death of an evangelical

I took a long weekend retreat to the beach, completely overwhelmed and worn out. I had just quit a job that had sucked all signs of life out of me, and yet life did not miraculously become simple the moment I walked out of my office and turned in the key. I found this rather annoying, that all of life’s problems couldn’t be solved by quitting something difficult. I know- the nerve of this universe to be complicated.

So I took another step toward the elusive peace and answers I had been not-so-actively pursuing, and I headed to the beach. I was committed to being quiet and still and contemplative for the weekend- something that had been very much lacking in my life lately. On my first evening there, I walked down to the beach. I found a good sitting place and watched the waves rolling out and back in. I thought about this ten year struggle with faith I called my “Christian walk”. I thought about how lately, God seemed awfully far-fetched. Christianity seemed a little supernatural for my taste. So you’re saying that this guy, God in human form, was brutally murdered, took on all punishment for every bit of ungodly behavior in the world, came back to life, and then went up to heaven to wait for us to join him? Does anyone else feel a bit foolish for claiming this as the meaning of life? As Don Miller so aptly put it, as if Christians were like that Star Trek fan who has not yet realized that the show is not real?

I looked out at the ocean some more. “The size of the ocean seems awfully far-fetched, too,” I thought. There are blue whales swimming in there that are so big that their tongues weigh as much as an elephant and some of their blood vessels are big enough for me to swim through them. (Although I’d rather not.) I thought the fact that our bodies work- that our hearts beat and blood flows and brains think- that also seems far-fetched. And what about gravity? Come on. An invisible force from within the earth that draws us all to the ground so that we don’t float off into outer space? If that’s not something from the Sci-Fi channel, I don’t know what is.

I guess what I meant by “far-fetched” was that I couldn’t comprehend it. What if I stopped believing in gravity because I just didn’t get it?

At this point in my peaceful contemplation on the beach, a man playing a set of bagpipes walked by. As if it was completely normal. Really. It happened. This has no spiritual significance, but the randomness of it was remarkable. Incidentally, while we’re on the topic of randomness, on my walk home later that evening, I saw a man wearing a tuxedo watering his lawn. A tuxedo. Who does that? When I commented on his odd choice of landscaping outfit, he sprayed me with the hose. He never did explain the tux.

After smiling at the bagpipes, I sat there on the beach wondering if I should indeed stop believing in gravity. But I knew that my struggle with faith was different. It was more personal. I could not laugh it off and be okay with it like I could with things like the depth of the ocean or the intricacy of the human body. I sighed. I felt reconciled to this state of limbo- not wanting to reject my faith, but feeling that I could not continue to claim it with any integrity because of these huge, ever-present doubts.

A song that a friend of mine had recently recorded and posted on her web page for struggling friends came to mind. “I said it takes faith/ and perseverance/ to live the life/ that you have been given/ but you’ve been given life/ with divine breath inside/ so breathe deep tonight, my friend.” (You can hear her sing it herself at www.youtube.com/alicerouse.) I smiled at memories of her while tears started to make their way down my cheeks. I felt so stuck. I didn’t know if I had any more faith or perseverance left, or if this journey was even worth the struggle to find them within myself anymore.

As I sat there, the word “ACCEPTANCE” suddenly imprinted itself on my mind. The reality to be accepted was this: I had a hard time believing that Christianity made sense. I had an even harder time throwing all of my trust into something that by design I could not comprehend or see completely. A lot of days, I didn’t even want to try- I preferred relying on my own understanding of the world, even when the results were painfully lacking. This might not have been the most attractive place to be, but as a wise friend of mine had taken to saying, “This is what is.” It was Real. I could look ahead with hope to a time when I would stand on more steady ground, and I could continue to try to seek out a deeper understanding of Truth, but today, this was Real.

I chuckled at the word “acceptance”. Wasn’t it the last stage in the five stages of grief? I felt like I had just witnessed the death of an evangelical.

Although “evangelical” is not by definition a negative term, for me, this term had come to mean that I should know the right answers and believe them 100% of the time, and not only should I know them, but I should always like them. I felt wrong to be having any doubts, and when those doubts had become so strong, the only option in this black-and-white religion that I had built for myself was to walk away completely.

So when I say “death of an evangelical”, I mean that I was seeing the freedom of a new way to approach Jesus- approaching Him with honesty. I was trying to look at the Jesus I hoped was not just a figment of the church’s imagination and say, “This is all that I have. You already know that. You know that I often doubt more than I believe. You know that I think this is all crazy talk half the time. If you are Real, please, please help me to believe it more. I have to depend on you to do it, because I am woefully out of ideas to fix myself.”

I knew that this “evangelical who needed to know all of the answers” in me probably would not stay in the grave, but for that night, I had a taste of a long-awaited peace that felt Real.

I stood up and started my trek home, wondering if others walking the beach that night thought that I was moved to these tears by the beauty of those random bagpipes.

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