he voice from the pulpit rang out, echoing through the large Baptist sanctuary as the preacher claimed to speak on behalf of the Almighty. “Look,” he told the crowd, his voice projecting an unwarranted amount of confidence, “if you have an issue with my message, then you have an issue with God himself. I am merely relaying his words.”
I was nine years old and sitting exactly four rows from the front, and I felt incredibly small and fragile before such weighty words. They conjured an image of a stern deity, someone impatient with my restless squirming in the stiff wooden pew. This god would tut-tut at my desire to dance down the aisles and disdainfully shake his head at my ink-stained hands, blue-black from drawing on my bulletin.
I spent most of my childhood within Christian fundamentalism, supposing that God was like the preachers who shouted angrily at us each Sunday, with graying hair and ill-fitting suits and trembling voices expressing deep heartbreak over our hell-bound state. At best, the god I’d come to know was distant and disapproving. At worst, he was terrifyingly capricious and violence-prone.
At 15, when I began struggling with a severe eating disorder, I asked hard questions, pushing back on unsatisfying answers about the supposed hope that Christ offered. But questions were not especially welcome in a religious system predicated on having tightly controlled, black-and-white answers to the world’s problems.
My experience launched me down the path of what many would term “deconstruction,” though the word was not yet popular at the time. In my life, deconstruction was a commitment to finding something that could satisfy what I craved: a better word for the suffering and pain in this world.
The day I started graduate school, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my belief system no longer included Jesus. I sat in my car in the driveway of my new Nashville home and wept, knowing how many people I was letting down. I wanted so badly to believe, even if solely for their sake, but I couldn’t. My deconstruction had turned to deconversion.
I spent the following three days researching and reading about Jesus, trying to figure out why I suddenly could not shake him. I spent countless hours scouring library bookshelves looking for stories like mine, stories of pain and God-seeking and wandering the desert of various belief systems to find some semblance of peace. I kept hoping these books would tell me what to do when Jesus interrupts someone’s life without warning. I hoped this insistent pull was merely a fluke, or a craving that I could satisfy by reading enough books or listening to enough podcasts. But it wouldn’t let up. The resolution I craved was a person, and that person was chasing me down.
In Jesus, I have finally found the answer I sought over the years—or rather, I should say that he found me. In him, I’ve learned that God is not a fearful, trigger-happy deity. Nor is he a bland deity with nothing to say to the evil in the world, like the narratives I heard in spaces of deconstruction. Instead, he loves his people so much that he refuses to abandon them to inevitable destruction, giving his very self to bring us back to life.
If God can pursue me over decades, patiently meet me in moments of seeming godlessness, and ultimately resurrect my heart in a cramped closet, then I can trust him to be alive in the spiritual journeys of others who seem far off from him. If God can bring me to see Jesus in a sudden moment of conversion, then maybe my sight and imagination are simply limited when I despair. My story screams of God’s long-game redemptive work that was out of sight for so long.
Also Read:
Devotional
Nehemiah’s Leadership Playbook: Mission
Inspirational
When Dad was Coming Home
Testimonies
Lord I’m Ready Now
