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The voice from the pulpit rang out, echoing through the large Baptist sanctuary as the preacher claimed to speak on behalf of the Almighty. “Look,” he told the crowd, his voice projecting an unwarranted amount of confidence, “if you have an issue with my message, then you have an issue with God himself. I am merely relaying his words.”
I was nine years old and sitting exactly four rows from the front, and I felt incredibly small and fragile before such weighty words. They conjured an image of a stern deity, someone impatient with my restless squirming in the stiff wooden pew. This god would tut-tut at my desire to dance down the aisles and disdainfully shake his head at my ink-stained hands, blue-black from drawing on my bulletin.
I spent most of my childhood within Christian fundamentalism, supposing that God was like the preachers who shouted angrily at us each Sunday, with graying hair and ill-fitting suits and trembling voices expressing deep heartbreak over our hell-bound state. At best, the god I’d come to know was distant and disapproving. At worst, he was terrifyingly capricious and violence-prone.
At 15, when I began struggling with a severe eating disorder, I asked hard questions, pushing back on unsatisfying answers about the supposed hope that Christ offered. But questions were not especially welcome in a religious system predicated on having tightly controlled, black-and-white answers to the world’s problems.
My experience launched me down the path of what many would term “deconstruction,” though the word was not yet popular at the time. In my life, deconstruction was a commitment to finding something that could satisfy what I craved: a better word for the suffering and pain in this world.
Like many fellow questioners at that time, I read books like Blue Like Jazz and Velvet Elvis and followed Rachel Held Evans’s blog religiously. During my time in a Methodist campus ministry, I found breathing room in a belief system that did not claim to have all the answers and that allowed me to care about people on the margins of society. But ultimately, this new faith system fell short. It broadened my compassion for humanity, but it did not satisfy my core longing.
My current pastor speaks of God’s non-anxiousness about our journeys, which allows us to be non-anxious with other people in our lives. I mention this as a caution, because the next part of my story is what so many fear for their loved ones who are deconstructing.
The day I started graduate school, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my belief system no longer included Jesus. I sat in my car in the driveway of my new Nashville home and wept, knowing how many people I was letting down. I wanted so badly to believe, even if solely for their sake, but I couldn’t. My deconstruction had turned to deconversion.
As I processed my grief over a faith renounced, I started attending a synagogue on Friday nights for Shabbat services. I found solace in Hebrew liturgy that I could barely understand as I sought a God I wasn’t entirely sure existed. Over the course of the next year, I studied alongside a rabbi and began to observe Jewish holidays. Before long, I had fully converted to Reform Judaism, where I remained for three full years before Jesus interrupted my life.
My non-anxious and faithfully Christian friend Anne called me on an average Wednesday afternoon. Without realizing it, she broke something open within me around the person of Jesus. There was nothing earth-shattering about our video call in a Starbucks parking lot. Anne did not attempt to convert me, and I did not bring up Jesus. Instead, she respectfully shared her beliefs, which included how Jesus had moved in her journey.
This kind of sharing was nothing unusual. Typically, I would smile politely while maintaining my differences. When I hung up on this occasion, though, I realized I was weeping. As I swiped at the salty tears streaming down my face, I could not rationally explain what was happening. It seemed like my very cells were responding to something so deep it had bypassed my intellectual armor.
I spent the following three days researching and reading about Jesus, trying to figure out why I suddenly could not shake him. I spent countless hours scouring library bookshelves looking for stories like mine, stories of pain and God-seeking and wandering the desert of various belief systems to find some semblance of peace. I kept hoping these books would tell me what to do when Jesus interrupts someone’s life without warning. I hoped this insistent pull was merely a fluke, or a craving that I could satisfy by reading enough books or listening to enough podcasts. But it wouldn’t let up. The resolution I craved was a person, and that person was chasing me down.
Honestly, I was angry. “I think I’m pretty settled on this topic!” I would yell to no one in particular, gesturing to my Star of David necklace. But the pull inexplicably remained.
On a Friday night in December a few years ago, I sat in a small closet in my Alabama apartment, hugging my legs to my chest. There, I encountered the living God. This was not the aggressive blinding light that Paul met on the road to Damascus. Nor was it a heady theological argument to convince me that Jesus is God. Instead, it was a quiet but insistent knowing, a lifting of the veil to see that Jesus was the same God who had been seeking me out over the years. He came tenderheartedly, like a compassionate shepherd scooping up a wounded, battered sheep and holding her close to his heart.
The richness and depths of theological understanding only came after. It was many months before I began to grasp the beauty of the grand story of God’s work to make all things new. But in the moment of encountering Jesus in my closet, I was aware that I needed to embrace him and that my life was wholly bound up with his.
The next six months were lonely. I told no one in my life about meeting Jesus because I knew the response would be mixed. I snuck out of my shared apartment each Sunday morning to attend church services. Most weeks, I ran to the bathroom mid-service, suffering panic attacks when a word or phrase brought back the voices of my childhood pastors.
Encountering the biblical God did not bring my life ease, and it cost me multiple communities and friendships. But the more I beheld the person of Jesus—the Second Person of the Trinity, not a stained-glass caricature—the more I knew he was worth selling everything I owned to follow.
I have always sought a faith of substance, something that could come against the powers of evil in this world and not be shaken or knocked over. I wanted a better story that could truly speak to humanity’s cry for justice with a clear, strong voice. I wanted good news that was good news, not bland moralism or fragile hope.
In Jesus, I have finally found the answer I sought over the years—or rather, I should say that he found me. In him, I’ve learned that God is not a fearful, trigger-happy deity. Nor is he a bland deity with nothing to say to the evil in the world, like the narratives I heard in spaces of deconstruction. Instead, he loves his people so much that he refuses to abandon them to inevitable destruction, giving his very self to bring us back to life.
If God can pursue me over decades, patiently meet me in moments of seeming godlessness, and ultimately resurrect my heart in a cramped closet, then I can trust him to be alive in the spiritual journeys of others who seem far off from him. If God can bring me to see Jesus in a sudden moment of conversion, then maybe my sight and imagination are simply limited when I despair. My story screams of God’s long-game redemptive work that was out of sight for so long.
I hold Jesus to be the answer, and the most beautiful one that exists. But if you cannot yet affirm that beauty, I trust that God is not anxious about you. Therefore, I am not either.
Lindsay Holifield is a writer and artist living in Birmingham.
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