reaching.

I only have a handful of friends that are Christians, and about half of them are struggling with what that means. Most days, I am too.

One of these friends, a guy active in his church, confessed a few weeks ago that he doesn’t know if he still believes the stories in the Bible are true.

“I mean, you can believe they’re true, and you can live like they are, but there’s no way to really know they are.”

I talked about this with my friend Mandie when we had church at a coffee shop. She told me that when she begins to doubt her faith, a couple of things happen.

First, she gets scared. I can identify with that. Sometimes I wonder if I believe the things I do simply because so much of my life has been invested in believing. For fourteen years I’ve tried, and failed, and tried again to live my life in a way that pleases a Father I’ve never actually met. Everyone who follows Christ is. I know that thought makes a lot of Christians cringe, but I hope they understand what I mean; we’ve never met Him in the traditional sense – never shared a handshake or a bag of Twizzlers. Asking yourself “What if it’s not true?” is a scary thing for most of us.

The exception would be my friend Nicole, who I’ve written about before. She told me once that she didn’t care if somebody proved none of it was true; she would keep following because she likes the way it feels and the results it’s had in her life. I walked home the night she told me that wondering if I felt that same way. I don’t think I do.

The second thing Mandie told me that happens when she begins to doubt her faith is her life becomes stagnant.

“Like nothing really matters, and I have no purpose.”

I can see the truth of that in my life. I get caught up in what I’m doing and forget who I’m doing it for, and it’s not long before my identity is tied up in the job I have or whether I wrote anything that week, or even attempted to. It’s pretty miserable, really. I start getting depressed, and begin feeling that if I don’t get the next grant and the nonprofit my friend and I run has to shut down then everything is my fault and I’m a failure. I worry about where I would go and wonder if I would have the strength to start all over. Again. I start to feel like I’m being used, and forget that being used is a privilege, not a sacrifice.

It’s evident in my friends’ lives, too – the ones who are wrestling with doubt. They’re feeling the weight of having to know the answers, feeling the pressure of tomorrow, feeling – worse of all – a loss of joy.

A few nights ago I went for a walk to think about these things. The season has started to change, and, as usual, when it does something inside me begins to wake up.

I thought about my friend Phillip and the night a few weeks ago when he asked me if I wanted to ride motorcycles with him to church.

“We can get pizza and beer after,” he had promised.

While we were riding across the bridge, I started thinking about all of the things I wouldn’t like about sitting through a church service. I thought about how the guitarist in the band would have just the right hair cut, and how while they played the crowd would stand, the girls with their hands outstretched and the guys with a fist in the air. I realize that this wasn’t fair, and that you get out of things what you put into it, and the truth is, the people I saw there and the few I met could not have been any nicer. Still, I felt out of place, like everyone else in the room was wearing a red shirt - and I knew we were supposed to - but the only color I had was blue. People didn’t whisper and point, but I could tell. I didn’t belong.

But I used to. And sometimes I miss it. Rainer Rilke called it “the great homesickness we could never shake off.” I rarely feel at home. Most Sunday mornings, whether I’m going to church or – more frequently these days – skipping, I think about the life I used to have, and wish I could have one more conversation with everyone, all of us crowded around a table on a porch. I want to let Nate know I forgive him, even though he’s never asked for it. Most days I do. Or maybe it would be best to not even mention it. I want us to be friends again. I want to hear about his life, and to tell him about my girlfriend and my job and the new friends I’ve made. I want him to be my church.

Sometimes, I think forgiving would be easier if I wasn't such shit at forgetting.
The relationship between forgiving and forgetting is the thing about Christianity that frustrates me the most. Jesus said that we're forgiven to the extent of which we forgive. It also says in the Bible that God is able to take our wrongs done to Him and throw them as far away as the east is from the west. If I'm not reading too much into that, it means that not only does he not hold my sin against me; he actually wipes it from his memory.

Maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe letting go isn't as much about forgetting, about running away from a memory, as it is about returning to one- grace. Maybe God is so in love with us he's like a goldfish continually rediscovering the other side of the bowl; the slate's wiped clean and we get to wake up reborn, innocent and full of new life, not attached to life the way it used to be.

I passed Leroy while I was walking down King Street. Leroy is homeless, and in a wheelchair.

“Excuse me,” he said.

I took my headphones out of my ear and put them in my pocket.

“How far down there are you going?”

“I don’t really know,” I told him. “Planning to go to the Battery and just walk for a bit.”

He stared at me, like he wanted to ask me something but was embarrassed to.

“Can I take you somewhere?” I offered.

“Could you just take me to the first stoplight down there?” He lifted his arm and pointed to the stoplight. His hand was covered with bumps, one near his wrist was almost the size of his pinky.

“Yea… sure.” I said. I started to push him, taking small steps so my shins wouldn’t hit the back of his chair.

Four women dressed for a night out walked out of Charleston Place, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, admiring each other’s shoes. They made me angry, not because I was in a hurry, but because I began to wonder what it would feel like to be trapped in a wheel chair and have to listen to people talk about their feet.

The women didn’t notice us, even though we were five feet behind them. Finally they began to walk, even slower than we were going.

I asked Leroy how long he’s lived in Charleston.

“Since twelve years before Kennedy was assassinated.”

When we got to the corner he said he was going left. I asked him where he was headed, and he told me he didn’t want me to go out of my way.

“I’m not really heading anywhere,” I said. “Just wanted to get out.”

“Well I’m going to the corner of Market and Church.”

I told him I would go with him.

While I pushed him to down the sidewalk, past the hotel and restaurants and candy stores, I asked him why he was going to the Market.

“I’m going to sell these pencils,” he told me, shaking a plastic cup full of pencils decorated with cartoon characters like it should have been obvious.

I wondered how many pencils he would sell that night, and what he would rather be doing if he could do anything, with anyone, anywhere. I wanted to ask him how long he’d been in the wheelchair, and if he still missed being able to use his legs, or if it had been so long he’d forgotten what it was like.

I wondered if he felt more complete than me.

I stood with him for a few minutes on the corner of Market and Church. Nobody wanted any pencils. I couldn’t think of anything that seemed right to say, so I just told him I’d see him around and started to walk. I went down to the Battery, and through all the residential streets south of Broad, and finally, around Colonial Lake. While I was walking I started to pray, or something close to it.

I told God that as much as I wanted to know the answers to all that happened in Columbia, as much as I wanted to figure out why my wife and friends and church and even He seemed to abandon me, I didn’t want to be stuck trying to figure it out forever. I wanted my life to keep moving. For a moment, sitting on the bench looking at the reflection of the moon on the water, I felt as if I was looking inside the period at the end of a difficult sentence, not just seeing a dot on a page, but seeing a rest, a space, a breath. I felt, for a moment, a return to who I used to be.

***

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, the same one I come to for church with Mandie and her friends sometimes. One of the employees just walked by with a wet rag, wiping crumbs off the table someone left.

“What are you writing about?” he asked.

I gave him my usual answer.

“I don’t know. Whatever comes out.”

I wish I could have been honest. What comes out are usually stories of longing.

Longing to be able to stand, and run. Longing not to doubt. Longing for purpose. Longing for a friendship I used to have. Longing for the ability to trust in God the way I used to, with no fear of getting screwed. Longing, somehow, for my past, and a completely separate future. Longing for somebody else, or occasionally, to be somebody else.
Longing to know everything is going to be ok.

When I’m still, usually in the mornings – sitting outside with my back against the front of my house – I recognize it’s really just a longing to live.

I want to live today and not just tomorrow. Or yesterday.
I want to learn from those around me, to absorb their strength and their grace. I want to dance with my girlfriend, even though I’m rhythmless. I want to put an extra pump of butter on my popcorn, run another mile, give something I thought I needed away. I want to write a story I love, and then tear it up anyway, because that one was just for me. I want to pass out high-fives as if they cured cancer; maybe they do. I want to study a globe, put one finger on a place I’ve been and another on a place I want to go. I want to sit in the grass with my back against a tree and remember the lava-lamp glow of the Northern Lights above a snow-covered field in Norway. I want to have a late-night beer with a friend, maybe Adam, or Drew.
Mostly I want to love to forgive.

***

Last night, driving home from Savannah, I caught the last few minutes of the Jazz Piano program on NPR. I don’t know who the guest artist was, but I felt like he could have been any of us. He was referencing a recent concert he had performed at Carnegie Hall.

“When I was playing, I heard two songs: the one in my head I wanted to play, and the one on the keyboard I was able to.”

The segment ended with an excerpt from the concert, and you could hear it, in the middle of the song, a pause and a groan, like he was stretching for something just out of reach.