Week 5-6 Recap: It is Finished (But Not Really)

I skipped last week’s update in favor of extending my recap window to cover the last five days. So this will be an overall summary and probably the last update here for a little while.

I finished my 40 days of Christianity y’all.

I have so many thoughts, stories, emotions, and opinions I could share. It’s tempting to let it all fly, but I know I need more time to let things coalesce. It’ll take at least another forty days just to process everything I just experienced. For now, I’ll offer a summary of how I spent the time, a few select takeaways, and what I see as the next steps in my journey.

What I Did

I read a lot (for me - I’m not typically a big reader) including over a third of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Proverbs, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, Titus, 1-3 John, Revelation. And non-Bible Christian books: Augustine’s Confessions (books 1-9, I’m gonna finish the last four at some point), Martin Luther’s The Freedom of the Christian, CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, Francis Chan’s Beloved, and Robert Jeffress’s How Can I Know?

After reading a few hours each morning, I spent about 30min in quiet prayer and reflection. Prayer felt clumsy - it was a mix of repeating the Lord’s prayer (sometimes verbatim, sometimes in my own words), sitting in silence letting God know I was listening, telling God what was on my mind (but often struggling to not feel like it was contrived). Some of you reassured me that’s what prayer feels like a lot of times to a lot of Christians - maybe you were just trying to make me feel better but if that was the case it worked.

I listened to a lot of Christian music, sermons, and podcasts, and followed a variety of faith-focused social media accounts. And I went to church services on Sundays - visiting different denominations/styles each week. But probably the most impactful part of this experiment was reading the 50+ faith stories I received and meeting with about 25 believers to hear more of their stories.

Some Takeaways

It was an enlightening experience.

I refreshed a lot of my knowledge of the Bible and Christian doctrine, but more significantly I broadened my exposure to the wide umbrella of Christian traditions. I delved back into my southern baptist roots but also spoke to a handful of "liberal Christians," Catholics, Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, Methodists, and several that reject any label other than “I’m just pretty into Jesus.”

Some of these conversations sparked new friendships. Others rekindled old ones with some people I hadn’t seen in 20 years. Most of them felt really sweet - including with some folks where religion has been a tense, conflict-ridden topic at times. Before this experience, those conversations seemed to devolve into pointless arguments. A key difference this time around was my commitment to keep my mouth shut about my own experience and make room for theirs. I asked questions, noted where I related, and otherwise just listened*.

*At least, that's what I aspired to do. I gotta be honest that especially toward the end my discipline slipped a little and I let a couple of conversations become more debate-like than what I wanted.*

I think tribalism often complicates these conversations, but my wearing the “Christian” label for these forty days softened that. Holding my contrary views with an open hand didn’t erase the fact that I’m a real person with a real lived experience and good reasons for thinking the way I do. But it did remove a layer of tribal separation between us. It stopped feeling like I was the heathen they needed to defeat or defend against and more like I was a willing convert, ready to be welcomed into their tribe.

That goodwill wasn’t universal, though. Several times, I’d invited someone to share their story, and they rushed through a pretty shallow version of it as the price of admission to aggressively evangelize me and fear monger about the “eternal consequences” of my rebellion. Some of these, I think they'd convinced themselves that the headline of my first article meant I was sprinting back to Jesus, and when that turned out not to be the vibe, their disappointment was palpable.

Let me be very clear: I do not view all Christians as being like this.

That group was a clear minority of the people I had exchanges with. If that’s not how you engage with people outside your faith, I’m not talking about you. I bring this up as an honest part of my experience and to point out an important takeaway for me.

The more likely a Christian was to anxiously warn me not to let “some Christians” turn me off to Jesus, the more likely it was that they were actually the type of Christian they were warning me about. Because the warning itself is having the effect they're warning against - It assumes I don’t have the judgment to tell one person apart from a larger belief system, and it asks me to override my own judgment with theirs. And here's the thing. I know that move well because I used to make it myself, back when I was the one worried somebody’s bad experience with a Christian might cost them their faith in Jesus. It’s humbling to recognize that from the other side now. That sobering role reversal ended up being a prominent theme for this whole period.

It came up again when I encountered these frequent patterns of judgments about me.

• That I’m struggling, lost, desperate for answers (I’m not - I love my life and feel very grounded and peaceful).
• That I must have confused the real gospel for a distorted version or cultural Christianity (I didn’t - I had a very real spiritual awakening in college that drove a decade of life-encompassing belief and ministry).
• That I must have gotten hurt by someone in the church that drove me away (I didn’t - I was deeply involved in my local churches over the years and loved most of the people there).
• That I’ve been “hard-hearted,” and this exercise is God softening my heart (I think hard-hearted is Christianese for being stubborn or close-minded, and I see both my choice to leave the faith and this choice to return to it as expressions of my openness, not an indictment that I need divine intervention to fix my stubbornness).

I don’t want this to come off defensive or finger-pointing, because the real reason these judgments even sting is that they are a mirror. They’re a reflection of how I used to view people who weren’t like me - funneling everyone into a pre-formed script that would bolster my ideology, and assuming someone was lying to me or themselves any time they didn’t fit one of these narratives. It sucks to be judged like this, but it sucks more to live life as the judge.

Living as the judge alienated people who were different from me and isolated me into an echo chamber. But worse, it alienated me from myself. It caused me to ignore, suppress, or hate the parts of myself that didn’t align with my narrative. And ultimately, it drove me to a really dark place years ago out of fear of ending up on the wrong side of my own judgments.

I’m not trying to cast that story onto all Christians, or onto anyone but myself. But it’s been an honest part of my story that re-engaging with religion helped me better understand and grieve.

What’s Ahead

My theology, feelings, and practices are still in flux. At some point when I’ve had the time and space to integrate this, I’ll post more public content about my reflections on this process. Mel and I are having a baby any day now, so that’s gonna be my main focus for a little while, but I’ll say hey at some point early next year.

Follow Up Convos

For the past 40+ days, my engagement with Christianity has been mostly one-sided. I've been taking things in. Holding ideas with an open hand. Listening without judging. Not to say I’ve done all that amazingly, just that I’ve done my best.

Moving forward, I’d like to keep the process going, but now beginning to make space for my own point of view. I want to engage with more probing questions, share my own story with those who want to hear it, and refine my spiritual practice in light of this experience.

To that end, let me know if you’d like to be part of that (reach out on instagram if you don't have my number). Especially if you’re one of the people who contributed your story or a conversation during these 40 days and you want to keep the conversation going, hit me up. For real do it.

Worship Album

If you follow my social media, you may have seen me post snippets from two worship song demos. You can listen to those on my soundcloud: Eternity and One True Love. I’ve got several more of these I may post at some point, and I think I will probably finish a whole album of these.

Singing worship songs was a way for me to re-engage the prayerful, worshipful parts of me in a creative, embodied way. Writing and singing Christian worship was my first connection to music, and there’s something comforting about returning to those roots and letting go of the hangups I’ve had with it.

What’s Your 40 Days?

A handful of the Christians I talked to half-joked about doing their own “40 days of atheism.” Note: I’m not trying to convert anyone to atheism (I’ve never labeled myself an atheist btw), but I think the underlying concept is worth considering, reckoning with questions from outside your familiar system that's granted you predetermined answers.

Beyond religion, you could apply this format to almost anything you want to actually test instead of just assume:

• 40 days off social media
• 40 day work sabbatical
• 40 days without a vice (drinking, smoking, diet coke, etc)
• 40 days of switching political sides (right v left)
• 40 days of a different diet or exercise practice
• 40 days living in different location

Forty days is a great timeline because it’s short enough to not get overwhelmed by the idea of permanence - it can feel like too much to imagine never going back to the comfortable version of whatever it is you’re challenging. Yet, it’s also long enough to dissolve your impulsive resistance to discomfort and build new habits.

Lmk if you decide to do some version of this - I’d be interested to hear about it.

Thank you for your support and encouragement of my journey here. I hope it’s given you something back.

Peace & love homies