Why I Am (Still) a Christian

A few months ago, I had the absolute delight of hugging my kids goodnight after dinner and driving over to a friend’s house to hang out after their kids were asleep. It had been too long since I’d last seen them, which means I definitely rambled incoherently way too much. But in my defense, my friends had a relative visiting who 1) did not know me and 2) was one of those people who mixes questions with banter in precisely the way that makes one (me, at least) want to carry on endlessly. As our back and forth chatter took its detours, we waded into a series of grievances we each have with various Christian denominations, authors, pastors, and leaders. There is no shortage of material to lament, there. Somewhere between a hearty eye-roll over the state of progressive Christianity and a comment I made without hesitation about how I would happily fist fight Doug Wilson in a Waffle House parking lot, Visiting Relative (after reminding me that if it’s past midnight, I wouldn’t really need to go outside the Waffle House to fight whomever I pleased) asked me why I am still a Christian. It was an extremely fair question - since I obviously have major problems with just about every Christian denomination under the sun. Naturally, I completely blanked out in the same way I forget every movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life the minute someone asks which one my favorite is. (Or what kind of music do I like? What is music? Help! As if I haven’t been obsessed with music and lyrics as far back as I can remember.) I mumbled something about it being because of Jesus - knowing exactly how I sounded yet completely unable to form a full sentence. So much for St Peter’s admonition to “always be ready to give an account to anyone who asks you for the hope that is in you. With gentleness and respect.” For someone who talks so much, I’m really not great at talking sometimes. Obviously, that moment has passed. But I would like to try again. Welcome to my do-over. In which I make another attempt to articulate why I still claim Christianity even though I am an insufferable contrarian who is riddled with grief and anger issues when it comes to The Church. First of all, I am riddled with grief and anger issues when it comes to, oh, every little thing and institution my fellow humans have glanced at (much less, BUILT). Right and Left wing politics, public schools, private schools, homeschool orgs, higher level academia, the entertainment industry, the music industry, the sports industry, etc etc etc - I’ve got beef with all of it. I didn’t get an Oppositional Defiance Disorder diagnosis in 4th grade for nothing! If being alive on planet earth has taught me anything, it’s that in every country, under every government, and in every facet of life - human beings will be power hungry, controlling, self seeking little biznays who ruin good things and trample the innocent. I guess one might imagine The Church should be exempt from this because it’s allegedly a place people go to try to become good focus on grace (and still mess that up by succumbing to behaviorism or whatever), but I have some terrible news about all of that: The Church is also full of people. Wheat and Tares, if you will - and the wheat is still in a sanctification process, so. Humans are just messy, I don’t what to tell anyone. And let’s not forget that I am a messy human, too. Lest it sound like I would dare to leave myself out of all this criticism. If only. Alas. The cost of love is brutally high, but the cost of walling off from fellow humans is unimaginably higher. It is, I’m afraid, exactly as CS Lewis said it is in one of my favorite (if overplayed) quotes from him: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves” But this doesn’t really answer why I am still a Christian, does it? Well, a little bit it does. Because part of still being a Christian is not abandoning the whole thing upon discovery that Christians can be awful. We can be. Of course We can be! More news at 10? People who claim to follow Jesus have been betraying Him since Judas. So what else is new. I must also confess that I feel a certain pressure (probably self-imposed) to present every shred of evidence that has convinced me throughout my life that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Son of the all powerful, all knowing, and all loving creator God depicted in the Hebrew Bible. That He is who He said He is and that doing my best to surrender my life to Him is the best and most reasonable way to live. The high IQ, erudite thinkers closest to me have trained me to deeply value rationality and logic. So of course there have been many times in which I have nearly let go of all of this before I unearthed a satisfying answer to the doubts that surfaced. I am tempted to list them all out for you one by one along with the discoveries that made it impossible for me to let go, but: 1) I think you can and will find all of that type of information if you decide that you want to - and anyway, the likelihood that your sticking points (if you have them) are different than mine are high. It seems to me that everyone has their own specific objections. And 2) At this point, frankly, I’m bored by that part. Let me explain with a story that will truly (finally) bring us to the point! Sometimes I stumble across an important connection out here in the wilds of the internet. The ever elusive Internet Friend. But wait! How am I to know that said Internet friend is for real? I mean, have you seen the state of things? Bots, spam, and scammers abound! At this point, even if someone posts videos of themselves talking, how could we be totally sure it’s really them and not some more Ai generated slop? Whatever, though! I am an xennial harkening to this hellscape from the days of LiveJournal. I have had nothing if not plenty of time to become properly discerning. My ability to tell what’s fake and what’s real in these spaces has honed and fine tuned as years passed and I observed the exact ways everything changed around me. So, by the time Breezy Brookshire (subscribe to her page!) reached out to say hi and connect over a shared love of art - I had seen quite enough evidence that she was not only a real human person, but also the exact human person she claimed to be. And!! Listing out the evidence for these facts would be so boring in the exact same way that listing out evidence for my faith is boring. Do you really want to hear me carry on about social validation through networking and how much one can learn about another via voice memos etc etc?? You can find enough information about how to tell if someone online is who they say they are (in the same way you can find Christian apologetics, too!) to be reasonably sure that this is not only a real person, but also a treasured kindred spirit. I don’t want to dryly recite a bunch of Internet Friend Apologetics! I would much prefer to tell you that I know Breezy Brookshire is a real and lovely person because we are friends! I would much prefer to tell you that a little bit ago, I had another very dear old friend to meet up with and a job to do with said friend who was temporarily in Nashville, and I needed a place to spend the night on very short notice. So I reached out to Breezy - trusting that she was both real and who-she-said-she-was and asked if I could crash on her couch. And that’s how an Internet Friend became an In-Real-Life friend as we sat up to all hours excitedly talking over each other and sharing ideas, paintings, other various handmade things and the dreams we have for them. That’s how we spent the following day working alongside each other and a second evening trying to stretch the time as far as we could make it go before we had to say goodbye. Before I had to drag myself away to drive home in the thick fog full of the buzzing energy and encouragement that comes with genuine connection. If someone asks me why I am still a Christian, I am wont to say “it’s because of Jesus” in the same way that if someone asked me why I still think I can make real friends on the internet, I knee jerk to an example like, “Because Breezy is my friend!” I know how this will sound to the skeptic - I know. I hear it all through their ears as I say it, but the truth is that the skepticism I am met with over my faith feels exactly as absurd to me as someone insisting Breezy isn’t real when I know good and well that she welcomed me into her home and shared dried mango slices with me while she made us a cozy dinner and listened so well while I accidentally rapidfire told her one thousand of my life stories all at once. Of course, I understand why and how personal experience offered as evidence for Christianity is easily hand waved away by anyone who doesn’t already believe in it and/or simply isn’t interested in changing or even challenging their current worldview. Interestingly, I didn’t realize how hung up I am on all these reasons for unbelief that keep me up at night until a few days ago. I was at a lunch table with the other moms at our weekly homeschool co-op meeting, lamenting the longstanding unbelief of some of my most treasured (and respected and admired) friends. Confiding. I was carrying on about how brilliant they are. How practical and independent on the outside. How tender (nougat-y, even) inside. And then - a standard refrain for me - a good bit about how our culture sabotages belief in the Christian story. And how Christians, ourselves, do some of the worst damage to it. How spiritual abuse can factor in. How many important words like “grace”, “redemption”, and even “love” are often misused so egregiously that they are stripped of meaning or imbued with the opposite of their true meaning when heard in a culturally Christian context. One of the wiser-than-me mamas stopped me. “Sarah”, she said, “Any time anyone has a conversion that is real, it is always because they became aware of their need.” The fact that it took me a minute to metabolize that is kind of hilarious in hindsight. It is one of the most basic and foundational truths that exist, and I had not actively thought about it in so long, I had practically forgotten that it is even a factor in the unbelief of others. So I have been marinating about this ever since she said it, and it’s really fascinating to me to realize that for some people, seeing their need may be harder than finding enough reasonable evidence and/or overcoming the sharp edges of American Cultural Christianity. But I think she’s right - regardless of which part is hardest, the precursor to any of it is becoming aware of how desperate the state of our spiritual poverty is. Even when we think we are managing it all on our own just fine. Because, why would anyone want to go seeking out evidence or putting up with churchy nonsense if they felt they have it all handled and are perfectly well enough off, thankyouverymuch? I think there are a lot of well meaning attempts by my fellow Christians to try to force open the eyes of those who haven’t seen it yet. And I am, admittedly, distrustful of the vast majority of these attempts. I’m not sure you can convince anyone that they need a God they don’t even believe in, let alone trust by banging on about how wretched and depraved we all are at our core. Those words probably sound pretty nonsensical to your average fellow citizen who makes an effort to show up for their friends and family and love to give to a good cause just as much as the next guy. The truth is that by and large, most people are doing their best (in the colloquial sense, anyway) and they’re not wrong to disallow anyone from gaslighting them out of knowing it. It’s not bad for them to put up a wall that would shield them from taking on inappropriate shame. I had a friend a long time ago who converted to some lethal level of Calvinism and took up telling me I was going to hell every time I logged onto Facebook. I kept reminding him that I’m a Christian already, so he could consider chilling out? But he would just circle back to “have you ever told a lie? Then you’re a liar! Have you ever thought a mean thing about someone in your heart? Then you’re a murderer!” Etc etc and remind me that the Bible says liars and murderers are going to hell. And I would (obviously) say something like, “sure but for Jesus’s grace that covers us, right?” To which he would insist that I didn’t have access to that. It was very confusing. Ultimately, I had to block him. One time (before I finally blocked him), he dogpiled on me with some of his street preacher buddies and somehow I upset them all so much that one of them lost it and shouted, “OKAY, JUST GO READ YOUR COPY OF THE RAGAMUFFIN GOSPEL THEN, YOU DAMN HIPPY”. I had never heard of that book and it sounded promising, so I did go seek out a copy and I did read it. Bro meant it as an insult but it turned out to be an excellent book recommendation, so… win/win? This is an extreme example, of course, but it’s a caricature of how Christians can sound to those completely outside our worldview. We know 1 Corinthians 13:1. We know “if I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a clanging gong or a resounding symbol” - but I do so often have doubts about whether or not we really do know. You don’t try to shout down someone you love or try to make them believe they are a walking piece of crap. That’s not how Jesus talked about people. The wisest Christian I know told me it was Godspell that cracked the door open for her to surrender to Christ, because it wasn’t until she saw Him portrayed that way that she realized He (the real Him) is approachable. And that made sense to me. I don’t mean to brag, but I don’t think I ever had to be convinced of my need. Maybe it’s something about being corrected 20,000 more times by the age of ten than my neurotypical peers or the fact that I can’t ever seem to consistently be on time for anything or the abject horror show of intrusive thoughts conjured by my probably-misfiring brain or maybe it’s the acute awareness of the millions of ways I miss the mark day in and day out - and it’s not even just that!! It’s that I know I choose comfort over goodness often. It’s that I am painfully finite. I have a limit. And that means sometimes people will either be hurt by my bubbling over of resentment and exhaustion if I white knuckle myself beyond my limits … or they will sometimes be hurt by the boundaries I impose to protect those limits. It means I don’t always know for sure where the limits truly are and I am susceptible to drawing those lines poorly while I try to figure out where they really need to go. I’m not trying to turn this into a confession of all my overt sins - obviously I would be doing a terrible job of it if that’s what this was. Most of the examples I’ve given you could be explained away as “not my fault”. Just please believe me when I say that I have a long history of true screwups that were nobody’s fault but mine. Not something that can be excused by a disorder or fatigue - true fault. And my point is: Any time I have ever heard someone say they can’t imagine what they would need God for, all I can think is, “oh friend I need Him before I even begin to factor in sin.” I have spent the better part of my life clinging to Jesus the way someone who is severely drunk clings to their sober friend as they walk home together. Someone might ask me why I’m still a Christian and I think, “I can’t walk without Jesus.” I can’t walk without Him. Speaking of which, I’ve heard the accusation that some of us are using religion as a crutch, and I would like to counter that with: Yeah? You sweet, sweet summer child? Wait until you find out that leg you’ve been hobbling around on all this time, crutchless, is just as broken as mine! Put a whole cast on that thing, dang! In all seriousness, there are a lot of ways to think about spiritual poverty. I think most of my dear ones who are not here for it are pretty super-saturated in the culture of American Protestantism, to the point where a word like “sin” is already an offputting buzzword. They may have already even heard it said that the definition of sin is (as I mentioned earlier) to “miss the mark”, and even that simple definition has been soaked in shame-language at this point. That ubiquitous verse about removing the plank from your own eye so you can see clearly enough to get the splinter out of your brother’s comes into my mind sometimes, because we can find such a brilliant analogy in there if we take a break from hearing is as a tired figure of speech. Have you ever had a splinter in your eye? Have you ever had a splinter in your eye that was so thoroughly evading all your efforts to remove it that you had to give in and ask someone for help? In my experience, by the time it gets to that point, you are in so much agony that it really feels like nothing else exists except your eyeball. You are just one giant suffering eye. And have you helped someone remove a speck from their eye? Do you have any idea how tender, delicate, and careful this endeavor is? Now that I think about it, the last time I had to help someone get a thing (a chunk of sharp sand, in this case) out of her eye, the only thing for it was to find some running water that could wash out what my hands could not begin to clear out on their own. Certainly not without causing more damage, anyway. There are some things only water can fix. There are some things only Jesus’s Living Water can fix. And so, my frustration with clumsy-handed attempts at fixing people made by each denomination abounds. But so does my enduring gratitude for the times when my brothers and sisters in Christ have led me to the metaphorical running water to help me wash the splinters out of my eyes. There is a lot of learning and healing to be found in most denominations if you spend enough time around healthy communities within them and/or reading their philosophies. If I recall correctly (for example) it’s primarily an Eastern Orthodox way of describing our human condition to note that distance from God is movement towards death vs closeness to Him being the thing that fills us with life. I think about this literally but also in general terms of entropy and decay. So, again: why am I still a Christian? Because (among all these other things) I can’t rescue myself from my own sin and I can’t rescue myself from entropy and decay! I do believe that Jesus made a way for us - that by trusting Him and surrendering to Him, that we can boldly draw close to God and I want to boldly draw close to God. I need to. The horribly, deeply unpopular truth is that we all do. Pastor Tim Keller once said “The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00am for a glass of water is a child.” That’s the terms I need to be on with God. So, where are we, in my answer to this question? 1: I am still a Christian because I am convinced it is true. 2: I am still a Christian because I know the depth of my need. Now for part 3: I am still a Christian because of my personal experiences. Don’t even get me started on the prophetic dreams that have broken into my reality. More stories for another time. I really don’t think anyone believes because of signs and wonders. It does seem like that would be the thing, but you might be surprised at how adept people are at explaining things away or attributing them to some other worldview that better suits their priors. But sometimes the Lord reaches into my day to remind me that He is not some vague concept that I have invented and completely understood, but rather He is a living Being with personhood and a will all His own. He doesn’t show up the way I would expect Him to. He once startled me out of contentment with a warning that came out of nowhere and saved a life. I walked into my kitchen and saw a weird swarm of wasps, and felt Him tell me to call my several-states-away loved one - whom I hadn’t even been fretting over in the least until that moment. It was a critical moment. Another time, I was standing in my kitchen, crying to my sister in law because I was missing far away friends, and she said “Sarah wait, wait” took my phone out of my hands to capture a picture, and handed it back to me so I could see the way the light shining through the window was making a heart on my cheek. The God of the universe Who loves me even when I feel the most absurd kisses my cheeks with hearts when I cry and there’s nothing you could ever say to convince me otherwise. It’s as real as Breezy’s dried mango slices. He knows I receive hearts as love notes from Him, so He sends them. And yes - I know about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (the “frequency illusion”) which is basically a combo of selective attention and confirmation bias. Someone, please tell the insufferable nerds in my head they can dissect a tree frog if they really want to, but we will never hear it chirp again, so hush already! This is not that, and anyway, I have never in my life been able to select where my attention goes in any sustained sort of way. The hearts turn up when God knows I need them. At the pool when I feel like a slug: Scratched into my driveway after a tornado knocked a tree onto our house: And it’s not always hearts. Sometimes, it’s acorns. Sometimes, I am sitting outside in the absolute pit of despair wondering if I am completely unlovable (perhaps) and the Lord drops an acorn directly on my head. It is very sassy. I know I sound insane to anyone who hasn’t felt the presence of the “still small voice” laugh playfully at them, but this is just a fact of life for me. So is knowing it’s Him. ABBA Father, as represented through His beloved Son, Jesus. If you ask God to develop a shorthand with you, He might just do it. You might have to forfeit your seat at the erudite table and you might notice a lot of Very Smart People becoming unable to take you seriously after a while, but for whatever it’s worth, none of that has ever held a candle to the glimpses I have gotten of what it’s like to walk around in this world knowing there’s a Heavenly Kingdom that is here, too, in some mysterious way that I can never quite get my head around. And that I get to belong to it. And then there’s the Body of Christ. Yeah there’s the tares, the wolves in sheep’s clothing out there being terrible, and the people still in process of becoming fit for Heaven - rough around the edges, the whole lot of us. But there’s also the beauty of telling a friend (who also knows your Abba Father because He is hers, too) that this morning He dropped an acorn on your head to tell you that you are not just lovable, but loved - and immediately getting a text back from her about how acorns are also about growth. “The Lord is reminding you that you are still growing.”, she’ll say. She also sent me a verse that she had read earlier that day, from the ever-maligned Message translation of the Bible that I happen to love: “How can we picture God’s kingdom? What kind of story can we use? It’s like an acorn. When it lands on the ground it is quite small as seeds go, yet once it is planted, it grows into a huge oak tree with thick branches. Eagles nest in it.” - Mark 4:30-32 It is a huge understatement for me to say that it gives me life to get to hear God in the stillness, through His creation, and through the connections made by friends who love Him. To be prayed for? You’re going to spend time talking to our Abba about me? I cannot think of a sweeter thing. One time, back in college, I was sitting on the floor between bookshelves reading something dry and boring to myself, and another young woman from the class I was studying for found me, so she plopped down to see if I could help her figure out some work we had in common. Our conversation eventually revealed our shared faith to each other, and as we chatted on through the rest of that exchange, I swear the library changed in a way that I don’t think I can explain without sounding ridiculous, but (out of love for you, dear reader) I will try. It was as if the part of our world that is God’s Kingdom became higher resolution than the rest. And the part that is passing away faded into the background. I experience this around other believers sometimes. Not usually in church, unfortunately. I typically don’t fit in at church. Sometimes it seems like there is an interpretation of how to be a Good Christian that boils down to being a good church goer by arriving on time in correct attire and participating in events and signing up to help with church things and throwing your tithe into the basket and having kids who sit nicely in the pews. And sitting nicely in the pews and listening well, myself. I find all this comically incompatible with every temperamental bent in my nature. And though I think these things are respectful and good, I definitely don’t think any of them actually make it onto a list of top ten most important Christian virtues. Though I notice Heaven glistening all over the world around us like a sugar dusting of November morning snow in connected moments with other believers, it is still stupid hard for me, sometimes, not to flirt with the idea of giving up on attending a local church. But as long as I believe Jesus wants me to go (and I do believe He does), I will keep trying to go. Because I love Him. Because He loved me first, you know? So there we go; I hope that answers the question. As my life unfolds, I will always only be going with Jesus. “Further up, and further in” as He finishes the work He started in me, along with sweet Holy Spirit, just like He promised. Cause there is no way I’m doing that work without Him. Since I can’t think of anything better, I hope you will forgive me for always being out here believing it for you, too, even if you’re not in it yet. If I know anything at all, I know that goodness and mercy surely do pursue us all the days of our lives. I hope all the traffic lights you hit this week are green and I hope the books you are reading are about to get really, really good. Thank you so much for reading this little manifesto. All my love to you, my friends! The Escape Hatch (by Duckie Louise) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. If you would like to encourage my work without subscribing, feel free to buy me an essay-fueling coffee! Get full access to The Escape Hatch (by Duckie Louise) at duckie.substack.com/subscribe