How I Lost My Faith

What We Mean When We Say "Faith Deconstruction"

In the fall of 2016 I bought a jet ski. For technical reasons, we’re going to call it a personal watercraft, or PWC¹.

I’ve wanted one since I was a kid and owning one was a lot of fun. It was everything I thought it would be and more.

By more I mean more expensive. A PWC is a boat, and people warned me about how “boat” might be understood as an acronym for “Break Out Another Thou$and.” It wasn’t quite that bad, but it irked me a little each time I needed to have someone fix a mechanical problem. It wasn’t just the cost that I found upsetting, it was that as I watched the mechanic fix the problem, I realized with just a little bit of knowledge, I could have fixed the problem myself.

For the past two years it’s been sitting covered up on its trailer because it’s broken. By “broken” I mean it’s worse than in the past, having lost almost all of its power and thrust. This time, however, I decided I wasn’t going to pay someone to fix it.

I like having a PWC. You might say it’s important to me, I guess. I also like working on engines. So, I decided I was going to fix it myself. I made a conscious decision to tear the entire thing apart, piece by piece, learn how they all work and put it back together again.

I was going to deconstruct it, figure out the things that weren’t working right, fix the parts so that it ran like it was intended to run before it all broke for me, and then maintain the boat with my new knowledge of how it worked.

I have the entire mechanic’s manual saved on my old iPad 2. (It’s literally the only thing the iPad is good for anymore.) I know going in that I’m going to have to visit consult a true PWC mechanic from time to time for help, insight and guidance. This will mean I’ll have to humble myself and admit someone out there knows more than me.

The end goal is to have my little toy back up and running again. But if it doesn’t, at least I’ll know more about how it works, or was supposed to work.

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(A 3-second video of my dream-come-true. I don’t know who’s providing the commentary in the background, but somehow the 4 words they use seem appropriate.)

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While it’s not a perfect comparison (my comparisons seldom are), my PWC experience is much like what happened to my faith.

I was surprised the day I got on my PWC and discovered it was broken. I’d used it the day a before without any issues. I didn’t run into anything or anyone. I had cruised up and down the calm river at speeds far less than its top speed. There wasn’t any crazy riding that day.

So, the next day when I started it up and discovered the top speed was about 40 miles per hour less than what it should have been, I knew something was wrong, and I couldn’t ignore it.

I was also surprised the day I began to question my faith. I was preparing to teach a Sunday School class when I began to hear voices of doubt. There wasn’t anything different than the previous week when I’d prepared to teach Sunday School. The previous week had gone well. I’d prepared as usual, gone to Dunkin’ Donuts to get the munchkins (donut holes, for those of you unfamiliar with Dunks) which were just as important a part of the Sunday morning class as the lesson itself. We’d had class and went to church, sang our songs and listened to a sermon. Then I went to lunch with my wife.

Everything was normal.

But the next week it was different. I was beset with questions and statements about my faith. Right at the top of the list was: How can you teach a lesson about a faith you can’t prove is any better than any other? Frankly, you can’t prove there’s even a god.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had questions. But I’d ignore them as being the whispers of Satan, jump back into the routine of my evangelical Christian life, and they’d eventually go away.

But this time they didn’t.

They persisted, and I felt like the questions were fair. I wanted to be able to answer them with integrity.

I wanted to be honest.

I was seven years old I when I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.

Seven. It was at roughly the same age I decided He-Man was cooler than G.I. Joe.

These were the things I was thinking about during those years. Toys and stuff. My understanding of the world was limited.

I hadn’t asked the question of whether a god exists. Of course a god exists. His name was God. And sometimes Jesus.

Dad and I prayed to God at bedtime.

My family and I prayed to God to say thank you for every meal.

We prayed to God at church.

We prayed to God to be better people.

We prayed to God in the name of Jesus. …We prayed to Jesus in the name of Jesus. (I didn’t get it. But I didn’t ask questions either. It seemed like it was what my parents wanted me to do.)

Of course there is a God. At least, that’s how my 7-year-old self understood the universe.

Photo by Alex Andrews: https://www.pexels.com/photo/carburetor-parts-in-close-up-view-9666306/.

Accepting Jesus at 7 was an easy decision. Daddy was a pastor, and there wasn’t any one I wanted to please more than daddy. I’m not even sure God was more important to me than daddy was. But he preached about Jesus, so I jumped into the family worldview without much coaxing and stuck with it, problem-free, for roughly 20 years.

Riding up and down the tranquil river of life…

As I began to give credence to my questions and doubt, my faith began to take on a new look. At best it felt superficial - the Sunday School classes, the songs we sang in church (regardless of style) , the extra Bible studies - all things that I was doing out of habit having never known anything else. At worst some of what I believed as well as some of the messages my faith community delivered to the world began to seem arrogant considering the closed-ended answers I had for most challenges to my faith.

I realized I’d been born and raised in my Christian faith and always accepted it without hesitation. Invariably, I believed my faith was correct because of what the Bible said about, well, everything.

I’d never read any other religious texts. Why would I? I mean, I had the Bible.

The “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” The Bible had all the answers and the Bible and the Bible experts in my world told me not to look anywhere other than the Bible for the answers.

The problem I had with my Biblical worldview, however, was that I’d never considered a different worldview. I’d been handed the Bible at about the time I was swaddled in my first blanket. I was told it was the only source of truth.

I began to understand much of my life may have been blind luck.

Why was I fortunate to have been born into a loving, Christian family with a pastor-father who knew the truth about the universe while in the meantime some other child born the same day as me popped out in the middle of Saudi Arabia, his father an Imam, destined to live a life of religious lies which would lead him to hellfire and damnation? All the while this kid in Saudi Arabia insisted that I was the one who was going to hell for having the wrong kind of faith in God?

Something seemed off; unfair or unjust.

Wait…maybe we (the hypothetical Saudi Arabian boy and I) were both wrong. Maybe the kid born on the same day into a Bhuddist family … or the one born into a family of the Hindu faith … maybe one of them was right. Or…

…maybe we’re all wrong, and there isn’t even a God. Oh, sorry, I meant god, lower-case “g.”

These questions were the first time I began to question my belief in God. I was able to fake things pretty good for a while, and did, in fact, come out the other side still believing in the existence of a god, perhaps even the Christian God I’d grown up with.

But as I mentioned before, my desire to be a person of integrity ate at my conscience. Something began to change. I was on a new path. New to me, anyway.

Well, friends, that’s how my faith deconstruction began.

Next week I’ll get into where the path led. It was unexpected, and perhaps just a bit silly…

1. Technically speaking, Jetski is a model of personal watercraft made by Kawasaki. I own a Yamaha WaveRunner. But we all just tend to use the word jetski as a catch-all term for personal watercraft. It’s an understandable practice. “Jetski” is less of a mouth-full to say.

I wonder who’s more annoyed though, Kawasaki when all other brands are called jetskis, or all of the other brands who can’t get away from people referring to their products as a Kawasaki model? These are the important questions in life, amiright?