fett on 11/4/2010 at 20:13

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...that's me in the spotlight...

This is long, but also a long time coming. I haven't told this whole story to anyone yet, so this is the first time, possibly the last. Sorry there's so much “life story” but it's all intertwined and I can't be arsed to untangle it all yet. I would post it to a blog somewhere but there are still people who can't know all this, and I certainly don't want them to find out on Facebook.

I don't know how I first came to Christianity. It wasn't because of my parents. They were Christians of the God & Country variety, but not serious church goers. We prayed before meals sometimes, and said bedtime prayers, so maybe I was predisposed. I don't remember God being on my radar until I turned 13, woke up one Sunday morning, and decided I needed to Go To Church. New to the Air Force base in Northern Italy, maybe I was lonely. In retrospect, I started navel gazing especially early in life and the introspection mixed with raging teenage hormones probably convinced me that I needed a Larger Purpose. I started attending a little English speaking Baptist church up the street from my house, walking there by myself until eventually my parents were guilted into dragging themselves and my two younger brothers there on a regular basis. This is one of my deepest regrets, as my parents and brothers are both to this day entrenched in a solid Western Christian/Fox News worldview that haunts me every time I see them.

Church did not immediately convince me. The pastor was sincere, a selfless man (the only “good” pastor I have yet to meet in all my 25 years of ministry ). I listened intently to him, studied accordingly, but secreted myself away during school lunch and on weekends in the Air Base library, reading everything I could about Buddha, Mohammad, Vishnu, and what would become my mistress all through my future Christianity - Toaism (being a rabid Star Wars fan in the early 80's, this was inevitable). If I was going to set a course for my life, I wanted to make sure it was the right one. To my credit, little emotion was involved in the decision I made to become a Christian.

To its credit, Christianity is excellent at marketing itself. Modern proponents have mastered the art of taking what at its core is a very complicated and robust theology and condensing it down to bare bones, something other Eastern religions would do well to note. I didn't understand much of anything else I read, but the case for Christianity was clear: If a man who says he is God gets murdered, then rises from the dead, it requires some response from me, a mere mortal (thank you, C.S. Lewis). If man is sinful (and what white-bred, American 13 old boy with a few Playboys under the mattress isn't?), there must be some cure.

Clearly, my life was good. Good family, little stress, friends, success at school, discovering a latent talent for playing drums. But as I looked around me - and here's the core of what I believe happened - I saw others whose lives were not like mine. Being a musician at that age, I hung out with the metalhead/pothead crowd, though I was nothing like them in reality. Their lives were rank with tales of abuse, incest, misery, hopelessness, anger, family dysfunction, and despair. Everything the Bible said life was without the hope of a life beyond this one. Everything a Savior had come to repair and save from, had died to realize - the sick made well and the dead made alive. It was clear to me at that age that Jesus was the solution to the world's problems. He was peace, life, purpose, and salvation - not just from eternal misery, but from misery in this life. After all, I was content and filled with hope. It never occurred to me at 13 that despite the normal friction with my parents, it was the security of my home life and rearing that I was so, not because of any supernatural change that had come over me. See, I wanted the message of change through Jesus to be true, not so much because I needed it, but because it seemed like everyone else did. I hope I can say without sounding like an ass that unlike most Christians I've known, this was not transference (“I'm okay, but YOU need God”). I have always been an optimist, and relatively content with my situation, thanks to my parents and the gypsy life of an Air Force Brat. But I never was one of those self-righteous pricks that yells about everyone else's sin while snorting coke off my secretary's navel (missed opportunities...). In fact, as I entered my 20's, my contentment often troubled me to the point that I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find things wrong with myself, things to ask forgiveness for, to repent of, hidden sins that only God could see. This is the poison of Christianity, and its greatest trap. That you are not okay, no matter how happy you are, no matter how good you are - you are born in sin, and eternal darkness awaits you if it's not dealt with. Now, I was already “in the camp” and had no fear of hell, but I wanted to be all that God had made me for, so continual purging of sin was essential. Even then, I felt no conviction or compulsion to confess much of anything. Maybe something was wrong with me. (Never God - it must be me). Funny thing is, I can't remember a single time I ever felt comfortable with other Christians talking about their conversations with God or how the Holy Spirit “led them” to do such and such. Probably because it never happened to me, but partly because it just seemed silly. I was drawn to more practical aspects of faith and theology, not all the touchy-feely stuff that keeps most people attached to Christianity. I only got goosebumps when music was involved, but hey, I get goosebumps when listening to old Sam Cooke records, so who cares?

It's hard to explain to those who have merely had a brush with Christianity, what life is like for those who cast their life before the cross of Christ and surrender everything for his mission. My girlfriend in high school became my wife, and we continued on, just as in high school, looking for opportunities to help people. One solace I cling to is that during those years, we didn't look for people to convert, but rather people whom society had cast out - people who were hungry, ex-this & that's trying to get back on their feet. It would take too long here to recount all the crazy things we did in the name of showing people “the love of Jesus.” I was playing in a Christian band at the time that was drawing big crowds in Little Rock, driven mostly by my urgent messages of salvation at every show. I taught Bible studies in old buildings that were drawing 100+ unchurched teen agers every week. Word got around, and juvenile services saw the effect it was having in local schools with the kids. We started coordinating with juvenile law-enforcement in Saline County, Arkansas with occult related crimes and “de-programming” of teens involved in such (there was a rash of suicides and cat/cow/dog killings in the mid-90's in that area, which turned out to involve several policeman and two local pastors). We tried to help men leaving rehab to work their way back into a normal job and get their life back. We did drug counseling, marriage counseling, family counseling, spoke and played in numerous schools. I was an anomaly to church people because I looked like Axl Rose but since I'd done my theological homework, I could spout doctrine and apologetics like a seasoned seminarian. I actually tried to go to seminary during this time but was surprised to discover I knew most everything being taught already. My life was a 5 year circus of concerts, speaking engagements, jail cells, detention centers, abuse shelters, mission trips with bands, and reading, reading, constantly reading. I've had guns pointed at me, my cleaning equipment stolen. It didn't matter - this life was temporal. I carried on. Always coordinating with local churches to make sure physical needs were being met as well. What good is it to say to a man, “Be warmed and filled and not provide him with clothes and food?” So hopefully you can understand when I say “I was a Christian” I wasn't one of those guys with a bullhorn and a protest sign. I was one of the guys for whom going to church was not much more than a necessary distraction from doing the actual work of ministry.

I owned and operated a small marble floor cleaning service to finance all this, because churches like to pay in back-slaps and pizza. It didn't bother me - my purpose was eternal, and fueled by the constant imagery of spiritual warfare and the writings of the purposely impoverished St. Francis. I slept on more floors and in more cars than I can count, and often times skirted the edge of malnourishment because this life was nothing to me. To live is Christ, to die is gain. I eventually landed in a local Calvary Chapel as a worship band leader and assisting pastor. They shared a similar vision for the outcast and downtrodden (or so I thought at the time).

Then I really did start to die. After a year of tests to discover the source of my fatigue, breathing problems, and headaches, I was diagnosed with HCM - an enlarged septum muscle, inherited, incurable, and fatal. No more drums, no more traveling, no more stress - my heart couldn't take it. I lost my house and business, and my assistant pastorship at Calvary Chapel because I had no insurance and had to move in with my in-laws in Bum Fuck, Arkansas to survive. At a time when I should have clung to God, I started to question things. I tried to go on leading the worship band at the church, driving 2 hours both ways, but I soon developed an ulcer on my vocal chords and was ordered not to sing for 6 -8 months so it could heal.

So the question was: Why would God “call” me to speak and play music, then deny me the ability to do either? What is now my life's purpose? Staring out my in-laws picture windows onto their 20+ acre property, I spent many months in the empty house pondering this. I was completely isolated from all but my wife and her parents for that period of time - waiting to die, wanting to live my last days in adventure, but physically unable to get of out bed some days. I had lost everything and been left to die. Despite all my “to die is gain” bluster, I started to realize that I was in this situation because I'd made a lot of really stupid decisions - if you removed God from the equation. Any money I could have saved for such a crisis had been given away (hell, I even gave away a car and a van at one point). Because we had invested our time in ministry, neither Christie or I had finished college, neither of us had a career to fall back on, we had no savings, no insurance. She landed a job as a loan officer, but I could do nothing as bill collectors hassled us, the IRS threatened to imprison me for taxes left unpaid when we sold the business, and my health continued to diminish. What if God wasn't there at all and I was suffering the consequences of stupid decisions just like a -gasp!- a normal person, meandering along without any eternal purpose? The idea was terrifying and thrilling all at once.

I revisited my studies into Taoism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and to be fair, Judaism, over 2 years time while I wallowed in self-pity and doubt. I was an atheist one day, suicidal the next. I discovered Thief and escaped into The City for 6 months, taking the game apart, writing walkthroughs, diving into T2X. It's safe to say that the fragile tether to TTLG and the T2X team during this time may have actually saved me from taking my own life - I had a purpose, and it may sound crazy, but LGS deserved to have their last game made and that was purpose enough at the time.

I landed on Judaism. I taught myself to read Hebrew and some Greek. I discovered the Jewish roots of Christianity, and developed a much healthier perspective of faith, especially as it related to the faulty “relationship with Jesus” I was taught to pursue earlier on. I really discovered the Bible as a piece of literature and to this day am insistent that although I do not believe in God, it is the most amazing and well-engineered book ever written, linguistically, mathematically, and philosophically. I could debate anyone on hairs of theology - Calvanism, Armenianism, Preterism, Futurism, and any other ism you can name. I pushed my nagging doubts about the gray areas of theology to the back burner (for I have not the Mind of God), and my disillusionment at feeling alone in the universe, and soldiered on. Crisis of faith averted.

We had a baby, I found an HCM clinic in Boston that relieved our fear of Sudden Death. The throat ulcer went away. With a med change for me and a better job for Christie, we were able to move back to Little Rock and resume my position as an assistant pastor. Three months later the pastor was fired for drug use, fraud, and embezzlement. The church was in the poorest part of south Little Rock, rife with ex-everything you can imagine. I was at home dealing with incest, abuse, addiction, poverty, and dysfunction, but now I was armed with a fuller understanding of the Bible. As I resumed speaking at other churches, my church started to grow. I taught basic and advanced theology classes, without a degree. I was known as the “long-haired pastor” - refused to be called a preacher because I didn't preach - I taught. Church became a classroom, complete with huge greaseboards and powerpoint to convey to spiritually hungry people the amazing things I'd discovered in the Bible. This is the kind of stuff Real Churches avoid because it's too cerebral for a microwave society. I parsed passages of Hebrew scriptures to explain the finer points of Isaiah's prophecy about the outcome of WWII. But it worked for a time. I may sell the rights to Monty Python. Maybe I could have gone to a bigger church that could have paid me more, but I felt like I belonged among the downtrodden and cast-offs. This is where Jesus would have been.

Then I noticed a funny thing - not funny haha, but funny wrong. I was adamant that Jesus didn't come to make Bad People Good, but to make Dead People Alive. New Creatures in Christ, supernaturally changed by the Living Word and the power of the Spirit of God - like what had happened to me. But wait - I was never really bad or dead, was I? I had always pretty much been the same person. It's essential to understand that this message is the very core of the Bible and the life of Jesus - change, re-creation, fulfilled purpose, and most of all - joy. As I looked back over what was now 20+ years of ministry, something nagged at me, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

One morning I stood on the platform looking out and it hit me so hard my knees literally, physically buckled for a moment.

No one was changed.

I wasn't changed.

Sure, they weren't in jail anymore, they weren't trafficking drugs anymore, but they had already stopped doing those things before they showed up at my door, not after. Yet, they were still miserable, contentious, and bitter. They were exactly the same as before they got “saved” - they had simply learned the hard way that crime does not pay, and had changed their behavior. This was Pavlov, not St. Paul.

I started to take account of all the people who I'd helped over the years. Their physical needs had been met, but 99% of them were still doing the same things they had for years, living in the same cycle of misery. They may have changed their surroundings, their language, and even their clothes, but they were undeniably, undoubtedly the same. Even more telling was the fact that I was the same. Everyone had freewill, right? (No, I was a Calvinist, but for the sake of the argument...). It's not up to me to change them - that's between them and God. But me, I'd spent thousands of hours not just reading, but tearing the Bible page from page, looking for meaning “between the letters” in the truest Hasidic sense. Thousands of hours of prayer, seeking God, “caring for widows and orphans” because my faith was more than words.

Yet I was exactly the same person as when I was 13, on the day I woke up with the urge to go to church. Why wasn't I changed? Why wasn't I more Christlike? Did I need to be? Wasn't I, as the person my parents raised me to be, more selfless and compassionate than most of the Christians I'd been around?

Now you may argue that I was just with a bad group of people, but this is an abbreviated story. Before I landed at Calvary Chapel for those last years, I had interacted with pretty much every denomination, including a foray into the Catholic Church, and every economic class in about five different states. I'd been with believers in Israel, Italy, Germany. Upon close examination the same thing was true. People are by nature either happy or not, and Christianity (religion in general for that matter) provided a context for them to explain their disposition. But it never changed it. Plus, I don't think any of them were “bad,” just maybe unhappy, confused, and living in a constant state of cognitive dissonance that produces numerous psychological issues. All I knew was that I wasn't like them, no matter how much I wanted to be, in order to identify with them.

To make matters worse, I was now raising a family around this highly dysfunctional group of people. I wanted my kids to have the same security I grew up with, but they couldn't have it here, where passive aggressive people took out their frustrations with the pastor on his kids and wife at every turn.

To make matters even worse, I had started singing and playing bass for a band in Little Rock for extra income (despite the church doing well financially, I only took a small housing allowance, hoping they would offer more, but they never did). Over the course of two years I watched our atheist drummer quit smoking cigarettes, quit drinking, and quit smoking pot - cold turkey. Literally overnight. These are things I watched countless Christians, filled with the Holy Spirit, supernaturally changed by an omniscient God, struggle to quit unsuccessfully for years and years. Could it be this atheist was able to do it because he wasn't waiting on an invisible entity to do it for him? I was dumbfounded by the contrast, and my doubts deepened.

I spent two months of Sundays curled into a ball under the desk in my church office, waiting for the music part of the service to end, for my time to teach. I vomited my toenails up in the bathroom each Sunday, minutes before I took the platform. Should I tell them all this? Go on as normal, and hope to get back on track soon? Soon? This had been building for a few years now and I was more convinced than ever that Christianity was little more than a large group of adults, agreeing to play a game in which the rules were made up as you go. Ignore the contradictions between scripture and reality, ignore the fact that we're still the same as we ever were, and pretend to have something in common because we so desperately need to belong somewhere. Years earlier I had written in sharpie in my Bible a question theological giant A.W. Tozer used to have in the front of his Bible: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THESE PEOPLE?” Indeed. One morning, staring at this question, I finished my teaching early and announced that I was resigning. The congregation wept, protested, became angry. I was numb to to everything and everyone. I've never been so tired, even in all my heart problems. I spent the next three days in and out of lucidity, vomiting, and drinking heavily - something I'd never done before. I wanted to disappear or die. I got angry e-mails and phone calls. Suddenly they offered more money for me to stay, despite their knowledge of crippling medical bills and house repairs for years that they'd ignored. I don't blame them - they didn't know how to deal with money. But other pastors can tell you similar stories, of their suffering at the hands of the very people they're serving - people who have supposedly been changed into New Creatures by a supernatural God.

One month later, we sold our house , packed what little we could fit in a U-haul, and moved four hours north, to a little town in the Ozarks. We limped out of Little Rock, financially destitute, on the verge of divorce, and bleeding in every way possible. My marriage wasn't in trouble because of resigning - Christie and I were agreed that we had to do it. I had just spent so much time trying to babysit the church and tend the needs of other people that my family got the leftovers. We left behind hundreds of very confused Christians - not only my church, but people in the area who I'd partnered with and ministered to for years. Our families were confounded, but we didn't and haven't told them anything of losing our faith. It would devastate them and cause unbearable tension in our relationships, and my kids would bear the brunt of it. Christie finally enrolled in nursing school and graduated last spring - a life long dream that could never be realized because there was no time or money. I became a full time stay at home dad, part-time student, and got to know my two boys. If there is a God, the only evidence I've found is in my kids and wife.

Now for the first time since I was a kid, I'm truly content again. I expected conviction and guilt to wash over me after a few months. I expected to be spiritually starved and wondered if I would fall into all kinds of destructive behavior without the restraining hand of God to protect me from my sinful nature. But I'm just the same guy I was before all of this - happy, optimistic, and curious about the world. Here's the most important thing: All the hope, joy, peace, and contentment that was promised to me in faith by the Bible, I have found in unending rivers since I lost my faith. I think it's more accurate to say my faith was taken from me, rather than that I lost it. I continued for many months to pray, study, seek but I eventually had to admit to myself that I was getting no answer, making no progress, and that I was doing just fine, if not better, living life, taking care of my family, and enjoying the world around me, without any thought of spiritual life. I can honestly say that the sky is a deeper blue and the leaves are a deeper green because I'm actually looking AT them instead of BEHIND them now, if that makes sense.

I'm reluctant to call myself an atheist. I think I'm a humanist, but I don't want to be anything ending in an “ist” - except maybe an apathiest. I don't care if there's a God. If there is, and he is benevolent, and full of grace like I taught for so long, then he knows my heart, and I am not bitter about his silence - he knows his own business and I will not meddle in the affairs of dragons. He knows I tried to seek him with all my being, and he has grace enough to cover my failings. In the meantime, I've become a sappy, tree-hugging, people loving, music loving husband and daddy. I stare at my kids every night when they fall asleep, learn to cook new foods, read shitty pulp fiction books, listen to The Beatles, and enjoy every single moment I can because I may not be here long. If only I had woken up to how incredible this place is earlier. If only I'd realized that helping people is a noble thing in and of itself. That belief in anything isn't the end all. That my parents did a damn good job of raising a good kid, who grew up to be an honest, productive member of society in the face of a crippling disability. I'm 39 years old and I've been born again, or rather re-incarnated, back into the person I would have been should have been, if only I'd not looked to a non-existent God as the solution for all the troubles of humanity. I'm leaving behind those regrets and starting over, day by day. It is painful and wonderful. I've done a poor job of communicating what happened, but it's the best I can do because I'm unwilling to spend any more time explaining it or reflecting on it.

I have a whole world to soak up, and a relatively short time to do it.

Enchantermon on 11/4/2010 at 21:18

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Thank you for opening up, man.

driver on 11/4/2010 at 22:11

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Truly fascinating. I'd love to hear your story in greater detail.

gunsmoke on 11/4/2010 at 23:04

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Hmmm.

Mr.Duck on 11/4/2010 at 23:28

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Amen fettums.

Every person must seek their own path in life, even if they stumble a lot and for a long time. It's good to read you've found some answers and comfort in your life. Cheers.

Personally, I think that people that use God/religion as a crutch or an excuse...for anything...have it all, or mostly-all- wrong. That isn't to say I think that all people inside a religion and believing in God are co-dependant or somesuch. I believe in God, but don't affiliate with religion.

In the end, it's a very personal thing, to believe or not, and how to act upon any which you decide.

It's great to see you're walking again all by yourself. You're a big man for sharing all this.

Thank you.