5. A Stone Removed
How exposure to death forced an excavation of a metaphysical framework.
It was very late when my brother shook me awake. I was staying at a friend’s house, and the fact that my brother was the one waking me up in the middle of the night was an immediate sign of danger. Something terrible had happened.
What makes it stranger is that the night before at work, a weird feeling had settled deep in my stomach. I had a sudden, overwhelming instinct that I shouldn’t leave any relationship unresolved because I didn’t know what was coming next. My mind went straight to my father.
Since returning from church camp, I had experienced a powerful, unspoken urge to reconcile with him. I had run into him at a gas station and simply walked up and hugged him with everything I had. I didn’t say much besides, “I love you.” To him, this was completely abrupt. Our relationship had been deeply strained before I left, and the gesture caught him entirely by surprise, though he welcomed it and hugged me back tightly.
Because I had years of experience trusting my internal warning systems, I didn’t wait until my shift was over. I called him from work to set up a time to hang out. The call went well, and we planned to see each other soon.
As I shook off the fog of sleep and tried to orient myself, my first thought was that something had happened to my dad. Instead, my brother explained that my best friend’s brother had been in an accident. He was riding his motorcycle on the highway and crashed less than a mile from town. He died from the crash. I remember feeling dizzy and needing to sit down. I was simultaneously sick with horror for my friend and flooded with relief that it wasn’t my father.
The Shattered Baseline
I found myself internally wrestling with the collapse of a childhood illusion. I used to think young people didn’t die. Death was something that happened to the elderly or to victims of violent crime, not to your peers. This was now the second friend I had lost in less than a year. This time, the loss felt viscous and entirely too close. My belief in my own safety was crumbling. If they could die so easily, I was totally exposed. The thought circled my mind on a relentless loop. Could this faith I was clinging to actually protect me? Was I right to trust it?
The Interrogation
That question sparked a deep dive into the Bible and theology. For the first time since praying that prayer two years prior, I opened the gospels. I was completely stunned by the wisdom of Jesus. The concepts of enemy love and radical care for the disenfranchised were entirely foreign to me. I distinctly remember thinking, this is who I prayed to save me? I couldn’t believe the depth of a religion I had barely scratched the surface of at camp. Yet, my skepticism remained fierce. I knew better than to trust something just because it felt comforting.
If I was going to allow this framework to provide safety in a world that suddenly felt incredibly destructive, I had to ensure it was intellectually sound. I began interrogating the faith.
My youth pastor happened to double as my high school history teacher. Every day at the end of class, I used that window to pick his brain about this Jesus character. I hammered him with questions about the reliability of the texts and how I could know any of it was legitimate. He gave me his full attention and started feeding me books, which I completely devoured. I was starving for an intellectual scaffolding that would prove this wasn’t just wishful thinking, but a foolproof understanding of reality.
The definitive shift occurred when I asked him a question that altered everything for me. I told him, “If I could just know that Jesus was a real, historical person who actually walked the earth, I would believe everything else about him.” Growing up in an isolated small town with parents who never discussed history, politics, or religion, I was completely blind to how the wider world functioned. My teacher looked at me calmly and said, “Trevor, historical scholars are almost universally convinced that a man named Jesus lived on earth.”
The realization shocked me, and then immediately anchored me. From that moment, I was all in. I read the Bible daily, consumed Christian apologists, and began attending church and youth group regularly.
This framework was entirely different from my teenage peace treaty with a God who threatened me with death for stepping out of line. This was a warm invitation into a personal refuge. The person of Jesus wasn’t a detached deity in the sky who was indifferent to my environment. He was a historical man who understood human suffering because he had entered directly into it. He was everything I was missing in my relationship with my father. He was the living embodiment of existential kangaroo care, and even more than that, he had conquered the greatest threat, death itself.
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