What We Lose When We Lose Our Faith

That time I threw the baby out with the bathwater.

The only reason I’m writing this to you now is because my life hasn’t gone as planned.

In 2019, I quit my job in higher ed to write books. Books about God, about Christianity, about faith.¹ But if I’m honest, by that point, none of it felt true anymore. I wasn’t quite yet an outright heathen (see: democrat²), but something was breaking. And it had been cracking for a long time.

The day I graduated from Ashland Theological Seminary.

The cracks came slowly at first. A disappointment here. An inconsistency there.

But then they began to snowball. They gathered momentum when I watched the church I loved ignore abuse. And again, when they chose power over…everything. And again, when they rejected me for disagreeing with them (about gay marriage, abortions, other religions). At one point, they even called me dangerous. And what’s worse is I believed them.

So, I left.

I left the church family I had grown to love. The building I gave a decade of my life to. I never visited the room again where I first met my wife. Or where I finished the final edits of my seminary dissertation.

I left all of it, and in doing so, I left huge parts of me scattered across the wreckage of what I thought my life was going to look like — supposed to look like.

For years, I've felt like my faith betrayed me, and I've done everything in my power to avoid talking about it. But today, that ends because I needed one more god-damn f-word to make this series an even ten, and I do not have 2,000 words to say about farming. 

What Faith Is

Now faith is the confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. — Hebrews 11:1

Faith is a practical trust.³

What makes it different than words like hope and belief is its grittiness. Faith gets your ass up and out into the real world. It's always backed up by action.

One of my favorite Bible stories is of a paralyzed dude with four crazy friends (I like to imagine he got paralyzed in some wild camel accident). They heard about this healer, so they carried their friend to see him, but when they arrived, the crowd was massive. They'll never get in this way. So, what do they do? Climb onto the roof, cut a hole in it, and use ropes to lower their friend directly in front of the healer.

Of course, the crowd loses their damn minds. People are running off to try and get all of them arrested. But the healer just kind of nods, approving the badassery at hand, and the paralyzed guy gets up and walks out fully healed.⁴

Faith, by its very nature, is divisive because it asks you to believe things other people do not, and then to act out those beliefs in the real world.

In church, we were taught that faith looked like leaving your family or giving money or quitting a job or moving to a new country or taking some risk that made no logical sense so that when/if it did work out it would prove that the big man upstairs was looking out for you.

So then, if all of this sounds well and good — if it’s all so encouraging and empowering, where’s the problem?

What Faith Isn’t

The problem is that blind faith has a habit of blinding its believers. The “what we do not see” dissolves into what we choose not to see. And that leads to self-betrayal.

There’s supposed to be this balance between faith and awareness that bad faith has a way of corrupting. A perfect illustration is the drowning man parable, where a guy stuck on his rooftop during a flood prays for help but ends up drowning. The twist is that the guy denied rescue three times (two boats and a helicopter), as he kept saying, "God will save me." His "faith" had blinded him.

For the people around me, men and women whom I loved and respected, faith became about meanness, and money, and victim blaming, and ignorance. And they asked me not to see, not to question.

Their faith became a toxic sort of certainty that the world would, and should, work a certain way and anything to the contrary was evil. Actually evil. Imagine thinking that anything different from you was Osama Bin Laden in disguise. How exhausting would that be? How little would that make your world?

What Faith Could Be

Okay, personal soap opera aside, why should this word matter to you at all?

What does faith have to do with your mental well-being? Especially if you’re not religious or into the woo-woo or wouldn't step foot in a church even if they bribed you with the juiciest piece of hate chicken in the world?⁵

Because trusting that there’s something else looking out for you, that miracles are real, that you can believe things will work out even if you’re not sure exactly how — these are beautiful thoughts.

Stepping into your power as a man, as a human, also means accepting the limits of that power. The boundaries of how far and how much you can influence on your own and letting something bigger step in to help when needed.

I have come to a place in my own life where I honestly think it’s important to believe in something. In what? I don’t know, nor do I think it’s my job to tell you as a Puerto Rican guy from Ohio who has a weak stomach for spicy food, an inappropriate sense of humor, and a sizeable chip on his shoulder towards organized religions.

But I do have thoughts on what faith should feel like.

It should feel like an energy drink for your soul. It should expand what’s possible and what’s accepted, constantly pulling you into things bigger than yourself and launching you into how the hell did I get here moments. Faith should feel light. Like it’ll all be okay. Like you’re sitting in a canoe, floating on a lake at daybreak. The cool morning air sweeping across your face, birds welcoming you with their songs.

Faith should be obsessed with what you have to give, not pushing you to take. It should be inviting, not excluding. Progressive, not regressive. It should be young and old and fast and constant. It's a thing you ride in, but one that never runs anyone else over.

Faith should make you more comfortable with who you are. It should wake you up, open your eyes, and raise your voice. You should be braver because of what you believe. Kinder too.

Faith should never make you question your worth as a human being, your place in the world, the gifts you have to offer. It should never suffocate your ideas or make you shut your eyes.

Your faith should make you come alive. Fully. Unapologetically. What you believe about the world should make you fall more in love with who you are. With who you could be.

This is the kind of f-word I want to write about.

I hope you find something worth believing in like this.

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As for me, well…when people look back at my life and my story, I want them to say that he learned to trust again. That he was loyal to his ideas and principles, and that he lived a story larger than the one he could have written for himself.

That he believed, practically, in things we can’t quite explain for reasons we can’t quite detail. But they worked. The universe/god/Morgan Freeman showed up and showed out.

And it was a great thing all his plans went to shit.

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Challenge #10: Starry Eyed Surprise

1. By this point in the story, my books had sold 150,000+ copies and would go on to sell 100,000 more. It felt weird making money from things I wasn’t sure I still believed. But they helped build a bridge to where I am now, and for that I’m thankful.

2. I hate to bring politics into it, but I don’t care what anyone says; this is a top-tier joke.

3. A lot of the Faith Is section borrowed ideas from two bulky books I still have from seminary: Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch (IVP) and Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP).

4. This story is from Mark 2, and the moment the guy is dropped in front of Jesus, the text says, “He saw their faith…”.

5. Hate chicken = Chik-Fil-A. Yes, it’s a real thing.