neither one was me trying to leave the faith.

The first was that I became a father.

There was a rhythm I had built with my first daughter at the end of the day. I read her a book, then turned off the light and held her against my chest and rocked her until her eyes began to close. One night I was in the chair with her nearly asleep, and I looked at her face in the dark, and the love that came up in me was bigger than anything I had felt before. There was no threat to her I would not have walked straight into to protect her.

I loved this child this much, and she was helpless, and every part of me rose up to keep her from harm. I had been that helpless once too. The God I had built my whole life on was supposed to love me with that same love and more, and he had watched the childhood I came from and let those things happen to me, when he had every power to stop them.

The pain of that idea was too great, and my anger moved in to suppress the grief. I couldn't grieve it, and talking about it with other Christians didn't help. Every answer they offered came back around to sin, mine or my father's, and left me with a small child who somehow had it coming.

The second was that my father died.

The day it happened I was replacing the interior doors in our house when my brother called to tell me Dad had a heart attack and they were taking him to the hospital. They had already brought him back twice. I sat down in a chair in our bedroom to calm myself, and then I went back to the doors. I cried, a little. Not sobbing, not from anywhere deep, just a tear or two every so often while I kept working.

That night, after we got our daughter down, Mary and I put on a movie, and nothing I picked was landing for her, and I came at her hard over it. "Just let me pick. My dad just died." She said, "I'm sorry. You seemed like it wasn't even affecting you. I didn't know."

The hope I had been carrying since I became a Christian at fifteen died with him. That he would adopt the faith and he would be the present father I knew he could be.

Anger was the only emotion I could reliably reach when grief came up. I didn't cry at his funeral. Sitting in my childhood grief was not safe and there never had been room for me to do it.

My wife encouraged me to get counseling. What I didn't expect was how it would open my access to my childhood, and how much grief I had suppressed, and how the faith had been one of the ways I suppressed it. It was only through therapy that I started to see how completely I had fused my body's need for safety with my certainty that the story was literally true.

After those two events, and the work of therapy, my body stopped letting the testimonies I had always accepted satisfy my need for certainty. Nothing about the evidence had changed. I had just experienced something real enough that the faith now had to meet a higher standard to keep regulating me the way it had.

I believed that if I lost the certainty of the resurrection, I lost the foundation of my safety.

But what I'm now able to articulate is that I never actually possessed certainty in the resurrection in a verifiable way. I had certainty in the testimony of individuals who asserted that the resurrection had happened, and in my own ability to construct a bulletproof chain of reasoning.

But that chain of reasoning was never what settled my body. Defending it was how I guarded the thing that did.

I had been using the same word for two different things and never noticed. There was the certainty I felt, which was the thing in my body telling me I was safe. And there was the certainty I could actually claim, which depended on whether I could verify anything. In my life those two always showed up at the same time, so I never had a reason to separate them. But the one that was keeping me alive was the first one. The one I spent twenty years defending was the second.

At fifteen, that week at church camp, I didn't possess certainty in the literal claims of the faith. Faith had provided me with a regulated and embodied experience that was doing work in convincing me of its power and usefulness. I couldn't have made any sound theological arguments or have proven that Jesus was even a real person on earth.

But once the faith came under attack from those outside of it, the intensity of my childhood suffering and the lack of parental care meant I needed to defend the literal claims to keep the story. I was worried if it wasn't literally true, it would stop regulating me the way it had at that camp.

The thing I'm trying to make sense of is this: what can we have certainty in, and what can we reasonably require from another person?

I think for most Evangelical Christians the most basic test of whether someone is a Christian is how they answer this: do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?

I required it of other people myself. I witnessed to strangers, to friends, to my own family, and every time I was asking them to be certain of something I now know I was never certain of either. I was not lying to them. I believed I had it. But I was handing people a test I could not pass, and I did not find that out until the certainty was gone.

Can any Evangelical Christian actually claim they are certain of the literal resurrection of Jesus? Certain in the way they claim I have to be certain in order to call myself a Christian, and in the way they require other people to assent to it in order to be saved by Jesus?

Here is the difference between us and the disciples. The disciples saw a resurrected Jesus they could touch and eat with. It was an embodied figure that was undeniable. Jesus in the gospel of John doesn't seem to have a problem with this type of proof being required. The book is built around seven specific embodied stories, miracles that point to the reality that he was actually the messiah.

The gospel of John saves the story of Thomas for last, the most embodied proof given of Jesus's resurrection in all of the New Testament. Jesus doesn't rebuke Thomas for needing the proof. He even offers Thomas the ability to put his hands into his wounds. He does bless everyone after Thomas for believing without seeing him.

But Jesus was willing to offer his wounds to convince him.

If I say, like Thomas, that I cannot be certain of the resurrection unless I can put my hand in his side, what does that make me?

Would Jesus, if he actually rose from the dead, condemn the person who honestly wants that kind of proof? Why did Jesus give Thomas the ability to do that, if he was opposed to us demanding an embodied proof?

I think many people are holding onto that question, and if it was answered the way it was for Thomas, they would be able to speak about Jesus's resurrection with certainty.

But as it stands right now, no Christian, at least that I've met, has been able to put their hands into the wounds of Jesus. So the certainty they have is not in the resurrection, but in the testimony of someone who did touch him.

Almost everyone I love is still inside the faith.

My oldest daughter knows I am no longer sure about Jesus. Ever since I told her, she has been afraid of what happens to me when I die. She writes me cards with Bible verses in them, hoping they will help me believe. I keep every one of them. I do not have an answer for her that doesn't cost one of us something.

My wife and daughters go to church each Sunday without me. At bedtime my wife prays with the girls, and they ask me why I don't pray with them.

My closest friends believe I am wrong about the most important thing there is, and nearly all of them are kind about it, which is somehow harder than if they were not.

There is a part of me they cannot reach now, and a part of them I cannot reach either. None of that is because anyone stopped loving anyone. It is because I cannot produce the one thing that would close the distance.

I can now sit with the beauty of the story of Jesus and the incarnation and long for it to be true. I love the fact that people got to physically interact with Jesus. Honestly, this is still why I can't leave Christianity alone.

It matches a deep need to be loved and seen by a parental figure, especially for someone who, as a child, didn’t have a father who could do it. I desire to interact with God in that embodied manner that those people experienced.

But I don't get that. I tasted a small embodied version of it in individuals in the church. I still feel it in the power of the narrative. But what I yearn for is to experience that true embodied presence of God. I am asking for a proof that Jesus himself didn't condemn, proof that can be checked by an embodied physical experience.

What I will not do again is ask certainty to do a job it was never built for.

I stand with Thomas before his experience and say I can't believe it unless I can put my hands in his wounds. Not because I don't want it, but precisely because I deeply do want it.

Was Thomas a Christian only after he got his proof and made his confession? He spent a week where he had heard the testimony of people he trusted with his life and still could not say he was certain.

And if he was a Christian during that week, then how many of us would say "my Lord and my God" if we were handed a physical Jesus to put our hands on?

Yesterday a friend said something beautiful. But instead of taking in that beauty, I spent the evening and the morning taking it apart.

I realized that I love my boys unconditionally and if I love my boys that way, my father must have loved me the same way too, even if he couldn’t always fully express it.

We had been talking about what changed in his thinking when he was about the same age I am now, as it related to his own hunger for his father’s approval. He was talking about the way he began to quiet that need. The crazy thing is that he still felt a hunger for his father’s approval and affection, and his father was in his life. We have talked about his childhood and his father’s presence before. In the ways that mattered most, his father was the opposite of mine. He was consistently loving, encouraging, and most important of all, physically present.

Hearing him say that about his own boys was beautiful. I love that he can say it that way. I want to be able to take it in the way it was offered.

Who am I to critique a man’s love for his own children? But then I realized, I am not doing that. I am doing something else to protect myself. So what am I protecting?

Hearing him say it activates three things in me. Doubt. Shame. Grief. Doubt is the one that shows up first, and it is loud enough to keep me from the other two.

Doubt comes first because doubt is fast. Within a second of hearing him, my mind already had two objections ready. The first is that the love is already conditional. He loves them that way because they are his kids, and I suspect he doesn’t feel that same love toward his sons’ friends who are the same age. The second takes the form of, “yeah, but what if one of your boys goes wayward and ends up hating you?” I know what he would say to that. He would say it is possible, and that he would love him anyway.

The objections are not stupid. They are also not the point. I have spent enough time with the part of me that produces them to know what it is doing. It has been doing it my whole life. If I can find the flaw in the sentence fast enough, I never have to sit with what it feels like to have never been loved that way.

Because here is what my doubt was covering. My friend can look at the way he loves his boys and reason backward from it. If I love them like this, my father must have loved me like this. He gets an answer he can live with.

I became a father too, and it worked the other direction on me. Loving my daughters that way did not tell me what my father must have felt. It told me what I did not get. And it made the distance between the story I believed and the life I was actually living impossible to keep ignoring. That is a large part of what broke my faith.

For many years, the evangelical churches I attended, and especially their male leaders, filled that gap for me. They stood in as representatives of Jesus. But no person could reasonably bear everything that role carried for me.

They could love me well, but they could never go back and give me what I had needed from my father.

As I go back and read the Bible now, I keep seeing Jesus offer something over and over that I didn’t see when I was a Christian, because I didn’t know how to put words to what I was looking for. I can articulate the hunger more clearly now, and appreciate the beauty of what was being offered in the teachings of Jesus.

The religious story that most powerfully captures this struggle and longing is the story of the prodigal son. The part that still moves me is how the father runs to meet his son while the son is still far off. Before the son has said a word, it says the father ran and embraced him and kissed him.

I read that line this morning and wept over it for the first time in my life.

How deeply I long for my father to have done that with me, and how deeply I still long for him to do it now. To see him run. To have him embrace me. The beauty of those words doesn’t hit as powerfully for people who have never known that kind of pursuit. You only know how good ordinary food tastes after you have fasted for a day.

It’s incredible how deprivation changes your perception of the ordinary.

I love that story. I want to believe that God the Father runs to me and embraces me and kisses me. But God isn’t a physical being on earth who can do that. Jesus is using the beautiful image of an earthly father to show what God the Father is like.

But my body doesn’t get to physically experience that.

Jesus uses a physical story to elicit a response in my body. His parables almost always invoke a felt, embodied presence to drive home the point, and I love that about him. I love that his teachings are embodied, and how could they not be? His presence on earth is theoretically God taking an embodied form.

He is teaching in parables what he represents literally as a walking parable.

But as much as I love this story, and as much as I want it to be true, I don’t get to talk to Jesus, or see him, or experience him as an embodied being. There was one place above all where I needed that story to become physical for me. If my father had been saved out of his addiction and begun to live out the truth of the Christian faith, Jesus would have become tangible to me in the body of my own father. It would not have undone my childhood, but it might have healed something in me that his addiction had taught me about fathers.

So when my father died, the last chance I had of touching an embodied Jesus died with him.

I know there are legitimate rebuttals many evangelicals could raise, about how this isn’t a correct test of whether or not he is real, and why I should still believe. But I can’t help going back to that beautiful image of a father who sees me far off and runs to me and embraces me and kisses me, before I say a word. If I could experience that from God, I would weep in his arms and just allow myself to be held.

I would ask him why he let so many terrible things happen to me. Why couldn’t my father have gotten better? Don’t you know how hard this burden is to carry? Do you know what it is to see the beauty of a story, and to know a whole generation got to touch him, and that I never will?

This leads to shame. Shame because I keep wanting to be seen by the people whose framework I can no longer affirm. And I know my writing reads as a threat to it, even when what I am mostly doing is telling them how beautiful I still find the story.

I tell them the incarnation still moves me more than anything else I have found. That the image of a God who comes after his creation in a body is the most beautiful thing I know.

But I am also telling them that I took the story so literally that I couldn’t stay any longer, because after becoming a father myself, I began to feel the disconnect between the embodied story and the reality of my lived life.

I have sent my writing to a few evangelical leaders. Some of them read it, and I am grateful for that. One pastor never answered the email. Every time I send it I am opening myself up again, and then waiting, not just for a response but for one that feels like being seen. What I am handing them includes some of the darkest, most vulnerable moments in my deconversion process, specifically about not wanting to be alive any longer. It costs me something to write that down. It costs more to send it to someone who does not hold it with the weight it deserves.

As I was finishing the book, I told an elder’s wife what it was about. She reflected that she sees most deconversions as the result of unprocessed trauma. She meant it as an explanation, not an insult, and it still stung.

Then coffee with a pastor. An hour of good conversation, and on the way out a passing comment about my “daddy issues.” I got in my car and sat there while an incredible sadness came over me. I wanted to sob and couldn’t. So I drove home replaying the conversation over and over. I parked in the garage and stayed in the car, because the anger had come up over the top of it, the way it always does. I sat there until it was safe to go inside. I texted him shortly after and told him it hurt. He was kind about it and said he didn’t mean it as an attack, and that he would say the same of himself.

But whatever they intended, both responses located the problem in me. If the wound explains the leaving, then the faith itself never has to answer for anything. The trauma did it. God comes out the innocent party.

Except that is not how Jesus handles anything. He does not explain suffering from a distance. He walks into it and puts his hands on people.

And still I send it out to be read. My own hunger drives it, and so does knowing someone else is sitting where I was. I long for the evangelical church to do what the father does in the prodigal son story. Run, embrace and kiss me and those like me.

What I want is not for them to tell me I am right. I want someone to say, “I see how deeply painful this was and why you walked away. If I had lived your life, I might have done the same. I love you, and I am here. I cannot erase the pain or make God physical for you. But I am physical, and I can sit beside you.”

But because I can’t say with certainty that the resurrection was a literal historical event or that the Bible is inerrant, they can’t run and fully embrace and kiss me.

And I understand why. Most of the people I have in mind love me and would tell you so. But understanding doesn’t take away the longing or the hurt. The embrace has a condition attached to it, and the condition is the one thing I cannot produce. So I write, and I hope it reaches them, already knowing where the embrace will stop.

I bear the shame of wanting it anyway.

Underneath all of it is grief. I know I carry the desire for my biological father to do this, and he died in 2018. The yearning is still present. No matter how well my writing lands with readers, they are not my biological father, and they are not the evangelical church representing God the Father to me. I am not sure this is grief I get to set down. What I am learning is how to carry it.

If God the Father is real, he created in me the longing for a father.

He named himself after the thing I tasted but was starved of.

I hungered for that as a young boy when I first heard the story of Christianity, and I still hunger for it now.

I still long for God the Father to run to meet me while I am far off, to embrace me and kiss me. Not a metaphysical knowledge of it. Not a psychological projection of it. The physical thing the story actually describes.

A father who crosses the distance.

This past week has been an incredibly hard one, and my deepest fears have begun to manifest in me. It started last Monday, with a run I went on with my oldest daughter and a conversation we had about my childhood. The fear it stirred up is so powerful it makes me want to scrap this whole Substack project and the book I’m writing.

To give context to this story and to our relationship, last year I told her that I am no longer sure about Jesus and who he is. I knew telling her would be painful, that she would cry and be afraid. I withheld it for over two years. But if I was going to keep being a part of my family and stay married to my Christian wife, I needed to be more honest, because living a double life was destroying me on the inside, to the point of suicidal ideation.

My oldest daughter feels everything deeply. She cries with an ease that I honestly have never seen. She weeps over the ants outside being washed away in a rainstorm. She worries about the snails that come out around our house after it rains, afraid they will be accidentally crushed on the steps, and spends an hour relocating them into the surrounding vegetation. My daughter loves every living thing with a passion that honestly annoys me. Not because it isn’t beautiful, but because I hate to see her in pain, and I can’t shield her from it. I can’t stop the world from being an unsafe place for all the creatures she loves. And if I’m honest, that’s one of the most painful things I still feel about the world we live in, a world that is deeply unsafe, where death is constantly threatening everything we love, at all times.

After I told her I was no longer sure what I believed about Jesus, she began to weep and said she was afraid she wouldn’t be with me in heaven after I died. Mary was there to hold her and comfort her. I was able to sit with it for a few minutes before I had to stand up and leave the room. Offering her comfort on this without challenging her belief, and my wife’s belief, was a fine line. I didn’t want to challenge her faith in that conversation. It would only have made things worse. So I left, because the pain was too great and my protector was beginning to turn it into anger, his oldest method of coping with a pain this powerful.

Ever since that day, my oldest daughter has been afraid of what will happen to me when I die. She has written me cards with Bible verses, hoping to “help me believe in God.”

Here is the irony. I am afraid too. Maybe even more than she is.

This week that fear manifested in a new way I didn’t see coming. On that run, we were able to talk more about the book I’m writing. The book is my life story, told from two angles. One angle is how I grew up without a consistently present father, and what that did to my psyche. The other is how I projected that absent father onto a version of God I came to believe had set me on fire after I denounced his existence, smoking pot for the first time as a twelve-year-old.

I told my daughter a small, age-appropriate version of this story. She has only ever heard snippets of how painful and hard my childhood was. Many of the things that happened would crush her sensitive soul and be too hard for her to make sense of. But I wanted to begin connecting with her about it. In many ways, this book is a manifestation of that same hope, the hope of connecting with people still inside the evangelical church.

After our run, I felt really good about our conversation and about connecting with my daughter around my story. I felt hopeful about the book and what it could do for my relationship with an institution I still feel deeply rejected by.

Then reality hit me.

On Wednesday morning, my wife told me, in the kindest way, what my oldest daughter had said to her. She had told her that dad was “trying to get her to not believe in God.” Mary was not accusing me. She knew that wasn’t what I was doing, and she was telling me gently, hoping to help me go back and clarify things with our daughter. It was a kind and generous prompting.

I was crushed.

How could she have taken that away from the conversation? I was so precise with what I said. I intentionally didn’t say anything about God not being real. In fact, I argued the opposite. I told her about the view of God I had built as a nine-year-old crying out for him to stop my father from being harmful to me, and how I had wrongly internalized his silence as apathy and distance. (Again, I used language simple enough for an eleven-year-old.)

But then my fear came raging back. If my own daughter can’t understand me, maybe this whole project is a waste of time. Maybe the people who read my work will take the wrong message from it too. Maybe this is a lost cause, and none of it is worth doing. Maybe releasing this would just be me putting myself out to be rejected, over and over, by the institution I so deeply want to show up for me.

Instead of receiving Mary’s help, my fear overpowered me and I rejected her sweet prompting. It turned into a fight with my wife that triggered my aggression, a destructive response that created a deep rift in our marriage. I was grumpy and sullen and frustrated, not someone who felt safe to be around. Because the reality is that I didn’t feel safe, and I was manifesting my internal state in my actions. I became what I felt inside. And even when I did manage to calm down, my calm came with a caveat. More than once I told her I would be peaceful and kind, but only while we waited for her to be ready to return to the real fight, whether she would keep believing in a version of hell I could not accept. My peace was a holding pattern, not a gift. Each time, I created a false sense of safety with a string attached to it, the exact opposite of what I am arguing for in my book.

That Thursday morning she told me, plainly, that I become an unsafe person to her when I change like this, and how deeply it triggered her own need to retreat and protect herself. That she has flashes of needing to escape, and that I don’t understand how I come across.

Her message set off the deepest fear I have, the one I have carried my whole life: that I am unloved, and that I will be abandoned by the people I love the most. In that moment it was Mary, the person closest to me, my most secure attachment figure, telling me I had become unsafe, and underneath her words all I could hear was that she might leave.

I did not respond well.

I dismissed her feelings and went harder on the attack. I blamed the whole disconnect, and my internal state, on the one target I felt was safe to attack, the institution of evangelicalism. The institution that created this division between me and my family, with its us-versus-them idea of belief. Accept Jesus and you’re saved, reject him and you’re separated from God, and from them.

But here is the truth. I am deeply afraid that this is actually true, and that I’m wrong.

This is what I believed about God when I was burned at the age of twelve. I was afraid he was an unsafe person who threatened me with hellfire for rejecting him. I felt that fear as true torture in my body, through the debridement procedure to remove the dead flesh from my burn. I know the physical fear of torture, and the threat of God, in my body in a way that almost no evangelical I have ever met does.

I lived on the other side of the evangelical story for the first fifteen years of my life, before I became a Christian. And now, after leaving the faith, I am back on that other side again, standing right where I started. I felt the fear of hell in a way that most evangelicals born into the faith never have and never can. My wife became a Christian at the age of four. She has never known what it means to be on the opposing end of the faith. My daughter is the same. She has believed in God and Jesus since she was old enough to understand it. She has never been afraid of God, or worried about being separated from him. She only knows that fear now, through her fear for me.

This fear of God that I still carry produces a miniature version of hell, not just in me, but on earth. And it is the antithesis of my book’s argument. My book is my life story, and the hope of it is that people can understand that the most loving thing we can do with those we disagree with is to sit with them in their pain and care for them, even if they can’t change what they believe.

I want so badly to be understood by evangelicals, for them to remain present in my life without needing me to accept the metaphysical claims I no longer can. I want them to see the pain I feel, the struggle I carry, and to not leave me. To love me without the expectation that their love will change my thinking.

I want love that doesn’t have a caveat.

Here is the reality, though. This fight, this whole week, was me being unwilling to give the evangelicals in my life the very thing I was asking of them. I was aggressive and demanding toward my wife because I wanted her to change her theology about hell and separation from God. I withdrew my love, my kindness, my closeness, and used my anger to try to change what she believed before I would offer any of it back.

And I owe Mary more honesty than that. Her own understanding of God and of hell has been evolving for a long time. She is not the fixed, certain believer my fear needs her to be. But this week I gave her no time to sit with the wound in me. Instead of asking her to be present with me in my pain, I came at her aggressively and demanded that she change. I wanted her to have already arrived somewhere it has taken me years of my own suffering to reach, and I withdrew from her for not being there yet.

I dreamt all night about hell, not about being in it, but about arguing aggressively about its absurdity with pastors.

After sitting with the dream, I was able to let the true grief surface, and I cried this morning.

I realized that the pain I’m really feeling is still about God and Jesus. It’s the pain of a God I still desperately want to be real and present in my life, the way I wanted my biological father present, rejecting me, and rejecting the love I want, because I cannot assent to a metaphysical reality I cannot verify.

So I wept about this version of God I am still so deeply afraid of, and about how the fear is retriggered by my daughter’s fear that I’m “making her not believe in God.” That same fear of being abandoned is resurrected by my daughter’s childlike fear, which is a mirror of the God I felt at twelve. The God who set me on fire because I told him I didn’t believe in him, the first night I smoked pot.

What I need from Mary, from my daughter, from any evangelical, is for them to stop believing in a God who would punish people for their unbelief, whether by Hellfire or by annihilation. And needing that from them is a deeply wounding thing to carry. At the same time, it’s my own fear about God being manifested in another person.

That is the wound my daughter activates, and that Mary’s inability to abandon her deeply nurturing and sacred beliefs about God activates. It’s the wound that says you will be forever separated from everyone you love, because you refused to believe in this specific version of the hell game. It’s the fear that God really is that vindictive, that he would destroy me, and their subtle acknowledgment of hell feels like they are joining in on making my deepest fear come true.

I still carry that fear with me to this day. A part of me is still afraid that when I die, I will be wrong, and God will send me into eternal punishment, away from the people I love and from my family. That even though I’d be open to accepting him after my death, it will be too late, and everyone who warned me will have been vindicated.

But my realization this morning was that as long as I keep looking for Mary, or my daughter, or any evangelical to reject that interpretation, to reassure me that I’m not the one who will be cast out, I will always be anxious, because my validation is being outsourced to other people. If I can’t feel secure in my own relationship to God and to this fear of hell, people will always trigger me, I will always be reactive, and I will ironically demand that they change their beliefs so that I can sit with them.

So my goal is to genuinely cry, to let that pain surface, and to turn toward that scared twelve-year-old boy, for the adult me to reassure him that he is safe. That if God is real, and if the incarnation is real (something I will never be able to prove), then he is standing on solid ground. He wouldn’t reject that love. He would accept the love of Jesus, and Jesus would accept him. He doesn’t have to be afraid.

The only route that lets me heal is the one where I am simply honest about the pain and the fear, and cry, without trying to change the people around me so that I can feel okay about myself.

The moment it turns to anger, I’ve lost. I’ve lost the people who still hold that belief, because now their nervous system is activated. And I’ve lost to myself, because I’ve started playing a game I can’t win, against them, and against me.

I’ve created my own miniature version of hell by generating my own isolation, cutting myself off from the people I love, refusing to be with them unless they change what they believe.

And ironically, what I actually want is to choose the way of Jesus over my own anger and need for self-preservation. I am not sure Jesus was divine, and I may never be sure. But I am sure of his example. I want to emulate the beauty I see in his story, to sit in the idea of a love that doesn’t reject or refuse even the people who are killing him. He is not a pushover, not someone who submits to abuse for its own sake. He is someone entirely secure in the love of God, and willing to give his life for that belief.

If Jesus had become angry and refused the people killing him, it would have been based on fear, fear of what their judgment meant about God’s approval of him. It would have been his wound externalized, demanding that they confirm from the outside the truth he already felt about God on the inside.

But he refused that path. He chose to operate from a secure, loving place.

That is the path I want to choose, to be secure in my relationship with a God I can’t truly talk to, and that I’m still deeply afraid of. But I know my own heart. I am open to a relationship with that being, and if he is there, he knows that about me.

For now, though, my only hope is to sit with that twelve-year-old boy and hold him. Because he is still so deeply afraid.

She was three days old when we brought her home. Small enough for me to hold in one hand, barely over five pounds when we picked her up from the DHS office. A premature baby, placed with us to be loved and kept safe until her family could become safe enough to take her back.

And she made me angry in a way I could not explain.

Why does this little girl get to be saved? What is different about her that she was able to make it out of her childhood unscathed? Why didn’t God send someone to rescue and love me? Was I not worth being saved?

These questions began to surface once I slowed down and looked at the anger. It was not consistent with the reality of the situation. Bringing a helpless little girl into our home had stirred up a deeply wounded part of my childhood I had long suppressed.

While I was a completely functional adult, mostly in control of myself, I had unresolved complex trauma lying dormant in my body. Something that once ravaged your whole body, now out of sight and out of mind, can come raging back unannounced.

This is one of the hardest chapters in my book, and it sits right before the collapse of my faith. Read straight, you might think that rescuing a little girl from a life that would most likely have looked like mine, maybe worse, should have sealed my love of the faith. It didn’t. That confusion is part of the point, because it did the same thing to me when it happened.

So how does a deeply therapeutic and emotionally beautiful event cause the reaction it did in me?

We intentionally chose to open our home and foster children. We did it with the explicit hope of changing the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in America. So why would bringing this helpless baby into our house to receive love bring up such explosive anger? None of it makes sense, until you understand the reasons under the anger. The louder the anger, the deeper the wound underneath that it is protecting.

By the time she entered our home, I had begun therapy for the first time in my adult life. My father had just died, and our second biological daughter had been born after my wife almost died from an ectopic pregnancy. The year before had been a deeply tumultuous one, and my need to be in therapy was driven by the anger that kept bubbling up in my daily home life.

A couple of months before my father passed, I would feel anger I couldn’t explain, and it would spill out in simple frustrations at my wife and my daughter. Nothing in my day could account for why I felt this way. My wife, being the wise woman she is and a trauma therapist, knew more about the reasons than I did, and she was kind in how she approached me about them.

She insisted I begin therapy, because the anger, while not abusive like my father’s, was still destructive and unhealthy. It had an echo of my childhood I did not want to hear, and it was not something my wife was willing to let our family live inside. So I agreed. I was resistant at first. I thought, what good would talking about my emotions do, and how could that change the past and what happened to me? I also saw emotions as untrustworthy, something to be mastered rather than expressed. Expression was a weakness in my eyes.

What I didn’t expect was how much therapy would open up my body’s ability to feel again. It wasn’t that I felt nothing before. I couldn’t feel the softest ones, the most vulnerable and sensitive ones. How could I, when no one had ever been able to hold those emotions for me safely?

As I began therapy, I became able to access the deep emotions my trauma self had buried. It let me touch something I never could before.

The grief underneath the anger.

I began to see the anger as a protector, shielding me from the more vulnerable emotion beneath it. I saw for the first time how dangerous grief is to a young, vulnerable child, and how the anger had protected me. I also saw how it had become maladaptive. It had never been safe to touch that grief as a child. Now, as an adult, I had the resources and the attachment figures to begin to do it, so the anger was no longer necessary as a guard.

When the anger stood down, the wound could fully surface. The wound of why I wasn’t rescued when I so badly wanted to be. On top of it sat another fear. What if she went back to her mother, and that home wasn’t safe? What does it mean for a little girl to taste safety and have it ripped out of her grasp? What does that say about how the world works, about God’s priorities and human agency? None of it could be resolved cleanly.

There is an irony in the role of a foster parent. You are the one on the front lines, and in many ways the one with the least say in the child’s future. Your role is to house and love a child with the expectation that you will hand her back, in hopes that the home she left has done the work to become safe enough for her to return to.

As a child of a broken home, I understood its mechanics in ways people raised by loving parents don’t. So as we stayed in communication with the biological mother and grandmother, we could see the ways she wasn’t truly safe and was deliberately hiding things from the courts. My old childhood wound, needing to speak up and not being able to be heard, resurfaced. Here I was as an adult, watching this helpless little girl possibly return to the destruction I had lived, and I couldn’t change it.

It wasn’t until my therapist asked me whether I could speak up in any way that might change the outcome for our daughter. Her situation did not look hopeful for reunification. I knew with every fiber of my being that if she went back, she would be back in the system in no time. Had I kept quiet, still believing no one was going to listen to me, she might have been sent back to a mother who clearly wasn’t safe.

So I began to speak up, in court and to the DHS caseworkers, and I changed the trajectory of her story. I had processed the childhood wound that said I can’t speak up because no one is there to listen, and I realized it was a version of myself I was still carrying. It wasn’t that I never spoke up about injustice. I had spent much of my adult life angry about it, and aggressive about it. But that wouldn’t work here. If I lost my temper in court or with the caseworker, I would only hurt her chances. I needed to speak up, but I needed to do it vulnerably.

So I resolved to call DHS and be vulnerable. I wanted to ask them the way that small boy asked the question under the rage, the one who held the deep wound and wanted so badly to say, “Can someone save me?” As I told the caseworker my concerns, I began to cry, and I asked her why we were reunifying our daughter when I had sent documented evidence of the mother lying and hiding it from her. The caseworker listened and told me she would speak with her supervisor.

I hung up, thankful the tears had come during the call, and that I had quieted the rage inside me. A week or so later, she called back. They had reviewed the concerns and decided to change the goal from reunification to adoption. My excitement could barely be contained. Then came the next question. “Would you two be willing to adopt her?” Before she finished the sentence, I let out a soft, audible sob and answered, “Yes, we would.”

How this related to God was more complicated. In my mind, this was God orchestrating the events, allowing me to suffer as a child so that I could become a father who would open his home to a helpless child and love her in a way that was unique because I had known the pain of a broken family.

But that was painful in its own way. It still required God to have allowed me to suffer and be abused in order to become this father to her. If that was his “plan,” I didn’t get a choice in it, and he allowed a small boy to be abused for the future potential of being a good father. As poetic and beautiful as that idea can appear on the surface, it is paid for by the suffering my body had to hold to get there.

For the first time since my childhood, my body experienced what it meant to speak up and be rescued. The rescuing came through my own need to know that speaking up against injustice, vulnerably, could change the world around me. So while it saved my daughter from a life I had once lived, it also showed my body, for the first time, that my vulnerability had a place in this world.

I remember sobbing in the shower about this. Sobbing because, for the first time, that small child felt seen and listened to, and had tasted a small measure of the love he so deeply wanted. It had come through my own actions. I had been the rescuer of my daughter, and at the same time of my childhood self. I was showing that little boy that I would have spoken up for him if I could. I would have brought him into my home and loved him like he was my own son. I would have fought for him in the courts and with a DHS worker. I was answering my own question in real time.

Yes, you were worth saving.

This morning, I sat sobbing in my office.

If you had told me even two months ago that I would be writing over twenty essays and a full-length book, and crying as I did a deep excavation of my life, I would have laughed and thought you were crazy. Not because men shouldn’t be emotional. I think modern American culture has done great damage to the idea of what a real man is, specifically around the idea that a grown man doesn’t need to cry. But I never thought the tears would come through writing out my own story.

The past month has been more emotional than I could have imagined. The book I’m writing slows down and lets the scenes from my essays breathe. Yesterday I wrote about the most pivotal time in my entire life, the year I turned fifteen. So many things happened that year that changed the course of who I was and who I would become. But this morning was the first time I gave myself permission to slow down and fully enter into what that fifteen-year-old boy felt.

The first thing I wrote about was the police raid on my house.

Honestly, most of the emotions of that night are buried deep. My internal protector was in full gear. As I wrote about it, I realized how much of the pain my subconscious had buried. I have very specific memories. The police coming into the house with guns drawn and screaming at us to get on the floor. Being handcuffed with my hands behind my back for over an hour in a police car. The wreckage of my house after they left. But what I can’t access is the grief. What my body did to protect a young child in that situation was suppress the weight of grief that should have accompanied it. To truly sit in that pain at that age, with no adults to hold me, would have been devastating. I didn’t have the luxury of processing it. I had a house to clean up after they left. I had a small town to face. I had a job to go back to and a school that would know all of my family’s chaos. The protector needed to make sure I could survive, and for that, I am thankful for what he did.

Then I wrote about my conversion to Christianity, which followed shortly after.

I wrote about the night I thought I was going to die, when I prayed to God without knowing anything about Jesus. I had only heard about him in passing, that he could “save me.” So I asked him to, over and over. I didn’t know if the laced drug I’d smoked was going to kill me, and I was paralyzed with fear, reaching for anything that could save me.

I woke up the next day and resolved I’d never smoke pot again. I have kept that to this day.

But the following weekend, I decided to get drunk. For some reason my mind thought this was different, that alcohol was milder. I had been getting drunk since I was twelve and always had a good time. This time was different. A deep depression set in that night and would not lift. Even worse, when I tried to think of the things that normally made me happy, like leaving the small town, getting a good job, being away from the chaos, I couldn’t feel the joy I used to feel reaching for them. So I called my mother, who was living with her sister, and asked her to come get me.

A friend found out I had suddenly moved and invited me to summer church camp. I agreed to go.

The reason I was sobbing this morning was the realization of what that fifteen-year-old actually experienced at that camp.

In my first draft of the chapter, I had condensed the whole week into a single sentence. I’d basically written that it was amazing, without going into why, without letting it breathe. I naturally stray away from flowery prose. It isn’t how I talk or who I am. My default register is matter-of-fact and direct. But writing has forced me to slow down and look at what was happening in my body in ways I wouldn’t normally allow.

So this time I wrote about what made that week amazing.

I wrote about the way people talked to one another at camp. There was no attacking language. No threats. No name-calling, no shame. People spoke words of encouragement. I would have made fun of people who were that positive before this week. But that week, I allowed my body, and more specifically my internal protector, to rest. I took in the encouragement. I let myself feel empowered by the words. I tasted what it felt like to live in a completely different way than I had for most of my childhood.

But the thing that truly set the tears off was the realization of how profound a dinner table is to a dysregulated child.

When I was very young, before the chaos began, our family had a dinner table and we ate together. Ironically, that table is also where my first memory of my father losing control of his temper took place. After we moved from that house, we never owned or sat at a dinner table to eat as a family again. I didn’t realize until this morning how completely a table can stand in for a connected family.

At camp, we ate every meal together at a table. We laughed. We were present with each other. There was no television to distract us, just one another. And there were adults I could feel safe around. They were there to support and care for the children at the camp. I didn’t have to absorb the chaos of their lives. I could just be what I was, a kid.

This morning, the profoundness of losing my faith hit me in a way it hasn’t since I left it in October of 2023. I felt the weight of the safety that fifteen-year-old boy had experienced that week, and I felt it as a loss for the first time. And I let myself imagine what it would have meant to him to never have had it at all. And more than that, I began to reflect on what that week actually meant to that scared child.

A cynic would say: See, you just needed a family that was present and didn’t speak harshly, and a dinner table to sit at. You didn’t need Christianity.

But that misses what created the situation in the first place. I am not claiming Christianity is the only thing that could build a place like that for a hurting child. I am saying it is the thing that built the one I walked into. The faith is what moved these particular people to organize a camp, to welcome a child they had no connection to, and to care for him as if he were their own.

I have had to sit with the complexity of acknowledging that the faith wasn’t just a cover for what the experience really was. It is true that my conversion was a bodily experience, biological and psychological. But it is also true that this experience happened because the faith had moved adults to care enough to build a space where a traumatized child could hear a message and feel something that changed the trajectory of his life. The theology was the fuel. The embodied actions, the safety, the table, the encouragement, were the outputs produced by the engine it ran. And that engine allowed a deeply abandoned child to feel safe.

The weight of that complexity is something I am still wrestling with. I can no longer hold the literal truth of that faith the way I once did. But I cannot deny the truth of the embodied experience either.

So I am left with a question I do not know how to answer. If I can no longer hold onto the literal truth of the faith, is the embodied reality that held that fifteen-year-old boy now forever out of my reach? Can a faith that lets go of the literal still build a space where an isolated, frightened boy finds the comfort he found?

And if it cannot, that is the answer I am most afraid of. Because it would mean the literal was never just a belief I could set down. It would mean the literal was the thing holding up the archetypes of the faith that I still champion now. I do not have a resolution on this. Like Jacob, I’m still trying to wrestle God to the ground.

I wrote this piece with the thought of what would I say to myself in October of 2023 when the collapse happened and I was terrified and anxious about what comes next and if things would get better. Some of these points are universal to the experience of leaving a rigid dogmatic interpretation of the faith, but a couple of them are specific to me and my experience.

Identity and Meaning

1. You are not overacting, you are losing a surrogate father.

You need to know that the terror you feel is not about a lack of truth, but a lack of safety. You built a rigid, literalist theological fortress to protect yourself because your actual childhood home was a volatile war zone. Leaving the faith feels like walking into outer space because you are stepping out of the armor that kept you alive. It is okay to be terrified when you take off a survival suit you have worn since you were twelve.

Normal feelings to have:

You will constantly question your choice and be afraid of death and what comes next. After I left the faith, I would have dreams where something was happening that would result in my death and I screamed out for Jesus to save me. You still want that protection and that is okay.

2. The black hole of Nihilism is real, but it doesn’t have to consume you.

You are standing on the edge of what feels like absolute nihilism, terrified that if God and the Bible are not a literal truth you can plant your flag on, then your life has no meaning. You will soon discover that the divine and the transcendent moral order do not vanish just because a rigid dogma did. But it will take time to recalibrate and you will go through withdrawal. You need to be honest with people about it or it can consume you.

Normal feelings to have:

This will hit in waves as you had previously built your meaning and purpose on the certainty of knowing you held the one and only correct way to view the world. You will have to do work to begin letting yourself sit with the pain of the unknown. You will want to rebuild a new certainty but will find that you can’t, not in the way that you did before. But you’ll see that is actually more healthy and humble than what you held before.

3. Your value is not sitting on a scale that needs to be tipped.

Right now, you are panicking about what your life means if you cannot prove your worth by knowing that you possess perfect truth. You will try and make massive career achievements your next priority. You do not need to build an empire to prove yourself to everyone who doubts your decision. And even if you did, it won’t stop that desire to prove them wrong — because it’s more about how you feel about your own decision than what you are projecting they are thinking. You don’t need to be the best at something just to justify the space you take up on this earth. You can slow down and feel the weight of the decision.

Normal feelings to have:

The energy you put into the faith will naturally look for another outlet. You will feel the need to justify your decision by showing Christians that you are just as good as they are morally and you didn’t need prayer and Bible reading to get there. This is not a healthy place to be because the reality is that you are a complicated mix of emotions, trauma, and competing desires that will inevitably lead you to fall short of your own expectations for yourself and others. Don’t give into the need to prove your morality by being perfect. No one can do that — not even Christians.

Relationships

4. You will navigate a new normal with your spouse, but it will take work.

This will be one of the hardest parts of your decision, especially if you both were serious Christians when you got married. They will feel like you have abandoned them and that you are progressing on a different path without them, and to some degree that is true. You will need to hold space for them to grieve it as well. You will most likely need a marriage counselor who can act as a neutral party to help navigate the appropriate compromises.

Normal feelings to have:

You will struggle to feel like you are on the same team. You will be hurt by the statements they make about feeling abandoned and will want to challenge them and stop them from grieving. But the reality is that you left, not them. Even though you didn’t do it to hurt them, you will have to make space for their pain. This will be volatile and that is expected. Give it time.

5. You will feel isolated from your old Christian friends, and talking with them about why you left won’t always feel good.

Many of your friends love you and are deeply concerned about you. However, many of them won’t understand why you left and explaining it to them won’t always ease the pain. I had many conversations with friends at coffee shops and by the end of the conversation it felt like there was no true resolution for them. They want to understand but since they are still in the faith, the decision to leave isn’t something they can truly agree with. By the time you finish the conversation, you’ll feel disappointed because nothing you say can help them feel better besides hearing that you believe again. Some of them will also try to keep you in the faith and argue against you. This is coming from a place of love, but it will feel hurtful.

Normal feelings to have:

You will feel isolated and alone in a significant way. Try and find at least a few friends who can truly hold space and be empathetic towards your decision. You will also need to find a few people who have walked through this as well and are not aggressive toward the faith. When people want to meet to try and talk you out of leaving, you do not have to engage in that. You can if you feel comfortable, but don’t feel forced into the conversation. You don’t owe anyone an explanation, you can decide to give it when and if you feel comfortable.

Beginning to Rewire

6. Your body knows the way before your head does.

Stop trying to think your way out of panic loops and career anxieties. The panic is your internal protector trying to shield you from the raw grief and fear of the unknown, which is an important system. However, you need to cycle through it and begin to speak to yourself kindly, even thanking that protector for the work it did to keep you safe and letting it know it can put down the defense now and sit with the grief. The only way forward is by entering into it.

Normal feelings to have:

You will be afraid and cry more than you are comfortable with. Some days it will feel heavier than you can take but you can get through it. It’s okay to want that comfort from a heavenly father, even if you can’t believe it’s possible. I remember voicing that to my spouse and deeply mourning that.

7. Your brain will automatically try to replace the old rigid system with a new version.

Human programming craves certainty. When you leave a system based on rigid compliance, your subconscious will immediately look for a new set of rules to master so you can feel a sense of safety about the world. I immediately turned to starting a new company to deal with my pain, it worked for a few months, but ultimately the void came back. It’s easy to also turn academic achievement, political ideology, or even the deconstruction process itself into a new form of fundamentalism. Watch out for the urge to turn your new life into a performance test.

Normal feelings to have:

Your desire to create a new system is completely normal and expected. You’ve been in this system for years and it has brought peace and comfort. It’s okay to want that and even to cycle through this. I still crave that but it will get less and less intense as you get further from the initial leaving.

8. You will have to learn how to trust your own intuition from scratch.

Literalist frameworks teach you that your internal compass is inherently broken, deceptive, or sinful, forcing you to rely entirely on external authorities — texts, leaders, rules to live by — for direction. One of the hardest tasks is learning to listen to your own body and mind. This is the first time you are giving yourself permission to feel, adapt, and grieve ideas that you once struggled to make sense of and moral fights you might not have wanted to take up but felt obligated to because of the requirements in the text. Learning to trust yourself will take time but it will become more and more natural as you learn that your sense of morality doesn’t leave you once you decide to leave the faith.

Normal feelings to have:

You will fear your ability to hold things as sacred or morally important because you were conditioned to think that you can’t without the faith. However, you will see you are still able to discern things that you find harmful or good based on the results they produce in your life. Many of the moral imperatives are intuitive and experientially you’ll see that living by them will produce a life you want and going against them will cause more chaos. You’ll start to understand these moral truths not just as divine commandments, but as a reliable trail to guide you through life.

9. The divine and the transcendent do not belong exclusively to the system you left.

Christianity claims a monopoly on meaning, morality, and connection to the sacred through the text and the teachings of the New Testament. Because of this, leaving the institution can feel like diving into a black hole of absolute nihilism and unknowable meaninglessness. However, you will learn that it’s okay to be soft towards the things that were and still are true moral teachings in the faith. You can agree with and champion those things without feeling like you are committed to believing all of it as literally true. You’ll also begin to discover that awe, mystery, a transcendent moral order, and deep human purpose exist entirely outside of dogmatic frameworks and in other traditions as well. The sandbox you were in broke, but the universe did not.

Normal feelings to have:

You will want to reject everything about the faith because you want to fully separate yourself from it. It’s normal to desire to feel truly disconnected from it before you can feel soft towards it again. You might also find that once you are softer towards it, the desire to protect it as something unique resurfaces. That urge is normal and okay.

I sat all day today running an anxious loop. I was trying to solve a problem about what my next career move would be. At the end of April, I left a career at a company I had been at for the past thirteen years. I left not because I was not good at what I did, I left because I knew how unhealthy I had become in that role. I needed to change course if I was going to continue to grow healthier for my family.

I ran various different scenarios about what I could do with my life now at the age of thirty eight. Could I go back to school and get the PhD I originally wanted before I decided not to continue with schooling? How much would that cost, and could that turn into a career that is meaningful and I would be proud of?

But in reality, the question I am really asking is if he would be proud of it.

Most of my life drive has come from one sole aim to prove: am I worth it?

A father has many symbolic meanings: provider, protector, guide, and supporter to name a few. To me, all of that could be summed up in the symbolic meaning that said, “you are valuable to this world and I am glad you are here.” When my father was present, I felt that with every fiber of my being. I felt all of the layers of the symbolic but most of all I felt that his love and affection for me always answered the question of my worth. When he was engaged and interacting with me, I knew the answer was yes.

But my father struggled with that question himself. His own relationship with his father was a strained relationship. I remember asking my father how he got addicted to meth and his answer was pretty simple. His father was absent as well. Not in a drug use and abusive way, but in an emotionally and physically distant kind of way. My father desperately wanted the same question that I desired to be answered by his father, and it was met with a metaphorical no.

What is the most upsetting and damaging part about childhood trauma is that our mind is thirty eight but our emotions are still nine. When we get wounded at a deep subconscious level, our emotional age does not progress and we get trapped in the age of the trauma. My thirty eight year old self knows my father loved me and that he was suffering from his own wounds. But my nine year old emotional subconscious is still screaming, “was I not worth fighting for? Am I not worth it?”

As I lay on the couch with my wife tonight, I was able to get to the core of the anxious searching for the perfect next career move for me. I was able to cry and tell her the desperation I have to be seen and understood at a level that would combat that programming that is trying as hard as it can to answer the question that I know cannot be answered.

My father died a distant alcoholic who only met my oldest daughter twice and died one month before my second daughter was born. In some ways my subconscious is saying, “the question has been answered, you were not worth fighting for.” So my subconscious has fought to drive me to performance to challenge that answer. I am going to be the most successful person I could possibly be to prove that wrong. It has been doing that ever since I left my house at twelve and did not live under his roof any longer.

It was there under the surface driving me as I strived for every new achievement that I thought would prove my worth to him. If I could just be more amazing than everyone else, it would be undeniable and he would be overcome with awe at my achievements, and he would decide that his self destructive tendencies could be stopped and his love and admiration for me would force him to give up his vices. My accolades would overpower his weaknesses and addictions and I would have a father that finally answered that question with a resounding, “YOU MATTER!”

Then one day, he was gone. The ability for him to change the answer to that deep visceral existential question of my value is no longer possible, and I was left with an answer that I am still desperately trying to disprove to this day. When I achieve a milestone in my career or someone notices a painting that I did, or something that I built and says, “wow, that is amazing!” I think subconsciously, “you see that dad, I matter.” Every achievement is me trying to tip the scale back in favor of my value that is being weighed down by the weight of my father’s corpse on the scale.

My cry was therapeutic tonight. Not because it answered the question, but because it allowed me to accept the weight that I still want that answer. It also allowed me to dwell on the fact that my test has some flaws in it. It assumes my father’s abandonment and inability to overcome his own issues from his childhood are predicated on my value. My test at its core is flawed. It puts my father in a position that he could never truly answer.

But here is the rub: he should have been the one to answer that question. For whatever reason biologically, we are predisposed to want our fathers to answer this question. There is a reason the father archetype exists. But my father was a damaged child that was always going to struggle to answer that question the way he should have answered it. It does not excuse my father’s failings outright, but it does allow me to have kindness towards the little boy my father once was that did not get that question answered for him either.

The battle with this question is far from done. I am still wrestling with my value and worth to this world. I am still deeply unsure about if there is a grand meaning for all of my suffering and if me being on this earth means anything more than a random chance. I will need my wife to continue to ask me what is wrong and for me to take the time and ask myself what is driving this anxiety. My body always knows before I do.

I have to slow down, be present for the grief, and let the tears come.

When a person deconverts from a lifelong faith, their entire internal worldview is collapsing. People are messy, and no one in this situation will handle it perfectly. But being prepared to walk alongside someone through it is one of the most loving things you can do for both the person leaving and the family they’re leaving with. A therapist should be involved if at all possible. This list is not exhaustive, but it comes from my own experience and is meant to be a place to start.

Don’t Make it About Theology

1. Don’t try to argue with them about facts, and whatever you do, do not hint at where they are going now that they’ve left.

This is almost never the real reason people deconvert. The same is true for why people become Christians. Arguing at this level will almost certainly make the situation worse. Of all people, they know about hell. They have felt the weight of that reality for most of their life in the faith. Raising it now will only drive them further away and damage whatever relationship remains.

I understand the tension here. If you don’t address it, aren’t you failing in your pastoral responsibility? Isn’t the gospel fundamentally about what Jesus saves us from? That may be true, but this person already knows that and is choosing to leave despite it. Repeating it accomplishes nothing except isolating them further in an already incredibly vulnerable situation.

Your goal is to stabilize the emotions and the family first and foremost. Everything else should be pursued after and the reason for helping shouldn’t depend on the returning.

• What you should do: Listen to their story about how they became a Christian. Ask them what God meant to them and how that relationship changed. Remember, they just lost something that they held deeply. They are navigating not only the loss of a relationship with a creator they felt loved them, but also the growing isolation from the friends and family who defined their world.

2. Don’t immediately refer them to books, podcasts, or apologists.

The moment you hand someone a resource to help them not lose their faith, you’ve communicated that their problem is intellectual and that you have the answer. This happened to me in so many different ways. I felt I was being handled before I was being understood. For most of us, the real issue isn’t arguments. It’s grief, identity collapse, and pain they feel towards God and his lack of presence. Saying read this book or this resource says that you want them to come back more than that you want to understand where they are.

• What you should do: Ask questions. Ask what and how things started to shift for them. Ask what they’ve lost. Ask how they are doing emotionally. Sit with them in it. Really listen. I needed this more than I could communicate.

Don’t Make It About You or The Institution

3. Don’t make it about the church or how their leaving reflects on you.

The natural desire is to feel personally rejected when someone is leaving or seriously doubting that the faith is real, and it shows. When leadership or their community responds with defensiveness, hurt, or withdrawal, it confirms what they already feared. That their continued presence is conditional upon asserting things they no longer can assert.

• What you should do: Process how this is landing with you before you choose to engage with them. Do the work of sorting out what you are making their change of faith mean about how you feel about yourself. Doing that work beforehand will allow you to have a better presence and ability to sit with them.

4. Don’t treat them like a project or a crisis to be managed.

Sometimes engaging with the person who is leaving feels closer to damage control than to actually caring about how the person is doing. It can feel like the goal is to keep the person inside the faith and preserve the community rather than to ensure the person is doing well emotionally and psychologically. People who are struggling can smell this from a mile away, especially if they’ve been in the church long enough to understand how it operates. It will drive them further out.

• What you should do: Ask yourself honestly whether your care for this person is contingent on the outcome. If you’d only stay close to them to get them to stay, that’s worth examining before you engage. They don’t need another person who will abandon them in one of their most vulnerable moments. Going through a serious reworking of your faith is not a casual choice. It is an agonizing and painful experience. Similar to a divorce, no one escapes the situation without sustaining emotional damage.

5. Don’t share their situation with others without permission.

Prayer requests can operate like gossip in church culture, not because they are designed that way, but because it can allow people to hear about struggles others are having without permission from the person that is going through it. When someone tells a pastor or a close friend that they’re seriously doubting, having that information travel through a small group or through the church leadership is a profound breach of trust. And it communicates that the church’s management of the situation matters more than the person’s dignity. They already feel ostracized because no one knows how to talk to them or what to say anymore. To the person leaving the faith, it feels like being diagnosed with a terminal illness. They sense that people are talking about them when they’re not in the room, and then don’t know what to say when they are.

• What you should do: Ask explicitly whether they want anyone else to know, and honor that.

Don’t Abandon Them

6. Don’t let their relationships within the church quietly disappear.

This one is subtle but devastating. Whether it’s intentional or not, when a church community slowly stops inviting someone to things, the message received by the person who is leaving is that they are no longer welcome. For someone already grieving the loss of a God they felt close to, losing their community at the same time is compounding trauma. They are not just losing a belief system. They are losing their community, their weekly structure, and in many cases the only close friendships they have ever had as an adult.

• What you should do: Make a deliberate choice to keep showing up for them as a person regardless of where they land on their theology. If you can’t do that, find someone who can. This person’s mental health can be in serious trouble, and withdrawing support is the worst thing you could do. Please put aside the need to change their mind about the faith and see the person for who they are, a friend needing continued presence.

7. Don’t disappear when it becomes clear they’re not coming back.

Many of my church relationships stopped engaging once it was obvious I wasn’t returning to the faith. That experience doesn’t just hurt. It retroactively changes every memory of belonging they experienced. It reinforces a fear that the love was transactional.

• What you should do: Stay. Keep reaching out. Not to re-evangelize, but because they were your friend and they still are. Ensure they have found a new sense of community, and if they haven’t, consider inviting them to dinner or to hang out regularly to process. I know this feels risky. The fear that they will be hostile toward the faith is real. But my own experience is that I didn’t want to attack the faith. I only wanted people to see and understand me. I had arguments about why I left, but I didn’t need to voice them. I only felt pressure to do that when I was being challenged. The moment I felt genuinely seen, the defensiveness dissolved. Jesus sat with people who deeply doubted. They need that from you too.

8. Don’t neglect the partner who isn’t leaving the faith.

Many times only one spouse leaves the faith while the other is left to navigate the transition alone. They are sitting through sermons every week in a seat that used to be shared. They are answering questions from people in the congregation who many times say things that are hurtful. They are going home to a marriage that feels destabilized in ways they didn’t choose and couldn’t have prepared for. This is a deeply lonely place to be, and it is easy for the church to overlook them while focusing on the person who left.

• What you should do: Assign someone within the church to reach out to this spouse regularly, not just once, but weekly, for as long as they need it. Make sure someone is saving them a seat. Make sure they know they are not walking through this alone. The small gesture of a reserved spot in a pew carries more weight than most people realize.

9. Don’t stop checking in on the marriage.

Many marriages in which both partners identified as committed serious Christians, and only one partner chooses to leave the faith, end in divorce. This isn’t always the case, but many partners are not just navigating a theological disagreement. They are relearning what it’s like to be married to someone who in many ways sees the world differently than they do. They are relearning how to negotiate the values their family was built on, and doing that in real time while both of them are in pain.

• What you should do: Assign people within the church to stay in close contact with both spouses individually. This will be a volatile season and whether or not the marriage survives will depend in large part on whether both partners feel genuinely heard and supported. The church has a real role to play here to hold the people together long enough for them to find their footing.

10. Don’t assume the person who left is doing fine just because they appear to be.

People are remarkably good at masking how they are actually doing to avoid hard conversations and spare the people they love. The person who just left the faith has lost their entire worldview. They are adrift in a way that is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. And depending on the level of support they receive from family and friends, they are at real risk of suicidal ideation.

I know this was true for me. Even though leaving my family through suicide was something I never wanted, there were moments when I couldn’t see how I could keep supporting them in the ways they needed or whether my life would get better and I felt incredibly isolated. I wanted my wife to have someone who could share her faith, sit with her at church, and help raise our daughters in what she believed. I felt like I had failed her and I didn’t know if the pain would stop.

• What you should do: Help that person connect with others who have been through this and come out the other side. I remember reaching out to a pastor after my own faith collapsed, asking if he could recommend anyone who had navigated this kind of loss well. He never responded. But this is bigger than how you feel about your church or your theology. This is about the physical and emotional safety of a real person and their family. Your goal is triage. Stop the bleeding first.

My hope is simple. I want the person leaving the faith to feel less alone, I want the spouse walking through it to feel seen, and I want the church to have something practical in their hands when this happens in their congregation. None of this comes from a place of having it figured out. It comes from having lived it and wishing someone had been there on the other side of it sooner.