I'm THAT Jorge...

It has been difficult to give a name to my transition back into authentic faith, which started roughly 16 months ago. I add the “authentic” qualifier because virtually all of my concerns about God still exist on some level, but they don’t control my beliefs anymore. (That sentence itself cost me a friend.)

I would be understating the experience to say that my return to faith was an adventure. It was total chaos, at least internally. I had finally made this seemingly monumental decision to believe in God again, lacking any real evidence to support it, beyond sentimental reasons. I’m not sure exactly what I expected. Perhaps I thought everything would simply fall back into place for me the way it had been four years prior. But finally taking the “I believe” step didn’t make the shift back into Christian culture any more seamless. In fact, it was rather awkward.

In the grand scheme of things, most people didn’t actually care. I mean, sure, some were happy for me, while others thought I was an idiot. But it was sort of like when one of your friends has a wedding anniversary. You don’t actually care very much, but you recognize that it carries incredible significance for them. So you smile and tell them how happy you are for their ability to outlast half of the nation. Obviously, the greatest impact from all of this was supposed to have taken place within me. You know…on the INSIDE! (Emphasis on ‘inside’ added for no reason) But I felt almost exactly the same. And so everything changed.

Life didn’t stop or slow down, my priorities didn’t change, and my wife wasn’t any more or less attracted to me. I didn’t feel considerably happier, although I can concede that actually making a decision and moving forward with it was a great weight off of my shoulders. It all felt pretty much the same in my head. But wasn’t I supposed to feel changed? Shouldn’t I feel like a free man? Was I reborn? Had any of my other perspectives shifted as well? Did this automatically default my political position to Republican? IS SARAH PALIN MY HERO?!?!?! I was convinced something was supposed to feel different, so I felt this enormous pressure to act like I was different. And this caused my interactions with everybody to change.

People who knew that marital strife was the only reason I had even given church another chance to begin with (6 months before THE DECISION) wanted to know if I had merely returned to God for the sake of my marriage, and I suppose I kind of wanted to know as well. And if that was the case, was it such a bad thing? Was there only one single proper reason to believe in God? If so, I had probably missed the mark. So when people asked me if it was real, my only answer was, “I think so.” I couldn’t define what made it real, except I knew that I wanted it.

Sitting in my first worship service (in a Pentecostal church, no less) as an official believer, I spent almost all of it trying to figure out how to get into an “attitude of worship” for the first time in four years. Did I need to clear my mind, change my heart (what does that mean?), raise my head, close my eyes? What method had I used four years ago? It had been so easy back then. Now it felt stupid. Did I really believe in God? Because I just couldn’t “sense the presence of God” anymore. Had I even actually experienced the presence of God before?

Prayer was just as much of a hassle. How do you talk to someone you didn’t even believe existed 24 hours earlier?

“Hello God…if that IS your real name…how are things?”

For those four years as a skeptic, I never stopped reading the Bible. I just read it to study and to learn its history. I mostly read it to discredit it. But NOW I was supposed to use it as a tool to move forward in my understanding of faith and to build a relationship with someone I barely recognized. I was supposed to forget that so much of it felt forced and manipulative, driven by an agenda to authenticate prophetic or apostolic authority. I was supposed to throw out the possibility of errable human authors altogether. Was this possible? Could I now magically accept the Bible as the irrefutable, inerrant, divinely inspired, agenda-less word of the most high thing-I-was-uncertain-of?

“Hello Bible…if that is your real name…”

This was my plight. I was trying to figure out what it actually meant for me to believe in God again, while repeatedly trying to figure out the answer to everybody’s question.

Is this real?

I felt troubled for months. I had been so certain, perhaps foolishly, that changing my answer on this one really big thing would bring clarity to so many smaller things. But it only highlighted the unyielding and arduous nature of my questions, and I struggled to accept that. Through much of this year, I truly tormented over my decision, wondering whether I could actually reconcile my mind with my heart. On numerous occasions, I woke up determined to take everything back, to proclaim that I just couldn’t figure out faith, and walk away from it forever.

But time heals all kerfuffles (or something like that), and so I grew.

If there was anything that was harder for me to reconcile than my doubts to faith, it was the picture of a life without my wife. My conviction to keep a happy marriage was the primary driver behind the motives to take ownership of my personal faith. And as a result, the picture of mine and Tara’s love story began to mirror into my perception of my relationship with God. Here was this beautiful woman, remarkably strong and resilient, WAY out of my league, who loved me when she didn’t have to. This women whose trust I had deeply violated on more than one occasion, but who continued to show me love, even when she was angry at me. She was, and is, worth everything to me. So I dug into my faith to find out how to elevate God, an entity I could barely believe in, into MY savior, and into someone who was worth everything to me.

How cheesy is this?

He came to me through my wife, and consequently, through other people. Friends, family and students that I had grown to love over my short lifetime, but had rarely ever felt compelled to make sacrifices for, became more important than ever before. The more time I invested into figuring out how to love God, the more I found myself genuinely loving people. I actually WANTED to do more things for them. Maybe you don’t need God to love people. It seems that I did.

I don’t know if it is my nature or a learned behavior, but I have an obsessively inquisitive mind, and that could probably be said about everyone on some level. But I crave answers for everything that matters to me, and that is what has made this whole phase so troubling. I have friends who seem to have no problem ignoring the holes in religion in general, not to mention their own faith specifically, and even that requires an explanation to me. On a personal level, I don’t know that I will ever truly be able to feel a sense of certainty that what I believe is completely right. But I have very happily arrived at a point where I can continue investigating the questions without tormenting myself over the potential consequences of being wrong.

Oh my, what a dangerous sentence.

What I’m really saying is this: Maybe I’m the frog ignorantly sitting in the boiling water, slowly killing myself as I fail to realize the impending downturn of my quality of life. But at least I got into the water on my own volition, fully aware that someone might actually turn on the burner.

One of my favorite developments over the last five years of my life has been learning to keep all the questions in front of me. I’ve learned that not knowing is ok, as long as it doesn’t keep you from moving forward. And what I have arrived at in this faith is that my search for religious understanding has always been wildly ironic. The irony, of course, is that christianity, in its most perfect form, is shaped by our humanity; by our imperfections. “Perfect living” as an ideal of “perfect christianity” is an impossibility because it removes our need for a perfect God to depend on. If we choose to believe in God, then we should choose to rely on him. We were created with limitations and imperfections, and it is hard not to curse God for allowing that. But the end game, and I’m dumbing it down quite a bit here, is that perfect living can only exist in the physical presence of God. It actually is the final destination of the Christian journey.

It’s the cliche.

So even if my understanding of God is all wrong; even if our entire theology is based on the writings of selfish, power-hungry humanoids who never even knew the actual person of Jesus…

Oh well. Maybe the Bible isn’t a flawless script for Christian theology. If that’s the case, then someday when we’re talking to God in Heaven (if you believe in that sort of place), he’ll say to Paul, “Bro, you were way off on this part” and to me, “This is where you got me all wrong.” But we’ll still be with him because we will find out what God cared about is that we never stop trying to get it right, and we carry his heart with us through that journey.

As far as I’m concerned, I am all in for that God.

I’ll never be the perfect husband. But I’ll be damned if I ever stop trying to be.

It’s worth pointing out that tomorrow is my first day as a paid member of the pastoral staff at my church. I am making that point because I need to publicly acknowledge that this job changes things for me. I can’t be a part of that community unless I am willing to defend it. And I will. I know that there is so much wrong with the Christian community, but it is still the people and the place that I have chosen, and I will take pride in my choice.

I’ll never get it perfect. I will mess some things up. I will make some people angry. I will occasionally misrepresent my faith. I will eventually say something that seems wildly ignorant. I will someday stumble over my words when some highly intelligent skeptic takes it as their personal mission to make me see the folly of my ways. I will likely be marked by somebody as the reason they no longer believe in God (oh wait, too late for that).

I WILL PROBABLY PRAY FOR YOU WHEN YOU’RE SICK AND GENUINELY BELIEVE THAT I DID SOMETHING TO HELP.

I will also open my door to you when you have no place to go. I will give you food when you have nothing to eat. I will give you my shirt when you have nothing to wear. And I will tell you I am sorry when I have hurt you…and I will mean it.

And I will do it all in the name of God, because I believe in that sort of thing.