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 full 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. Let me be one small representation of him on earth.”
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.