11. A Cleansing Flood

Corporate Panic, Childhood Moves, and the Final Bible Study

It was a Thursday night and my living room was crowded with fold out chairs. Our small group was going verse by verse through Genesis, and we had arrived at the story of Noah. This was the first time I had ever had a leader go line by line through this ancient text.

It was a story I knew very well. I had always understood the traditional narrative. God had warned Noah of a coming flood that would cleanse the earth of the brokenness mankind had brought upon it. However, reading it this time was entirely different. I had yet to study Genesis like this after going through intensive therapy. I was reading the text with fresh psychological lenses, and I was enraged at the excessive violence. I thought about the brokenness of human psyches and the deep layers of intergenerational trauma that the people on the earth were acting from. The image of a loving Heavenly Father was instantly crushed under the weight of the horror, as my mind embodied the drowning human lives that were not saved. As we went verse by verse, we reached verse twenty-one. Reading that line, something inside me snapped.

A New City, A New Life

In 2020 when Covid happened, the ownership of my company panicked about the future of the business. All of our real estate properties were geared toward students living close to campus, and they feared we would not be able to weather the collapse of college attendance. In a panic after the first few weeks, they decided to remove their long-term close friend from running our deals and asked me to step in.

While getting a promotion and being recognized for hard work sounds like a positive development, our company was made up of people who all knew each other deeply. We had a daily prayer time each morning where we shared our life struggles, and we went on vacations together every year. No one in leadership had ever been fired because everyone hired was a friend of someone else in the company. This was a deeply personal, disruptive decision, and it was not something I celebrated. The owners had made up their minds. They told me I would be the new leader and asked how quickly I could move to the corporate headquarters.

By this time, I was significantly healthier emotionally and able to process what I was feeling in a way I could not when my father died. I felt the full weight of the decision the owners were making during an extremely chaotic period. It was April of 2020. No one knew what was going to happen with the virus, the economy, or the long-term effects on the world. In the middle of that unknown, I was being asked to uproot my family, move to a new state, and lead a company with properties across nine states.

I remember being able to sob deeply for the first time in a long time. I thought about how much I loved the house we were living in. Three of my four daughters had lived there since they were babies, and it was the first time I had ever felt a stabilizing connection to a physical home. I did not realize until that moment how much frequently moving as a child had impacted me, or how much a stable house actually meant to my sense of safety.

I told the owners I did not want to move and requested to do the job remotely. Furthermore, we had a foster daughter who legally could not leave the state until we officially adopted her. For the time being, they agreed to let the situation play out and allowed me to work remotely.

By the beginning of 2021, we knew we were moving toward finalizing the adoption of our foster daughter. A court date was set for August with an official October adoption date. When I let the owners of the company know, they were happy for my family, but their very next question was immediate. When are you moving?

A Cautious Optimism

After processing the reality for almost a year, my wife and I decided this relocation would be the best thing for our future. The new city would offer more options for friends, houses, and church potentials.

Before the move, I had begun telling Mary about the severe issues I was experiencing with the faith. I shared my new struggles trying to reconcile how the church was ill-suited to deal with my emotional hurt and, furthermore, they lacked an emphasis on emotional health. Even worse, I was realizing how resistant the religious community was to any discussion about emotional growth and how it relates to how we as Christians think about and interact with the world.

Even though we were scared and unsure, we looked at houses and got excited about what our lives could look like with a fresh start. We visited churches after moving to our new town and eventually landed at a smaller, more intimate church that Mary was really excited about. I was not as enthusiastic, but I wanted to help her with the transition as much as possible.

I was already seriously doubting my ability to stay in the faith, and this new church was unfortunately accelerating that doubt. This was not because of the leadership or any negative interactions with the congregation, but rather because of how seriously and literally they took the words of the Bible.

The Last Bible Study

I remember the dizzying feeling that swept over my body. It felt like the blinding sensation that hits right before you are overcome by rage, almost akin to blacking out. Why was God killing all of the animals? I am not someone who is overly concerned about animals, but for some reason, that specific detail hit a raw nerve. God killing all the people who were doing horrible acts was something I was not happy with either, but at least that action possessed an internal logic. Killing the animals felt completely senseless and excessive. It did not look like a father who deeply loved his creation and wanted what was best for it.

Thoughts rushed through my mind to say out loud, I don’t believe this any longer, this is ridiculous, and leave the study. But for the sake of my wife and her new friendships, I kept my composure.

I sat there spiraling emotionally, and the only thought that grounded me was that when I first believed in Jesus as a teenager, I did not know any systematic theology or any of the Bible. Maybe I could just strip the system away and go back to that simple way of believing. I resolved in my mind to leave this church and stop attending Bible studies, promising myself that I would try my absolute best to hold onto the person of Jesus.

But that would prove almost as impossible as surviving a literal global flood.


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