The Long Way Home

The pastor mentioned my mom's final wish during her eulogy. She wanted me and my brother back in church.

I sat there annoyed.

Not at the wish itself. At the pastor. He'd taken a funeral and turned it into a sermon about the saving power of Jesus. And look, I don't disagree with him now. But at the time I was an agnostic who'd spent the better part of a decade running from anything resembling faith. I was also a mess. My mom was dead, I hadn't handled her illness well, and the last thing I wanted was a lecture.

That moment captures something about the long way home. The path back to faith isn't clean. It's not a dramatic altar call followed by instant transformation. It's years of wrong turns, unexpected catalysts, and a slow accumulation of experiences that eventually tip the scales.

How I Left

The departure happened in stages.

My dad had shifted from a Baptist-Methodist background into charismatic evangelicalism with his second wife. They attended this place called Victory, a mega church with all the trappings. I was in my early twenties, going to their young adults group, trying to be a good Christian despite never having any real theological depth. The faith I'd inherited felt like clothes that didn't fit. I wore them because I'd always worn them.

Then I met a girl. She wasn't religious. Her mom was non-practicing Catholic, her dad was generic Protestant, also non-practicing. She was, and I say this with full knowledge of where she ended up twenty years later as an explicit astrologist and palm reader, latently witchy. But I liked her. And I told myself I could stay Christian while dating someone outside the faith.

Around the same time, Ron Paul's 2008 campaign pulled me into libertarian circles. Paul himself is a quiet-faith Christian, someone I respected. But the libertarian orbit is full of atheists and agnostics. I got exposed to arguments I'd never really engaged with.

Then I watched Zeitgeist.

The movie had a whole section about how Christianity was just astrological window dressing on pagan myths. A control mechanism. Religion as manipulation of the masses. And something in my head just flipped. Whatever fragile scaffolding was holding up my inherited faith collapsed.

I spent the next eight or nine years as an agnostic, dating that same girl for most of it. We were together until about a year before my mom died. When I started malfunctioning under the weight of her illness, my girlfriend left. No condemnation. We were young. But there's a direct line between that relationship, that period, and my departure from faith.

The Slow Turn

People ask about deconstruction and reconstruction like they're discrete phases. In my experience they blur together. I didn't sit down one day and decide to rebuild my faith from first principles. It happened more like a tide coming in.

The shift started, of all places, with Jordan Peterson.

This was around 2016. Peterson was doing his lecture series on Genesis, taking the stories seriously but symbolically. Psychologizing them. Finding meaning in the patterns. I'd grown up in Christian literalism where the earth was 6,000 years old and God planted dinosaur bones to test our faith. Young earth creationism, the whole package. It never made sense to me, and when it stopped making sense, I threw out the whole thing.

Peterson showed me another option. The stories could be true without being literal in the way I'd been taught. Or rather, "literal" and "figurative" weren't the right categories. These narratives operate on a level that transcends both. They're true in a way that factual accuracy can't capture and symbolic interpretation can't exhaust.

I started reading the Bible again. Not as a believer yet, but as someone willing to take it seriously.

The Daily Work

People want a moment. The specific Sunday where everything changed. The service where I felt caught between who I used to be and who I was becoming.

There wasn't one.

Coming back to faith has been a day-to-day thing. The Lord telling me to cut things out. This coping mechanism that's worked for years. That habit you've relied on to manage your stress and existential angst. The thoughts come unbidden: this is not what I want for you.

Here's how I know it's the Holy Spirit and not just my own thoughts: I'm not naturally inclined to give up things that feel good. Nobody thinks, "You know what sounds great? Letting go of this thing that's helped me cope for a decade." Your own thoughts don't volunteer that. They're usually about getting what you want or getting justice against people who wronged you. That's how people think.

But when you're reading the Bible daily, when you're committing to prayer, you start having different thoughts. Forgive this person who did you dirty. Show kindness to someone who's been nothing but rude. Start exercising. These aren't natural human impulses. They come from somewhere else.

I still get checked regularly. Recently the pastor was talking about giving and mentioned all the good things it had accomplished. He named something specific. And I had insider knowledge about what was actually happening behind closed doors at the church. The reality was the exact opposite of what he'd described.

I laughed out loud. Loud and inappropriate. It was visceral, not performative. The hypocrisy hit me so hard I couldn't contain it.

The Lord corrected me immediately. That wasn't right. I needed better self-control. The pastor's imperfection didn't excuse mine.

The Inevitability of Disappointment

Being in the church means getting used to disappointment. People can't handle the fact that church leadership consists of imperfect humans doing wrong things constantly. Making practical considerations instead of idealistic ones. Messy, dirty decisions on a day-to-day basis.

You have to accept that. The inevitability of disillusionment is a problem in any human institution, including the church. There's no congregation that doesn't have this. There won't be until Christ returns and establishes his perfect church. Until then, flawed humans lead flawed organizations doing their flawed best.

The question isn't whether you'll be disappointed. You will be. The question is whether disappointment in humans becomes an excuse to reject God.

What I See Now

Looking back, I can see something I couldn't see in the middle of it.

The Lord, through all my mistakes and wrong paths and stubborn insistence that I was right about everything, has positioned me to turn it toward his glory. That's hard to see when you're in the midst. You can't imagine how your bad decisions could serve any purpose.

Some people twist this into "God wanted you to suffer." No. Nothing would have pleased him more than if I'd found the right path in my twenties without all the pain. Obedience from the start puts you in a good place. I truly believe that.

But I'm positioned now to help people I couldn't have helped otherwise. Someone who walked a clean path can't speak to the person drowning in their own bad decisions. I can. I've been there.

Here's the thing about trauma: much of it is self-inflicted. Not all. Some people have terrible things done to them. But a lot of our pain comes from our own choices. And often those choices are themselves responses to trauma inflicted by others. We compound the damage. Our trauma causes other people's trauma when we deal with it poorly. The cycle continues.

I'm not minimizing what anyone has been through. I've been through a lot. Other people have been through more. But acknowledging that we often hurt ourselves is the first step toward stopping.

My mom wanted me back in church. She got her wish, though she didn't live to see it. The path there took nearly a decade, wound through atheism and libertarianism and Jordan Peterson lectures, and involved more pain than was necessary.

But it got me home.