38/40 - Prodigal Son Vibes

In 1998, I visited my first foreign country, Peru. I was traveling with my Dad and a couple from church to visit some missionary friends and help run a program for their kids while they attended a conference. I listened to Rich Mullins Songs 1 on my portable CD player as we flew through the night from Dallas to Lima. I was so pumped to get my first stamp in my passport. My Dad always told me that he knew then and there that I'd caught the travel bug.

As we were waiting in baggage claim for our things, our host for our time in Lima joined us. He was a local pastor who also supported our missionary friends and would guide us around Lima until we caught our flight to the middle of the jungle a little later. My Dad asked him a few questions and inquired about how he got involved with his church and the missionaries

"I grew up in the church, but at a certain point I had to leave and go build my testimony."  

I'd never forgotten that sentence and the multitude of stories it held. Especially when I walked away from the church and did everything I could to silence the still small voice that wouldn't ever leave me alone.

After my girlfriend and I moved in together and I got the tongue lashing that I did from all angles of friends, families, and concerned strangers in church, I really started to question what we all believed in. Was church just a rule-following club?  Had I been the best rule follower and now that I'd stepped out on everyone's favorite rule to enforce was there any place for me in the club? Turned out, no. Since then, even when I have tried to get back involved in an official capacity at different times over the past 17 years, until I get that one rule followed again, there is no place for me to be helpful. But once I locked it down and get back in line, then I can be of service to the church again.

After one barrage of "how dare you" and "I'm so disappointed in you" messages, I was out. It only took one thing to drop me from status within this community I'd been in my whole life? Cool, pseudocommunity it was.

And so I didn't go back to church for a decade. I dropped my belief in a specific something bigger than myself. I still spoke church code words when I needed to around some family and some friends, but I didn't mean any of them. I still knew how to pray out loud and sound like what they wanted me to, but it was all a show. Heck, all of it was a show for most people I actually knew. If people actually believe that the only way to get to heaven was through Jesus, and if you didn't find Jesus before you died, you'd burn in eternal damnation for forever, why would we spend any time with people that we love not convince them that they needed Jesus. Every interaction I watched between church people with people outside the church became filled with hypocrisy of what I had understood to be the goal of this faith. It was not to "go out into all the world and make disciples" but a behavior modification club and a "be a little better" pseudocommunity that all felt better about themselves after some good music and a nice speech on Sunday mornings.

I still snuck into church from time to time when I first moved to NYC. I still liked my hit of good vibes and a reminder to not be a degenerate all of the time. But I was probably hungover. I tried to get my girlfriend to go with me, but she was even more out on church than I was. I'd type the sermon notes out in an email and send them to her just in case they helped.

I never stopped believing that there was something bigger than me in this life. I never stopped believing that there is a purpose and that we can find the way that we are to live, to love, and leave a legacy. I've always believed that the power of community can serve more people than lone ranger do-gooders. But the more I traveled and the more I got to know people from all walks of life and all religious background, the more I realized that so much of one's faith journey begins with the geographic lottery ticket of where you are born.

But I was born in America and the American church is what I found available to me. I'd played all the games growing up and had been given all the platitudes of what a good kid I was. And then after having read the bible cover to cover multiple times, memorized over 1,500 verses, being the three-time State of Texas Bible Quizzing Champion and competed in Bible Quiz National Championship, the American church game of no longer made any sense to me.  It all looked and felt like a way for angry old people to tell the younger generation how to stay in line and gave people the chance to feel good about themselves because they were in that club.

So what was I supposed to do with that? I didn't know, but I also knew that this still small voice was still chatting me up when I slowed down long enough to listen. It was a faint whisper at first, but the more I honed in on it, the more I heard it. The more I could hear the first principles and root beliefs of what a relationship with something bigger than myself could mean again.

I started going to church on purpose. But as a skeptic and with my eyes wide open for hypocrisy. I started to find moments to be still and sit without agenda, but connect to a spiritual part of me that I'd kept on ice for a couple of decades. I started to find value and truth in the sermons that this incredible speaker would bring. He found a way to dig into truth at a core level, not a win the game level.

And then I heard this song one morning at church:

And I know I don't deserve this kind of love
Somehow this kind of love is who You are
It's a grace I could never add up
To be somebody You still want
But somehow
You love me as You find me

I know this kind of love to be true because my parents, as concerned as they were for me and as frustrated at me at times as they may have been, loved me anyway. And as I've sought to reengage with my spiritual self over the past few years, they've been there with open arms to encourage me to find my way to what it all means for me and celebrated the small wins where they existed, even if others behaved more like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son.

But, as life would have it, just as I was getting into a rhythm with the church I was attending NYC on a weekly basis where I was starting to connect with some really incredible people who also had fought to find their way back to some kind of spiritual existence, the pandemic hit and we were all flung away from meeting in person and forced to try and be excited about watching YouTube church. Then the pastor who played a big part of my journey back went out and had an affair because he got bored and wasn't getting his dopamine hit every Sunday in front of his crowd and needed a new high to distract him.

Needless to say, there is still a lot left in this part of my story, but I am committed to chasing it down because my belief in something bigger than this life and this planet feels essential to my soul's understand of life, love, and other mysteries.