006. I Thought About Becoming an Atheist

Hey you,

The middle weeks of December were rough — I genuinely wondered if I was losing my sanity. I held on by one fingernail onto my faith, reason, and endurance, and then I felt even that start to slip.

Have you ever frightened yourself? Maybe that’s something that happens to people fairly often but it doesn’t to me. Other things have scared me, but I can usually count on myself. Despite challenges with depression and mental health they’ve always been just that, challenges and not real threats.

I guess I always thought that when tragedy strikes the worse of it is immediate, but it doesn’t work that way does it? Shock insulates us a little, provides a little protection. It’s when the shock wears thin and we make the weird transition back into “ordinary” life that is harder. I was dealing with post-accident healing pretty well, or such was my thought. Recently the flashbacks were creeping back, along with that awful moment of impact. Dreams kept getting weirder and weirder, and more stressful, and all the uncertainties of the past months seemed to be having a party whenever I fell asleep. Probably my brain was processing stuff, but jeepers. Just stop, why don’t you? Party poopers.

The day before Thanksgiving I got a call that my insurance hadn’t covered all the hospital expenses for The Man who was Hurt (I know his name, just can’t share it in a space like this). It terrified me even though it really wasn’t big enough to do that. It’s just that I’ve lived with uncertainties on every hand for months now and much as I’ve put my trust in God over and over, the fear often overcomes me until I can calm back down. It’s hard to get used to physiological stuff in trauma. Your brain is cool and clear but your fear reactions set in and aren’t rational. “What does this mean? Will he file suit to try and get what he needs? His expenses should be covered, but what if they aren’t? What if insurance refuses. I have $5000 set aside for a future dream, and maybe that will cover .001% of the expenses. If the insurance provider asks me for a statement again I don’t know what I’ll do. “

The day of the accident I had to give my statement over and over and over again to different cops. Probably it was just because they wanted to make sure the story stayed the same, but it was also traumatizing. I knew while they were doing it that they had to do it, but that didn’t help the pain.

Trying to garner any holiday spirit was… unique. I hadn’t counted on spending either my birthday or Christmas single this year, so now especially the holidays were this giant neon sign pointing toward lack. Everyone has cute plaid matching pajamas for them, their spouse, and the cute, fat babies. If they don’t have that they have beautiful houses and plenty of money. I didn’t have much this season, other than a looming fear of getting taken to court for nearly killing someone, and sadness. You know, I’m pretty far down the totem pole currently.

After all the Unpleasantness happened I didn’t even try to be ok. I gave myself two months to heal and then in December I would try to enter the true spirit of the holiday. Two months was enough, wasn’t it? Ha. Everything seemed reasonably on track, until I got ill on December 5th and shit hit the fan.

You never know — when there are at least half a dozen bad factors present — which one is trying to delicately tap you over the edge, but whichever it was the pressure grew unbearable. I wasn’t sure how I could live anymore. Some of it was circumstantial. I was still trying not to be anxious about the unresolved insurance, the dreams were getting worse, I was fighting depression, and oh yay! It’s my birthday. This is normally a fun time. It was a good birthday and I felt celebrated. Texts poured in all week with people who wanted me to know how much they cared, loved me, and were proud of me for still standing. Through every text I thought, “they don’t know how close I am to losing it.” Life felt like an unlivable gift.

I didn’t know how close I was to losing it until I found myself driving home from an event after my birthday and actually considering becoming an atheist. That realization sobered me. But what to do? I was just done, strained to a breaking point. Even though my faith is at the core of who I am and all my life I’ve wanted nothing more than to know God, I didn’t know if I could pay this cost anymore — such was the level of pain that I considered doing anything, anything to get away from it. It was too much. In all the anguish of this autumn, this was different. This was a crisis of self such as I have never faced before and hope to God will never happen again. My faith is my life, and the fact that I considered leaving it is mind-boggling. Dear God what was happening.

Reaching a breaking point is like being forced to stretch past your means. Muscles cannot stretch infinitely, and neither can the heart. We learn endurance past what we know we can endure, but we wonder, will we snap?

The enormity of leaving my faith was an awful thing to think about. I knew the largeness of a choice like that, and never ever thought I’d be in a spot to even consider it. It is surprising what fire will reveal in our hearts. In this case, somehow I collected my mind and heart back from the delirium of pressure to realize that leaving my faith was a choice I would regret forever. Literally, forever. People who know the light and then depart from it are more truly lost — not because God stops loving them but because they turn away from love. God honors our choices.

Everyone has scrapes with self-confidence. We all know what it’s like to get up some mornings and seasons and feel like the stock value plummeted. We know what it’s like to dislike parts of our body, our lack of skills, our failings, and our story. We know what it’s like to have off-days or even silent months where life is a howling wilderness. We women know what it’s like to, once a month, deal with the hormones that flush the potential of life from our body. Most women know, we’re going to get through this ok, even if it doesn’t feel like it. We might feel like a miserable cow somedays, but we aren’t. We’ll get our period and the sun will shine again.

This was different than any previous down times. It was as if whatever it was had gotten past my character, personality, and defenses to attack the heart of me. It went for my faith. My faith in God and because of that, my faith in myself. If it had succeeded, my life would have been ruined. I don’t believe I am overstating that. I have never faced… something… like that in my life.

Somewhere around this point it dawned on me that I was under what was probably the biggest spiritual attack of my life; I picked up the sword of the Spirit and started fighting back. Spiritual forces gain access through our choices as humans, so I started by choosing God and resisting the fear.

At this crisis point the Lord asked me what I was expecting of Christianity that he wasn’t asking of me? The question brought in a light wind of peace, so I knew it was a good one. The stillness brought with it a realization. Anger to me doesn’t feel compatible to Christianity, and I was angry. On the Enneagram I’m a 9 w 8, so sometimes the peaceful and the aggressive sides of my personality get into a gridlock. All personalities have their own version of this tension. It’s a balancing factor and it’s uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. Usually we think of the primary strength as winning, but the underdog has a way of coming back (hello David and Goliath) and getting us between the eyes.

I won’t speak much about what is making me this angry, but I can tell you that the way my dating relationship terminated last year left me feeling… cancelled. Thrown away. I went into my heart to assess the damage and found fragments of trust and vulnerability everywhere. I am a peaceful person by nature, but living with this level of pressure from the accident and heartbreak was a big strain. I was doing pretty well with the mixture of other emotions: grief, sadness, trauma, despair, etc, but whenever grief turned to anger I’d start trying to keep it underwater like a beach ball in the ocean. Good luck, sister.

Growing up we weren’t allowed to be angry. There was no space for it, and no way out of it but to squash it, deny it, and discipline the heck out of it. I don’t fault my parents for that. This is a cultural thing that many of my peers have also recognized. We don’t even know what angry looks like, let alone what it means to be angry and not sin. There was no mapping for how to walk through most emotions so I’m having to learn that as a thirty-something.

Finally the anger asserted itself in a crisis of self and demanded I pay attention. Atheism popping up as a viable option woke me up but good. If this thing was actually this advanced then there were no options but to start reckoning with what it meant, and why it had attacked the very core of me. Somehow some doors had been left open. I do not believe that if we simply rub shoulders with evil that suddenly we have got a demon. I do believe that through our choices as humans we let things in the door that want to destroy us.

The fight was bitter and furious and here is how it went down. On the side of light was a gentle, gracious, and HOLY God. He reminded me that it was possible to be angry and not to sin and that he loved and delighted in me. On the other side were harsh, condemning voices that said I had deserved the abandonment and that condemnation was my portion. I was irreparably broken and goodness was never to be mine. The face of Jesus twisted into disgust and rejection.

I think when I saw that face it was the intelligence I needed to know that the dark side was here. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and this whole attack had been coordinated around condemnation of my personality, my faith, and my character.

Humans live with a broken reality, by which I mean there are two kinds of reality that seem to be simultaneously true. One is that we are irreparably broken, miserable, worms of humans, and the other is that we are good, full of light, and made in God’s image. That the work started in us will be finished. Both are true. One is truth without God and based on lies, and one is truth with God and based on love. It is our choice to decide which one to believe in our hearts. It’s a tricky shift and like moving mountains because we have to do it by faith. We have to believe that what we see about ourselves honestly, which is that we do have broken spots in our hearts, is going to presently be healed and whole and well because we have a Redeemer.

The light won, but not because of me. It was because at the pinnacle of the struggle when I nearly went under something beautiful happened. In the midst of this darkness a small voice whispered in my ear, “your righteousness is not your own.”

Something in me began to breathe again.

One of the concepts I have been thinking through lately is that real self-confidence is directly tied to our righteousness and hope. When our confidence is not real we are dependent on a range of things like successes in job, relationships, ministry, and appearance. I base this on what I see in Job’s story and it’s still being fleshed out in my mind.

When the message was delivered it came with this beautiful picture of holiness growing within me, like a pure and bright light which is being uncovered in the dark places. The light began to shine on me when I remembered this message, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” (Jer. 1:5)

I am called by name by the God of Heaven. He knows me intimately, from before I was born. He has demonstrated a hundred times that he loves me unconditionally. He calls me righteous. He has made me clean and pure.

When we face something difficult it is our identity which takes the brunt, and if we are the authority on our own merit we’ll fall. But, as Christians, we aren’t our own authority. God is. Jesus is my defense, even as I stand accused of everything that the world and darkness and a broken relationship says is true about me. I have made mistakes, and some serious ones. They have cost dearly, but God forgives me those. Even now the Healer is fighting for me as this anger takes its way with my body and soul. The fever will pass, but I cannot will it away. It must run its course. Now that the enemy is gone my spirit and soul can do what they were made to do and heal back. Anger is part of that inflammation to protect me until my soul and spirit can do its work.

I still question why I had to be hurt this way. Honesty compels me to say that though I was hurt in the relationship, I am certain it wasn’t done with evil intent. There is a large difference between humans hurting one another because we all tend to focus on what is best for ourselves, and humans who are so given over to the dark reality that they have become destructive.

There is one enemy of our souls who is unequivocally trying to take us out and he will work through whatever chink in the door he gets. He works in the currency of lies, which makes it of the essence to be honest about ourselves. However in all our honesty there is one thing that must take ultimate precedence in our lives and that is the voice of the Shepherd who has watch over our souls. Self-loathing, condemnation, anger, fear, bitterness and the whole range of lies from Satan are fierce enemies - flesh and blood are not.

Humans do hurt us. I have hurt others too. We are the ones who open the doors for spiritual forces to come through our choices, and sometimes because of connection and trust we do become vulnerable through our relationships. Other people do hold tremendous power over us, which, when it is protected and honored, brings us great health and joy.

I live with the sense of that in all my relationships now. What I choose to do may leave someone else vulnerable to lies, or it can make it so I have their back. We must all take responsibility for ourselves, but we are not every man for himself. We are every man together, serving God. Anyone who chooses to misalign with that reality has already exposed themselves to a fight they cannot hope to win without Jesus and trusted warrior-friends.

I am deadly serious about this fight. I presently operate without much hope, but I cannot manufacture that any more than I can fight anger on my own. The only hope for me is to align with a God-reality that says I can be of good courage, be of good cheer, and take heart.

So I do. I woke up this morning and took heart. It has been through a massive fight and took a beating in the past few months, but it is still beating back.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

L. Raine