So, I go to an Episcopal church. If you know me, you know that about me. If you know me, you probably know that I've always struggled with my faith in a higher power.
The guy Trent and I encountered in a restaurant in Salt Lake City did not know this. So I totally forgive him for witnessing AT - not TO - me about faith.
He was very nice, and nicely told us that he could overhear our conversation, though was trying not to eavesdrop. He introduced himself as Jacob, asked if we were Christians, and I answered honestly. “He is,” I said, gesturing to Trent. “Me? I don’t know.”
He said some wonderfully kind and accurate things to Trent. Jacob told Trent he just had that air about him of being a person of incredible faith. And he does. That’s one of the things I love so much about my husband.
Then Jacob turned to me. He said he didn’t know my journey, but told me that God does exist, and God is there for me, and God wants me to be faithful, and continued on and on. Trent could tell this was absolutely not helpful to me, so he gently grabbed Jacob’s arm, told him, “I’ve got this,” and Jacob got the hint and left. I was very turned off of God at this point, and that interaction just pushed me over the edge.
All of this major turn-off of God-and-Jesus talk comes from childhood. Growing up, I didn’t even have faith or spirituality. We didn’t go to church and we didn’t really talk about God, unless there was a ‘dammit’ after it.
So, it should be unsurprising that I don't like it when people come at me with “God thinks this" and “God wants this for you" that. No. No, no, no. You don’t speak for God. And you sure as hell don’t know about my relationship with the Generally Obscure Diety. (I just thought of that. Clever, right?)
The Generally Obscure Diety and I have a complicated relationship, to say the least.
My first experience with feeling like prayers were answered was when I was twelve, and my sister and I were in a rollover car accident on Arbon Valley Road, in the middle of the day, on a Sunday.
I had been sitting leaned back, and I was a rather small twelve-year-old, so when we rolled, I came forward and hit the seatbelt with my face. The strap caught my bottom lip and ripped it away from my gum. I thought I had bitten through my lip. I also cut my head open, broke my nose, and my lips were bloody and swollen. I was bleeding a lot.
I also don’t think the seatbelt locked immediately, because there was an imprint of food that looked like it had been between my front teeth on the little strip where the door meets the car above the right mirror.
My sister, Cassy, who had a concussion, broken finger, and a bruised hip that wouldn’t go away for another year, immediately jumped out of the car, trying to keep it together. I slipped under the shoulder belt and got out of her side of the car, as my door wouldn’t open. Debris from my high-school sister's car was strewn across the empty road, and there wasn’t a house or car in sight.
I started to freak out, crying, but Cassy asked me to keep it together for her, as she was trying not to pass out from her hit to the head. I nodded, somehow finding the strength as a twelve-year-old kid who’d just been beaten up by a car.
She asked if I remembered when I’d seen a house or business. I didn’t, but I thought it was back the way we came. So we started walking.
I don’t think we’d taken maybe a dozen steps before we both uttered the words, “God, please let a car come,” at the exact same moment. And at that moment, we heard the tires of a car coming down the road behind us. “Oh, thank you, God!” we cried at the same time.
The man, Jerry Bush, was a farmer nearby. (He’s totally a relative of the younger Bush president. A cousin, if I remember correctly.) He’d looked out his window and saw our car rounding the corner, disappearing behind a little hill, and failing to reappear. He also saw a little cloud of dust. So, he decided to investigate.
There are so many questions about the events of that day. So many ways you could see God or not in this situation. What made Jerry look out the window? What made him decide to investigate?
He was incredibly kind. He was an older man who saw two kids in need of help, and immediately jumped into action. He grabbed a towel for my face, and I held it to my lip, trying to stem the bleeding. We got in his car and we rode to the Malad hospital. My sister called my parents along the way, and he spoke to them while I screamed for my mom in the backseat.
Why did my sister tell me we didn’t need a seatbelt while riding in Jerry’s car? Was it her faith that we were going to be okay, that we weren’t going to get into another accident? Did Jesus literally take the wheel?
We got to the hospital, where they stitched up my head and cleaned me up. I told them repeatedly that my lips hurt, and they said the bumps on my lips didn’t need stitches and would heal. My parents showed up, then my grandparents. I began to cry when Mom and Dad’s upside-down faces appeared at my bed, and I was shaking horribly from the shock, though nurses kept me covered in heated blankets.
Was it God who inspired this practice in health care? Who inspired the science and research into why it was helpful to people who had just suffered trauma?
We drove home, and I continued to complain to my mom that my bottom lip was still bleeding, and it felt like it was loose. Mom steeled herself (blood is super not her thing) and held a flashlight up as I pulled my lip out to show her the damage. Her face went white as she recognized that she could see my chin bone.
So we went back to the hospital, this time in Pocatello, where a plastic surgeon in tennis gear came in to sew my lip back to my gums. They numbed me up, pulled my lip out as far as it would go, and took pictures. Then, still fully awake, the surgeon sewed, occasionally scraping the roots of my teeth with the needle.
Was God not there to tell the doctor in Malad to look inside my mouth? To listen to his tiny, twelve-year-old patient? Or was God there, knowing that surgeon would have done a horrible job? Did God save my face from permanent disfigurement that way?
This experience was the closest I’ve ever felt to anything like a spiritual intervention, or a higher power stepping in. I haven’t felt anything since.
I’ve been attending the local Episcopal Church for almost exactly ten years. Since attending, I’ve been baptized as a Christian and confirmed into the Episcopal Church. I’ve served on the financial board for the church, as a member of various committees, and as a participant in almost every aspect of the church service, from greeting people at the door to leading the worship itself.
I’ve had wonderful moments of connection with people whose faith astounds me. They believe in Jesus, and God, and, most importantly, they believe in love. That’s what drew me in and kept me coming back. To this day, it still impresses me.
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, we didn’t have church services for several months. And, during that time, I found myself missing the people. I didn’t miss the readings, and the Eucharist, and the talk of Jesus and God. I missed the people, because they inspired me to be a better person.
It was with that in mind that I stepped back from leading worship. I knew this was more than a crisis of faith. I didn’t have faith. I didn’t pray, I didn’t evangelize, I didn’t do the things that made the people I went to church with so great. So inspiring.
Currently, I serve on the Search Committee for the new Bishop, as ours is set to retire next year. And it has been a demanding and draining experience so far. And it’s not over, yet. But, I made a commitment, and barring it interfering with my graduate school studies, I will see it through. I also serve on the financial board for the diocese as a whole. I have two more years on this term, and after that, I will be ineligible to serve for another year.
I don’t know that I’ll feel the desire to go back to these kinds of church activities. I recognize that the Episcopal Church as a whole has often been known as a church by committee. It can be so very rewarding, but so very draining. And I recognize that I don’t want the business of the church to get in the way of my having a spiritual experience in the church.
I’ve immensely enjoyed getting to know these wonderful people. I love singing in the church choir, for the most part. That’s what has sustained my attendance the last few years. With that gone, I’ve been feeling no desire to go back. I’ve attended a few times, listened to the words, and reflected on them, but I feel no pull to them as though they are The Truth. And I know that comes from my strained relationship with GOD.
I can look around and see the good in people, and see the bad. I see the hurt we cause each other, the intense pain and devastation of war, famine, of a country controlled by the money-hoarding elite. People who are so desperate to give themselves as much as possible that they are leaving the rest of us with nothing. And they feel nothing about that.
Where is God? I believe God is found in love. But that doesn’t mean that you have to believe in God to love. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States says it best: “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” But you don’t have to be about God in order to love. And that’s the kind of person I want to be.
I don’t want to love people because someone else told me I should. I want to do it because it’s what is best for them. I refuse to not do bad things for fear of repercussions in an afterlife that may or may not exist. I don’t want to do bad things because that hurts people. It should be as simple as that. Wherever you find your motivation to do good, continue on, my friends. But I’m finding that motivation more and more with people, and less and less with the Generally Obscure Diety.
As for Jesus? I dunno. He could have been conceived through an immaculate conception, he could have been an incredibly charismatic pastor who wanted to spread a message of love that has been formed into the largest following in history. And what about the children Mary and Joseph had after Jesus? Do their bloodlines exist?
So many unanswered questions. And, as of right now, I don’t need the answers. I don’t want the answers, because I honestly don’t know that I could handle the truth. I think that’s meant for after we die.
I believe that something happens after we die. I just don’t know what. But what I’m going to focus on is doing right in this moment, in this life. If it turns out that I was supposed to follow Jesus’s teachings to the letter, then it looks like I’ll fail. And so will basically every Christian that exists right now. And if that’s the kind of diety we’re supposed to follow, I want nothing to do with God.
But if, as I believe right now, we simply choose to do right by others, do our best to leave the world better than we found it, and care for ourselves and the planet on which we reside, I think the Generally Obscure Diety will make themself known in the afterlife, and we will finally have answers to all the questions.
Until then, I choose love for love. Not love for God.