I am a mongrel in my religious background.  Over the years I have been a Presbyterian, a Baptist of different flavors, Church of God, a United Methodist and lots of independent church expressions.  A moment of explanation about my random use of “Church” and “church”:  Capital C usually means a named denomination or the whole Church, church is a local gathering.  With a few brief exceptions, I was in church most of my adult life.  I read my Bible religiously.  I taught at almost every church we were a part of.  I was mostly never satisfied with the local expression of the Church.

Part of the issue with being an independent church is that you tend to think that you have somehow stumbled into discovered the “Truth” all by yourselves.  If you do align yourself with other churches, it is with ones who have a similar form of “revelation”.  That can lead to some weird stuff.  What “Full Gospel” churches lack in structure, they make up for in enthusiasm.  That enthusiasm usually takes the form of an intense focus on one small aspect of Biblical dogma.  Mostly it devolves into legalism and rote repetition of some core set of beliefs or “vision statement”.

I tend to fall into the “as long as I have a plan, I’ll be okay” set of people.  I like Policies and Procedures and Guides.  I read my various Bibles through using my “Read the Bible in a year” plans.  I made up my own reading plans.  I wrote a devotion guide for one church.  I edited a prayer and meditation booklet for a Capital Funds Drive for a new church building.  I had started reading through and following the Book of Common Prayer to help my “growth”.  I thought I was doing it all “right”.

Until the one day my youngest child was killed in a car wreck.  He wasn’t driving, the car was going too fast, none of them had seat belts fastened.  The two on the driver side died, the other two survived.  It’s not like TV at all where a uniformed police officer comes to your door and delivers the bad news.  I got a call to come to the emergency room where a young resident of the “let’s show no compassion” school of bedside manner delivered the world shattering news.  In the moment I needed to feel God’s Presence most, I felt nothing except a crushing sense of loss.

There was no comfort to be found except in the presence of family and friends.  I medicated myself to sleep.  I worked too much so I wouldn’t think about it.  I read long books and watched TV and binge watched old TV series on Netflix. None of the old standby remedies worked.  I couldn’t read my Bible, I couldn’t pray (even the pre-written prayers from devotionals), I was dead, or at least numb, inside.

About the same time Ben died, a famous evangelist’s son died in a car wreck.  On the next Sunday he was back in his pulpit saying that was what his son would have wanted.  We did a lot of things because we thought that was what Ben would have wanted.  Another famous pastor’s son committed suicide.  He did the wisest thing and took three months off to grieve properly.  I was back at work two days after the funereal.  I’m not sure about the other two men I mentioned, but I still feel that empty spot, that unbearable grief that chokes all joy from me.  These days those feeling only come on once in a while and don’t last very long.  Yet each time those feelings come, I am reminded of the lack of any Presence except my own.

Did my son’s death cause me to lose my faith?  Or was his death an intersection on the path of my life that lead me to question all the trite “truths” that all Christians are fed?  Could be that it was the consummation of 30 years of questioning and thinking and coming to the conclusion that no one has satisfactorily answered my questions about the very Nature of God and His relationship (or lack thereof) with humanity.  It is easy to believe in God and follow the Christian traditions when things are going well.  And for almost our whole lives things had gone well.  When times are the darkest though, where is God?  I think that most belief systems start with the conclusion of God and work backwards from there.

I don’t have that answer, yet it seems to come up more than the question of where is God when things are good?  No one seems to bemoan the lack of feeling God when everything is fine.  I seem to notice more complaints about needing God when things are not good and He seems to have disappeared.  I know that some will say the opposite.  God has met many during the darkness, He just didn’t meet me.  I read C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed during this time and it wore me out.  I saw a man whom I had revered as a monument of faith wrestle with that very faith after the death of his wife.  If such a man of faith struggled, who could ever bear it?  But I survived, my simple childlike faith did not.

What replaced that simple faith was a belief in a Bigger sort of Deity.  A Deity who reaches out to everyone in ways eaisly understandable to them and says:  life happens and then you all die.  We make our choices and then bear the consequences.  Sometimes our choices are precluded by other peoples choices.  My son didn’t choose to hit that tree at 60 mph, but he did choose to get in the car with an underage driver and go too fast on a small country road.  The driver’s bad judgment led to her death and my son’s.  Did he choose to die?  No, nor did the driver choose death.  Yet they both put themselves in the position that an error in judgement caused two young lives to be stopped before they ever really started.  Where was God then?

Does that make me a Deist?  Maybe, or perhaps I just don’t think that the Supreme Being inserts his/her Presence into the world quite as often or as spectacularly as we think.  Some things are just coincidences.  Some events are a result of our own bad choices.  Some results are genetic.  Some incidents are just random chance.  There were a lot of life events that I took on blind faith.  No more.  I want to know.  I won’t allow blind faith or mindless obedience to disable my choice to question and ask ‘why’ or ‘how’ or’ why not’ or ‘when’.  If God is our “Big Daddy” in the sky, Daddy won’t object to my questions.  And I have plenty.