I got my first tattoo at the ripe old age of 33, this past February. I knew I wanted my first tattoo to be Christian in its symbolism, as that was the center of my life, but I didn’t want a cross or a fish or any of the more obvious symbols. I said that the reason was that these were over-represented in the Evangelical community, and often tacky, and that indeed was the God’s honest truth. What I didn’t say, the thought that sat at the back of my mind that I only halfway acknowledged, was that I wanted something either ambiguous or universal enough that I would be comfortable having it on my body if I left the faith.

If you’re thinking that that should have been a red flag, it was. And I knew it. Red flags were very familiar to me, I’d been acknowledging them and consciously walking past them for at least 13 years.

My current pastor at one point told me he’d been discussing me with my previous pastor, who said of me, “When Joe commits, he commits.” Yeah, you could say that…

For me, this all started with Robin’s death.

I didn’t know Robin that well. She was a friend of some friends of mine. I hung out with her maybe half a dozen times, and had maybe one or two conversations with her. It’s amazing to me that she’s had such a profound impact on my life.

The friend group Robin hung out with were the artsy kids of Ruston, Louisiana. Friends from drama, speech and debate, art club, a scattering of stoners. These were the friends I enjoyed hanging out with the most, and some of my closest friends, but there was always a wall there for me, because they weren’t Christ-centered.

Being loyal, committed, and dependent on external validation from a young age, I was the poster child for an enthusiastic young Southern Baptist. And as a young Southern Baptist in small Southern towns, you signaled your virtue. You went to church conspicuously, you wore christian T-shirts and cross necklaces (my favorite was one made with nails forming the cross, bound with copper wire, also setting the stage for my later love of white-hipster-industrial-chic). Well, you did some of that. If you were confident or athletic enough to gain self-esteem from your own accomplishments, you signaled your faith a little bit to identify with the Evangelical tribe, while the Christian kids who depended on that for our identity (yours truly) really leaned into it.

But if you didn’t signal at all, you were effectively signalling some degree of resistance, if only the resistance to allow the Evangelical community to own your identity. Which, to my young mind, meant that you probably weren’t really Christian, and you needed to be witnessed to. Fortunately I was so uncomfortable with witnessing that I rarely did it and didn’t drive off too many friends.

The practical point here is that while I enjoyed my creative friends the most, and honestly was closest to them, there was always a conflict in my mind that they were going to hell and I wasn’t saying anything to them and thus it would be my fault. But when I was hanging out with them and talking to them, I couldn’t see that they were lacking anything that I had to offer; they had hopes and dreams, they were compassionate and kind. They just watched weird movies, smoked the occasional clove cigarette, and cussed more than my church friends. So I decided not to bother them with my religious views. Looking back, this was one of the first times I chose my own judgement instead of church doctrine; I couldn’t make sense of the eternal consequences of that decision, but in the moment, I chose to accept my friends as they were. (My memory is rosy, and I may have very well tried to work Jesus into the conversation now and again, but if so it wasn’t enough to drive them away, and I certainly remember not proselytizing much more than doing so).

Robin was in one of these groups of friends I hung out with in high school and college, so we ran into each other from time to time, but we ourselves weren’t that close. Still, I knew who she was and that she was a decent person, with a brash sense of humor. She was dying a friend’s hair red once, then asked to dye my hair as well; I shied away from the red dye in her gloved hand and she chuckled, “Come on, it’s not like it’s period blood.” I didn’t let her dye my hair, but I did get a good laugh out of that.

And then she died.

And it was that sudden. It was the spring of my junior year of college, and I was in Texarkana on an internship, chatting with a friend on MSN, and they told me that Robin had been waiting tables at her job and literally dropped dead from a brain aneurysm. She was either 20 or 21, quiet, bold, good to her friends, an artist, and then she wasn’t.

Was she in hell?

Christian girls went to church and didn’t make period blood jokes. Was Robin in Hell?

Robin had always been kind, her friends loved her. But she never talked about her love of Jesus. Was Robin in Hell?

And if Robin was in Hell…how? How was that ok? What the fuck had Robin done to warrant eternal torture? I know that we’re all sinners and all deserve hell, but how the fuck do we all deserve hell?

She was a fucking kid trying to figure herself out like the rest of us fucking were and are and because she maybe didn’t figure out that Jesus was the answer in two goddamn decades she has to go through endless fucking torture beyond anything on Earth – the holocaust, gang rapes, torture and mutilation that you see in every godfuckingdamned war – because she fucked up one goddamn answer, because maybe she was a little to stubborn or a little too proud or it just never fucking clicked?

My sister told me recently that I’d had issues with the concept of hell since high school; I don’t remember that now, but it doesn’t surprise me. I always had questions about how people who die in remote, non-Christian countries go to heaven. As a sophomore in high school, I performed in a play called Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames. If you want to talk about the crazy, aggressive, fire-and-brimstone christofascist preaching you’ve read jokes and stereotypes about, that was it. It was unbelievably stressful. I played my heart out as one of a group of teenage partiers who died in a drunk driving accident, and were dragged to hell by Satan (performed with amazing enthusiasm by my youth pastor). I awkwardly invited friends at school in the hopes that they wouldn’t go to hell, without understanding why.

But all of this was academic. I didn’t know people who grew up in China or the Amazon. I didn’t know anyone my age who died who wasn’t obviously Christian.

But I knew Robin. However poorly I knew her, I’d hung out and joked with her and knew a little bit of who she was, and this wasn’t academic anymore

A friend would later tell me that Robin might have been Christian and just not heavily involved in church or the Evangelical culture, that I could just rest in the idea that I didn’t really know, or that I could even go and ask her friends and family what she believed.

But I knew it wouldn’t matter. Even if someone told me that Robin was crazy about Jesus, showed me that she went on mission trips every year, it wouldn’t matter. The shock and pain of imagining a decent person suffering infinitely had already hit me, and even if Robin was Saved, I knew there were millions, billions of normal, decent people who just didn’t believe in God or didn’t believe in my God who face nothing but endless agony.

I quit going to church for a while after that.

The timing couldn’t be worse. I wasn’t mentally prepared to strike out on my own judgement, being personally insecure and having depended on the church for my understanding of truth my whole life. More importantly, in the previous several years, my mother had died after a battle with colon cancer, my father started his own business that I spent my free time working at, then he himself was diagnosed with throat cancer. He would later go into remission and remarry, but the grief and trauma would have lifelong impacts on him, and on the rest of us kids. And a year later I would go to UT Austin for school, leaving little Ruston behind.

So yeah, drifting away from my community and beliefs, not taking time to heal from trauma, and then moving to another city without a place to plug into community there was a recipe for disaster. I won’t discuss it all here, but I wound up 100 lbs overweight, on academic probation two semesters in a row at one of the best graduate engineering programs in the country, and spent the next 6 years trying to dig myself out of that hole.

After a couple years of depression and just trying to survive, I got sick of it. I got angry at the way I was living and decided to get back up out of this pit. I started working out, I started making friends, and I started going back to church. I actually found an amazingly passionate, young, and vibrant church called the Austin Stone, which would change my life and give me countless amazing memories. But first I had to go back and face my demons, and a few months into my relationship with the Stone my old doubts came flooding back.

There were other issues sitting in the back of my mind that hadn’t seemed so important while my faith was solid-ish; the concept of a New Earth had zero consistency with any scientific investigation, and though that concept was starting to lose traction in popular Christianity, the fact that popular Christianity was having to reckon their beliefs with observable reality had portentous implications for the rest of my faith. And at 25, after having been getting my life back on track, I said to myself “Well, I guess I can’t believe anymore. I guess I’ll just go out and have fun, party, have sex, try weed, and live that life that I’ve secretly envied.” And in that moment, I felt a peace; because I knew I wasn’t going anywhere – I could see where this was all going. I would go out and trash my life for a few months, then wind up right back where I was because in that moment, at 25 in my little Austin apartment, I knew I still believed in God.

Hey, when I commit, I commit. Fuck me, right?

In all seriousness, I don’t regret that moment. I was simply being honest with myself – I still believed, and I wasn’t prepared to build a life outside of that belief, which is why my mind went straight to sex, drugs and rock and roll. A lot of people go through that phase before they start trying to build a life on family or principle or something more valuable, and maybe I would have too. But it’s just as likely I would have done exactly what I’d been thinking, and come crawling back to the Church after a few months of debauchery. I was, and am, driven by principles. Any life I build has to be based on that, or for me it’s not a life.

So although I was sticking with God, with Christianity, with the familiar Evangelical Christianity I’d always known, I now had to openly acknowledge my doubts. A month or so after this late-night realization, I was talking to a friend of mine named Phil. Phil was truly one of the kindest people I ever knew. He was a nurse, he’d moved with his wife into a set of apartments that were populated with immigrants in order to live among and minister to that community, and they’d later become missionaries in western Asia. As I began to open up to Phil about what I was going to, I laid out the story of my conflicts with Hell. And this is where Phil gave me some of the most consequential advice of my life:

“Joe, you may not ever understand this in this lifetime. The question is, can you follow God anyway?”

And it was a moment of pure clarity – Yes! Yes I could! I could follow God without understanding everything!

That worked for about another 9 years.

To this day I don’t know if that advice was good for me or not. I want to throw a temper tantrum and rage against that mindset – I could have been free a decade ago! I could have been living a better life for so long!

I don’t know that I could have.

I don’t think it’s fair to blame all or even most of my life’s disappointments on the Evangelical culture, though I will say they gave me next to no tools to deal with it. I was insecure in myself from a young age; for me this manifested in a need for attention, a fear of attention, and perhaps most consequentially a need for control. I needed to do everything right, I needed to understand everything, I needed to have perfect motivations for everything I did. I needed to be perfect, free of the doubt and fear and insecurity that this need fueled. I needed the perfect life, married at a young age to a beautiful woman with whom I’d raise children and save the world. So coming to a place where I said that I didn’t need to understand, that I could live my life without planning how it would go, was actually profoundly healthy for me.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet

And a light unto my path. – Psalm 119:105

Around this time, I heard in a sermon that the symbolism of a lamp at your feet was that you only had enough light for the next step. That you had no idea how life was going to turn out, but that God was going to guide you anyway. It was incredibly freeing compared to where I was, but would eventually be a shackle to me as I continued to grow.

Because you see, while it’s freeing to give up control of your life, there’s a hidden hook – that God will work it all out.

Now if you confronted the pastors at the Stone about this, none of them would advocate the popular Prosperity Gospel position that obedience to God results in Earthly success. In fact, most of them were downright bleak with the concept that you might be called to sacrifice everything in the service of the Gospel. But most of us in the audience weren’t that dedicated – if we were we’d probably be the ones going to western Asia. So, for my part, I absorbed the idea that God would complete this work in me – that God would be the one to drive out my fear, my insecurity, that God would be the one to bring me a wife, even while I knew that I was supposed to love God more than my wife.

So while letting go of control was helpful, it would be a longer journey before I began to take responsibility for my own mental health. Giving up the idea that I had to understand Hell in order to follow God was a very small step towards taking control of my own life.

And I only have enough light for one step at a time.

Over the next 9 years I actually made a lot of progress in my own development. I made closer friendships since I wasn’t committed to evangelizing to them. I got in the best shape of my life. I began to confront how I had centered my identity and validation on love and sex (or the idea of those, since I wasn’t getting any), my intelligence, and my friends. I began to strip these things out and center my identity on my faith all the while openly acknowledging doubts about key parts of my faith. Obviously I was setting myself up for another crisis, but I kind of always knew that I would just deal with that when the time came; existential crises were becoming old hat for me.

After clawing my way to a barely-won Ph.D., I moved to Baton Rouge, then to Houston, where I found a good community but spent two years trying to survive an amazingly bitter work environment. My work stress, combined with all of the baggage I’d been dragging around for over a decade, finally drove me to seek out therapy.

First I went to biblical counseling, which I will never recommend to anyone. It wasn’t an ugly experience – my counselor was very kind, and it was helpful to just talk about what was going on. But he told me early on that the way he operated was we would talk about what was going on with me, and that a lot of times we needed to just wait for God to act. Another red flag that I marched right past.

After about three months of counseling, I told him that I was just circling around, dealing with the same shit that I thought I’d already gotten over. And I asked him,

“So what do I do now?”

“Well Joe….I don’t know.”

That was my last session of biblical counseling.

Somewhere during this time, at the beginning of summer in 2018, I decided to move to the East End. I’d been living in Montrose, which was a beautiful, fun, artistic and interesting neighborhood. The East End was a more blue collar, Latino, and industrial, on the cusp of rapid gentrification, for better or worse. I liked the idea of stepping out of my comfort zone, and it would cut my commute by 15 minutes in the morning and up to 40 minutes in the evening. It was also tough because I’d found a church community in Montrose that meant the world to me; we really shared our deep, painful shit together and became closer and stronger. However, my church was planting a new branch over in the East End, and I was excited to be a part of it.

I knew that I didn’t know how to evangelize, because I couldn’t accept Hell. I knew I had no idea what I was doing, but I was done waiting to understand everything in order to take action. I’d been procrastinating my life for about 32 years, and I was sick of it. If I was going to follow Scripture, and commit to the Evangelical church, I was going all out. When I commit, I commit goddammit. So, not fully knowing where I stood with God or my faith, I packed up and moved again, splitting myself off from the community that just in a year had become a second home to me. This would paradoxically turn out to be a very good decision.

A few months later, at the end the summer of 2018 when I gave up on biblical counseling, I was very close to a mental breakdown. I was only sleeping a few hours a night, or not sleeping at all some nights. I constantly felt tense, nauseous, achy. It was around this time that I had about 2 weeks of vacation waiting for me at the Grand Canyon, and I just needed to survive to that point. In the meantime, I looked up a therapist on Psychology Today (tip: if you’re wondering whether you should do this, then you should do this. You can look up therapists based on distance from you, their methods, what insurance they take, etc.) That was an incredibly important step for me to take; it didn’t change my life overnight, but it began giving me tools to cope with the incredible stress I was under, as well as help put me on the road to accepting myself, which is the only real cure for my insecurity.

And for a brief moment, things were looking up. I was becoming a little less stressed, I was getting a grip on my mental health, I was connecting to my new community in East End, I was involved and serving in our church. And in January I finally went to get the tattoo I’d always wanted.

I loved body art, I loved street art, I loved hip hop and indie films, but I’d always felt insecure about my ability to own or express these things. Now, I was fucking. done. procrastinating my life. I spent some time thinking about the tattoo that I wanted; something beautiful, Christian, but……not too overtly Christian. I didn’t exactly have a foot out the door, but it was cracked open, and I couldn’t quit looking at the light outside.

Since I was living my life one step at a time, I felt like the lamp was a perfect metaphor. Specifically, a storm lantern, battered and rusty from wear. My artist worked with me to fill out detail, with a quiet night sky and stars in the background, and it came out beautifully. I was so proud, I was finally expressing myself in the way I wanted.

I would continue with therapy, making some attempt at exercise, committing to my church, getting out and living my life. I had plenty of doubts, plenty of stress, but I knew them, and I was facing them. My life was starting to feel like a life again.

Just about time for one more crisis.

This past April I went to Austin for a trip to see friends. I’d been living in Houston for 2 years and hadn’t driven the 3 hours to see Austin; absurd, I know.

I’m not sure if it’s the memories, the nostalgia, or just the fact that I took a long enough break from life to reflect on the fact that I was helping plant a church and I still was unsure of my own faith … but I broke down. Hell came back. I’d been wrestling with this very core concept of my faith since high school, for the majority of my life at this point.

And I just couldn’t do it anymore.

I spent those 4 days of my vacation just weak from exhaustion and grief. Some friends I told about this, some I didn’t. But I just couldn’t see myself carrying the burden of this theology anymore.

I was sitting in a pizza parlor reading a Medium article that so clearly stated everything that was burning in my mind: the sheer injustice of this concept, the fact that almost no one truly embraced it as a belief, and the downright traumatizing effect it had on me trying to reconcile it, and I was on the verge of tears.

I was just. Fucking. Done.

And it scared me, but not the way you’d think. Because I wasn’t scared of going to hell. I put that concept down and I saw absolutely nothing that would make me pick it back up.

I was scared of losing myself.

I was scared of losing my community.

I was scared that all this time, all of these late night conversations and prayers with God, the times I begged him to help me, and the times I felt His presence, that I had just been alone the whole time.

Now there are a lot of Christians out there that just don’t see the issue; they don’t really believe, or just don’t think about Hell, and go about their business. But I just don’t operate that way. I think it’s still some control I’m learning to let go of (in fact, the first non-Christian woman I dated soon after this asked me if I had ever been diagnosed with OCD; I haven’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me). The whole reason that I was planting a church, abstaining from sex or even dating someone who wasn’t Christian, the whole reason I was trying to get to a point where I could evangelize was that I believed that this was the right way to live. Why the fuck would I put out that much effort if I didn’t? If I believe it, I can’t half-ass it.

But I didn’t believe it, not really. I didn’t believe that anyone would suffer horrifically for all eternity because they didn’t know Jesus, which put my belief in Scripture and the mission of my church in serious doubt. In a way, I was more hypocritical than pick-and-choose Christians; they made rational choices to take the parts of scripture that made sense to them, or brought value to their lives, and just didn’t try to justify the parts they didn’t really believe; obviously there’s a very rich history of this behavior also justifying genocide, slavery, and Donald Trump, and I’m not advocating this approach, but if you choose to live out the parts of scripture that call for compassion, I get it. I’d spent the past 9 years fervently living something that I openly acknowledged that I didn’t believe, or at least couldn’t reconcile.

Yeah I fucking commit. And it almost took my life from me.

After Austin, I was very open with my faith community about what I was going through; I’ve always been open, and it’s served me well. And they have been astonishingly accepting – one of my friends there said “Joe, we’re not expecting you to struggle with this for a year or two then just come back. You may be dealing with this for your entire life, and that’s ok. You’re our family.” I’ve never felt so loved, and that kind of community is what kept me in the mainstream faith for so long, and honestly it’s why I don’t really feel bitter about the path I’ve taken.

But I can’t walk that path anymore. I’ll walk alongside my church family as long as I can (which may very well be the rest of my life), but my own life has to be driven by my own decisions. After a couple of months of reading theology books and debating with my pastor (who’s also a good friend), after all this I was ready to take the last step of the beginning of my life. At 34.

I’m following my own judgment.

It’s that simple.

On matters of eternal consequence, and in my day to day life, I’m making my own decisions. Not because I’m smarter than Peter or Paul or St. Augustine. Because if I don’t make the decision then I can’t own it, I can’t live it. I’m following my best understanding, succeeding and learning, or fucking things up and learning, but I’m moving forward. In some ways it doesn’t make a big change in my life – I’m still going to church, I’m still going to work, I still care about the people around me, I still want to do good in this world.

In some ways it’s causing major changes. My core values are more clearly defined, my future plans don’t center around evangelism, and my dating and sex life is changing significantly (incidentally, this was the final push for me to stop hoping that a woman would validate me, and to accept myself as myself).

I finally have direction in life. I’m making plans for my life with clearer goals. Those goals are much more internally focused, because I acknowledge that I simply cannot predict or control the future. As big or small as my plans are, I’m prepared for them to change drastically, and I’m not depending on them to define me.

I don’t know what I believe about God right now. I still talk to Him every day, hoping that He’s there. If He is, then I believe that He’s given me the agency and responsibility to make these decisions. That pushing myself to make decisions, and to accept and grow from the consequences of those decisions, is the way He has designed me to live. We’re taught that God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit, and maybe this is what that feels like. Or maybe not, in which case the need to hone my judgment is all the more urgent.

I don’t know what my life will look like next year or next week. That’s ok.

I have enough light for the next step in my life.

The only guarantee in life, is a life worth dyin for.