Spinning at the Crossroads: My Life With Religious OCD

A perilous beautiful move, choosing to throw yourself at the future, even if it means one day coming down in the sea.
– Leif Enger, Virgil Wander

I.

I’m standing in the middle of a country intersection, drenched in rain, and the fields around me are singing. I can hear their music in the sound of droplets hitting soil, in the tidal hiss of corn stalks swept by wind, in the watery echoes from the culvert by the roadside. I close my eyes. Tune my ears for harmony.

Is this, I wonder, what the prophet Isaiah meant when he described the trees of the field clapping their hands, the mountains and hills bursting into song? Not just a promise of redemption, but an ever-present hymn of praise?

Ahead of me, a stop sign titles at a dangerous angle. Fifty yards beyond it, where the fields are broken by a stretch of pines, the pale walls of a farmhouse rise ghostlike from the mud. The house’s yard and driveway are empty. I’m still not used to the stillness of rural Michigan – the absence of bustle and buildings – but I’m glad that I’ve walked to this spot. It’s where I perform the ritual.

Very slowly, I make a series of ninety degree turns, gazing down each dirt road to the place where it touches skyline. I pause for twenty seconds after each turn. Rainwater blurs my glasses, and I wipe the lenses clean with the sleeve of my jacket. Eventually, my rotation leaves me staring down the road I’ve come from. I shut my eyes again and murmur a quick prayer. Listen for the voice that rumbles, faint but steadying like a bass groove, beneath the others. Then I head for home.

In the years that follow, I’ll return to this intersection again and again, repeating the same exact sequence of turns – always counterclockwise, often on rainy days. Unlike most of the rites that I’ve performed throughout my life, this is one I get to choose, and it’s a lifeline. I need to be here, spinning at the crossroads, straining to hear voices in the wind and rain. I need to feel the roads unfurling themselves beneath me, and I need to remember what they mean.

II.

The rituals begin early, although I won’t recognize them as such for many years. “I’m sorry” comes first. Once, when I’m six years old, I sit beneath the maple in my grandparents’ front lawn with my head bowed and a handwritten apology note in my lap. I’m worried that I’ve offended one of my grandmother’s friends – a kindly, soft-spoken woman who is visiting our family cookout – and I’m awaiting her departure to deliver my message. The offense? Not greeting her warmly enough. The lady didn’t seem offended by this, but the mere possibility that I might’ve hurt her feelings is eating me up inside. The only way to still this anxiety is to make a formal apology. My mother spies me through the lace curtains of my grandparents’ windows. As I grow, she’ll recall this story many times. Her eyes will shine whenever she tells it. “You had such a strong conscience, even then,” she’ll say, tousling my hair. “You always needed to make things right.”

As you might’ve guessed, I’m not a strong-willed child. Energetic? You betcha – a whirlwind of pounding feet and ceaseless chatter, always running headlong and leaping over furniture when I’m not dashing off stories with Crayola washable markers. However, I treat my parents’ rules as gospel, and I’m quick to confess mistakes. Sometimes, my urge to right wrongs makes sense, as when I’ve stolen chocolate and then lied about stealing chocolate. Other times, it could be overkill, as when I stumble through a dark house in the middle of the night to ensure that the boogers I’ve picked wind up in the trash. I feel at peace while doing what’s expected of me. Conversely, if I’ve transgressed a boundary – any boundary at all – then I feel scared, restless, and unmoored.

This conscientious streak serves me well. I’m raised in a devoutly religious family as the son of Baptist missionaries. When I’m four years old, my parents stow our family’s belongings in cardboard boxes and move us to the village of Vel’ký Biel, Slovakia. I’m too young to grasp the details of their ministry, which involves assisting local evangelical churches. My time in Eastern Europe is a blur of backyard play with my two brothers and two sisters, Sonlight curriculum homeschool assignments, and weekend trips to Bratislava and Budapest. Yet religion pulses like lifeblood through our days, and I grow to love its rhythms. The Sunday gatherings at the local pentecostal church, where elderly congregants speak in tongues. The hushed prayers before meals and bedtime. The family devotionals on Easter and Christmas Eve. The Awana clubs with their sticker charts and flannel graphs and Bible memorization games. As good Baptists, we avoid the term “liturgy” (much too Catholic), but that’s what this sacred procession is – from the Greek leitourgia, “the work of the people.” My people.

I grow up surrounded by stories. Father Abraham, frail with exhaustion and old age, trading blows with Yahweh under the moon. Moses smashing tablets on the dusty slopes of Sinai. Storm-tossed Jonah facing down the abyss of a whale’s maw. The Narnia books and VeggieTales VHS tapes and Adventures in Odyssey cassettes (if you know, you know). These tales kindle my young imagination, but the stories that my family tells are even better. My paternal grandparents are both Christian authors, and my dad inherited their narrative gift. I listen, shaking with laughter, as Dad and Grandpa describe pranks at Bible school, and I hold my breath as they recount proof of God’s faithfulness. Grandpa evangelizing a homeless prizefighter at knifepoint on Skid Row. Dad, stranded as Sabbath evening fell in Jerusalem, praying for taxi fare and watching the wind carry a twenty-shekel note to his feet. The bus he missed when my older brother was sick, which was pulverized by a suicide bomber. This heritage of faith is the tapestry into which my youthful dreams will be woven, the drama in which my story will play a small but meaningful part. God’s existence is always a given, and I yearn to make him and my family proud.

I’m five years old when I say the Sinner’s Prayer for the first time. I sit cross-legged on my bunk, listening as Dad describes Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross. This story makes intuitive sense to me, and it also confirms my deepest fears. I’ve offended someone with my misbehavior – the ruler of the universe, in fact – so much so that I deserve separation from the source of all goodness. Unlike many Baptist parents, my dad doesn’t mention hellfire or brimstone. Instead, he describes God’s radical love for humanity in general and me in particular. Yet I sense that the stakes are high. My fibs and pride and petty crimes (that darn chocolate) have already caused the death of God’s beloved son. Left unchecked, they’ll ruin me. I welcome Jesus into my heart with eyes screwed shut, willing myself to mean every word. Later, when I press the landline receiver against my ear and tell my grandparents that I’ve been born again, elation surges through me like an electric current. My mistakes might fill me with shame, but they can’t come between me and God anymore. I’m safe.

III.

When I’m eight years old, my family returns to the United States and settles in a suburb of Grand Rapids. The move is abrupt. We miss our friends, and American culture takes some getting used to. Yet life rolls on as before. My energy levels continue unabated; as a fourth grader, I organize a puppet show troupe, invent a knockoff D&D game for my classmates to play at recess, and fill Mead notebooks with secret agent novels. My teacher watches my pencil as it whirs across sheets of lined paper. “Is it connected to your brain?” she asks. The rhythms of my family’s religious life continue, too. Sundays bring sermons at the local Baptist church, Wednesdays bring youth group Bible studies with canned sodas and bags of Doritos, and summers bring church camp with its endless outdoor games and sing-alongs (“It’s a big, big house…”).

These activities fill me with excitement, but they also spawn new fears. I’m in elementary school when I begin repeating the Sinner’s Prayer. Pastors assure my friends and me that once is enough; God sees our sincerity and cherishes our fumbling attempts at faith. But that’s the problem: How can I be sure that I’m sincere? No bright lights or audible voices have ever confirmed my rebirth. Jesus taught that genuine faith is expressed through obedience: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). His subsequent response to supposed believers – “I never knew you” (7:23) – haunts me, as do sermons on the rapture. One night, I have a dream in which my friends vanish, one by one, as I pray to be taken with them. Lying awake afterwards, I scan my memories for instances of righteous action, and then I question whether those acts were motivated by genuine love or by prideful self-interest. And I say the words one more time – “Lord God, I come to you a sinner…” The assurance that follows this prayer will last until the following night.

These worries can’t dampen my religious enthusiasm. I love the sacred world that I inhabit. When pastors wax poetic on the glory of the gospel, I yearn to treasure scripture as they do, and I redouble my efforts to conquer Leviticus and read through the Bible in a year. When congregants rise to thunder hymns (accompanied by guitar and drums, not the holy pipe organ), I imagine the Holy Spirit sweeping through the sanctuary on invisible wings. When I read of my namesake, Hudson Taylor, sailing for China with empty pockets, I dream up missionary trials for myself on far-flung shores. I’m baptized by my father in the sixth grade (fully immersed, of course). As I stammer my testimony into the microphone on the edge of the baptismal font, with my relatives seated below, a wave of pride washes over me. Here – surrounded by family and friends and the arms of the Almighty – is where I belong. Life feels too good to be true. Doesn’t it always, just before the earthquake hits?

IV.

Eighth grade is the year the world splits open. Years later, I’ll remember it as a gulf – a cliff-edged chasm between the child I was and the teenager and adult I would become. I’ll also picture it when reading Bible verses about hell.

In the last weeks of summer break, I discover that I can’t fall asleep. Nights without slumber – an hour or two, if I’m lucky – crawl forward into weeks. I greet each morning with my fists pressed into my eyes, sobbing silently as dawn breaks and the shadows in my room dissolve. My concerned parents try everything – prayer, soft music, hot milk, warm baths, rotating fans, melatonin capsules – and eventually this cocktail puts me under. But the sirens in my brain have already begun screaming, and they won’t stop for seven months.

I enter fall semester with dark half-moons under my eyes. At once, I’m aware that something in my mind has shifted. Guilt and fear are old neighbors, and I’ve grown accustomed to their awkward visits. But these new thoughts that crowd my skull – harsh, frantic, and accusatory – are impossible to ignore. They’re vandals smearing paint, burglars knifing furniture, invaders smashing windows. I hear them when my geometry teacher scrawls formulas across her whiteboard: You can’t understand any of this. You’re going to flunk. I hear them while sitting with classmates in the cafeteria: They can’t stand you. They nod and smile when you speak out of sheer politeness. I hear them during wrestling practice, as I dig my heels into the ground and arch my back to avoid getting pinned: You’re lazy, selfish, disgusting. You quit when the going gets tough. Once, when my arms give out and my shoulders slam into the mat, I hear my wrestling coach say, “That’s the Jesse I know, right there,” and some wall or defense deep inside of me crumbles into dust.

These new thoughts are accompanied by new behaviors – strange rituals that I don’t understand and can’t stop performing. Alone in the school bathroom, I scrub my hands in icy water until the skin cracks and bleeds. I erase whole pages of homework because my handwriting is never quite right, and then I write them again, erase them again, rewrite, erase, rewrite, erase, until none of the pencils in our house have erasers anymore. I spend hours smoothing bedsheets until every wrinkle is gone, and then I unfurl the sheets and start over again. If I don’t follow these rules – if I use warm water or write sloppy letters or leave blankets unkempt – then everything my mind says is true, and nothing is right anymore, and nothing in the world will ever be right again until I prove that I’m not lazy, selfish, and disgusting.

My wrestling coach wants me to cut weight – ninety pounds down to eighty-five – so I can compete in the lowest weight class. Every weekday, I toss untouched meals into the cafeteria waste bin. My eating disorder has nothing to do with my physical appearance and everything to do with punishing myself. On the weekends, when I’m not practicing or attending wrestling meets, I run sprints in the snow until I collapse from exhaustion.

Gradually, my religious practice is sucked into this widening gyre. I’ve never once felt attracted to other boys, but now I’m petrified that I might be gay, which is bad because I’ve heard how the adults at church talk about homosexuality – “shameful,” “wicked,” “depraved,” and “unnatural,” quoting the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. Hurrying between classes with my arms full of textbooks, I analyze each glance that grazes my male classmates: How can I be sure that I haven’t lusted after them?

Likewise, I’ve never struggled with doubt, but now I’m convinced that my faith is weak and might collapse at any moment. I scour Biblical commentaries for answers to tough questions, scribble detailed notes during morning devotionals, and watch dozens of YouTube lectures by Christian apologists like Os Guinness and Ravi Zacharias and William Lane Craig. Then I wonder whether I’ve committed the unpardonable sin that Jesus describes in Matthew 12:31-32. Some scholars argue that it’s a lifelong rejection of Christ’s message, but the text is vague; no one really knows what “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” means. Christians also debate the book of Hebrews’ declaration that it’s “impossible for those for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit… and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance” (Hebrews 6:4-6). How can I be sure that these passages don’t describe me? Better confess something, anything, just in case. Then repeat the confession a few times to make sure it’s sincere.

One wintry night, I kneel at the edge of my family’s driveway with my dad’s coat slung over my shoulders, gazing up at a pitch-black sky. Inside the house, my parents and siblings are washing dishes and winding down before bed. I plead with God to show me a sign, to prove that he hasn’t abandoned me. I shut my eyes and wait. No sign comes. The sky remains starless. I head inside when the cold bleeds through the knees of my jeans.

After a couple months, my parents discover that I’m dodging meals, and they’re horrified. I’ve always been scrawny, but now my ribs bulge through skin. Mom cradles me at night while I weep. Dad takes time off work and drives to school every day at lunchtime. He watches me cry as I force mandarin slices between my lips and my brain roars in protest, and his brow is creased with sorrow. When I resist the protein shakes that he hands me before wrestling practice, he threatens to pull me from the team. I drink them, hate them, love him. My parents take me to appointments with psychologists and psychiatrists, where I answer survey questions with number two pencils. Finally, I’m prescribed a medication for anxiety that alleviates my symptoms in a matter of weeks. The change feels like clambering out of a deep well and seeing colors you forgot existed. I begin writing stories again – the fourth installment of my secret agent saga. And one day in the spring, my youngest sister tells my parents that “Jesse’s got his funny back.”

My family isn’t sure what to make of my seven-month spiral. We call it a “hormonal imbalance” and trace it back to my childhood hypoglycemia. No diagnosis is made. My mom recalls a time when she raged at God, exhausted by the demands of motherhood. “I can’t measure up to your expectations,” she told him. His answer arrived like an echo: “You never could. That’s why I died for you.” In the decade following eighth grade, I’ll interpret my suffering through the lens of this story. “I thought I understood the gospel,” I’ll tell folks at church, “but I didn’t. I was arrogant and self-reliant. I thought that I could earn God’s approval. Jesus wanted a relationship with me, so he stripped everything else away until I could embrace him.” My faith has survived the crucible. In the final week of spring semester, I perform Kutless’ song “What Faith Can Do” as a solo for my junior high choir, and my music teacher wipes tears from his eyes as he listens:

I’ve seen dreams that move the mountains
Hope that doesn’t ever end, even when the sky is falling
I’ve seen miracles just happen
Silent prayers get answered, broken hearts become brand new
That’s what faith can do

V.

I’m wrapping up my eighth grade year when I discover Robert Zemeckis’ film Cast Away, curled up on a basement couch with my dad and my older brother. The movie tells the story of Chuck Noland (played by Tom Hanks), an ambitious FedEx executive who makes no apologies for his workaholism. He berates employees for their slowness, checks his pager during Christmas dinner, and struggles to find time for his girlfriend, Kelly. When Chuck looks toward the horizon, he sees a checklist – an endless sequence of predictable tasks and measurable results, stretching as far as his eyes can see. Boarding a plane to resolve a work problem in Malaysia, he knows exactly what he’ll do upon his return: pop the question to Kelly and continue business as usual.

Neither of these things happen. As his flight nears its destination, it’s buffeted by a violent storm and crash-lands in the Pacific. The next day, Chuck washes ashore on an uninhabited island, the sole survivor of the wreck. He’ll remain there for four years.

As the story unfolds, Chuck struggles to adapt to isolation. He treks across the island, exploring its haunts and hideaways. He learns how to crack coconuts, how to spear fish from the tide pools, and how to coax a fire into life. He salvages packages from the sunken plane, repurposing everything from ice skates to fishnet stockings. One of these packages divulges an unexpected companion – a volleyball (named “Wilson” after its logo) that becomes his deadpan conversation partner throughout the film. Eventually, Chuck escapes the island on a makeshift raft. Half dead and adrift, he is once again plucked from the sea, this time by an ocean liner.

I expect the story to end there, but it doesn’t. Chuck has spent four years yearning for the familiar routines of society. Now, he discovers that his old life is anything but familiar. As he attempts to reintegrate into a world that believed him dead and gone, he faces challenges more difficult than any encountered on the island – most notably, the remarriage of the woman whose memory kept him alive.

I’m riveted. I can’t look away. One scene in particular reduces me to tears. At long last, Chuck has broken through the waves that surround the island, using a wall from a portable toilet as a sail. He whoops with joy. Then he looks back at the island. His smile vanishes, and his eyes fill with tears. For the first time in the film, Alan Silvestri’s soundtrack becomes audible – a tide of woodwinds and strings that elicits an almost physical ache. Minutes later, Wilson the volleyball tumbles overboard and is lost to the sea. Chuck weeps unconsolably. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says.

Why does this scene move me so deeply? Maybe it’s Hanks’ emotional performance. Maybe it’s the fact that I, too, know what it feels like to suffer alone. To flounder, totally helpless, in foreign seas. To say a thousand apologies that never bring relief. Or maybe it’s the recognition – subtle and unconscious – that Chuck has grown to love his island prison, that he needs Wilson’s voice to be real, that he can’t bear to let these things go. What will he become without them?

VI.

I’m a junior in high school when I watch porn for the first time. 2:00 a.m., hunched over a desktop computer, my family’s asleep. I’ve never masturbated before. Don’t even know how. When my body responds to the images on-screen, the rush of pleasure morphs into bewilderment, and then it becomes shame that settles in my stomach like nausea. The next day, I come clean to my parents and God. Dad installs Covenant Eyes software on the computer, and he encourages me to avoid staying up too late. “Lead me not into temptation,” I whisper on my mattress. “Deliver me from evil.” But the floodgates are open now. A pattern solidifies: I’ll stay strong for a week, two weeks, a month, and then I’ll sneak out of my bedroom in the dark and yield again, grieve Jesus’ heart again, berate myself again (How could you be so stupid?), and pray for deliverance again. This cycle will continue for the next decade.

Porn offers a distraction from a lonely and difficult routine. My social life never recovered after eighth grade. Friendships that were strained by my prolonged isolation have blinked down to coals and vanished like smoke. Once, I drew classmates like a magnet – doodled and joked and told goofy stories whenever I could. Now I struggle to initiate conversations because I’m terrified of saying the wrong thing and looking foolish. Academics are safer. I don’t erase homework assignments anymore, but I still fuss over them late into the night. As a senior, I take five AP classes, graduate fourth in my class, win my school’s writing contest, and earn a National Merit scholarship. And I’m miserable. I’ve never heard of burnout, but whatever flame I had is long gone.

I still experience intrusive thoughts. Once, they were just voices, but now there are pictures, too – gruesome images that I can’t bear to verbalize, waking nightmares in which I do terrible things to people I love. I shake my head repetitively to ward off these dark scenes. Start handling knives with extra caution and become skittish around children. Would I ever act on these thoughts? Not in a million years. Everything about them repulses me. Yet doubt creeps in, nonetheless: What if I did? How can I be sure that I won’t? Can I really trust myself not to?

My porn habit isn’t the only thing complicating my sexuality. When I was in middle school, my friends and I sat through Christian sex ed classes taught by snowy-haired elders at our church. These men leaned over a wobbling lectern and warned us that pornography corrupted the soul, that it drove wedges between us and God, that it wrecked marriages and devastated families. They taught us to “bounce our eyes” when looking at attractive girls, to fix our gaze on faces and eyes and nothing else. We fidgeted in our seats and exchanged nervous glances. “Jesus,” the men said, “taught that whoever lusts after a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart. He’d be better off plucking out his eye or severing his hand than allowing that sin to consume his life” (Matthew 5:27-30). Now, years later, I’ve developed a habit of averting my eyes whenever I notice a female classmate’s body. I know that it’s not immoral to appreciate a woman’s appearance. Jesus himself invented beauty, after all. But how do I know when my appreciation of beauty becomes lustful and turns deadly? How long can my thoughts linger before I’ve sinned? Scripture doesn’t say. Consequently, my confessions of lust become preemptive; when it’s possible that I might think someone’s attractive, I ask God for forgiveness.

During high school, I begin talking long walks in the rain. This strange practice acquires deep spiritual significance. Since no one else is outdoors, I can talk to Jesus at a regular volume without looking like a crazy person. I tell him about my loneliness and fatigue, my shame and fear of hurting others. When I feel like weeping, I try to imagine that he’s weeping with me. Sending down sympathy through grey skies and dreary weather. I’ve always struggled to discern God’s voice – always wished that it was louder or clearer. Now, I find that I can almost hear it – a low murmur, soft and steady, like the drumbeat of distant thunder. Years later, I’ll learn the word “sacrament,” and that’s what these sodden strolls are. A “means of grace.” Somehow, amidst the sights and sounds and smells of rainfall, the Psalmist’s notion that God is “near to the brokenhearted” is a little bit easier to believe.

In the fall of my senior year, my dad and I drive south to Illinois and visit Wheaton College, the school that my paternal grandparents attended. I sit through chapel and an English literature class, and then we visit a small building on the edge of campus that collects memorabilia from Christian authors – C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, and George MacDonald. My eyes widen as we survey the relics. Tolkien’s desk and pen and pipe. Lewis’ tea mug and childhood wardrobe. Childhood illustrations materialize – Aslan shaking his mane with a roar to end all winter, enormous eagles plucking Frodo and Sam from the blistered crags of Mordor. Dad read The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings aloud when my family lived in Slovakia, and these stories are deep in my bones, nearly as sacred as Scripture. If Wheaton College loves them as much as I do, then this is where I want to study writing. I submit my application a couple months later, and classes start the following August.

College is exhilarating. I love the impromptu frisbee games, the late-night burrito runs, the Men’s Glee Club, the school-sponsored communion services with grape juice and sourdough bread, and the dorm-room theology debates over endless “isms” (Arminianism or Calvinism? Creationism or Darwinism? Pentecostalism or Cessationism? Egalitarianism or Complementarianism?) At Wheaton, I’m surrounded by kindred spirits – young people who yearn to make a difference “for Christ and his Kingdom ” by fulfilling the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…” My classes – even the boring ones – feel like preparation for this great adventure. Campus is studded with memorials to famous evangelists like Billy Graham and Jim Elliot, and my heart quickens when I pass them on my walks between classes. Could that be me someday?

College is also exhausting. Rituals that I’d hoped to leave in Michigan have stalked me to Illinois. My classmates often procrastinate, but I can’t seem to complete homework assignments at anything less than a hundred and fifty percent, even if doing so means pulling all-nighters with 16-oz Americanos. My battle with porn drags on, too. Early in the autumn, I join a “Lust Free Living” small group, where dudes on my floor confess to (horror of horrors) having sexual thoughts each week. These meetings reassure me that I’m not alone in my temptations, but they don’t reduce my shame or halt my repetitive prayers for forgiveness. I still don’t know how to interact with girls – still find it hard to look at many of them, much less talk to them. And I continue upbraiding myself for my anxiety, my social awkwardness, my self-perceived selfishness, and my inability to feel like the “new creation” in Christ that 2 Corinthians 5:17 proclaims I am.

What makes my self-criticism so frustrating is that I know I shouldn’t be feeling it. The religion that I practice is suffused with grace, and the Source of that grace – Jesus Christ – dwells inside me by the power of the Holy Spirit. Why, then, do I beat myself myself up every day? The word “ragamuffin” enters my lexicon – a descriptor of the holy mess that I imagine myself to be. The Ragamuffin Gospel, written by an alcoholic priest named Brennan Manning, astonishes me with its depiction of a heavenly Father who runs, reckless with pent-up affection, to kiss and embrace his prodigal children. Alone in my dorm room, I spin Rich Mullins’ album A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band on repeat, aching for the assurance of redemption that the songwriter’s lyrics celebrate:

The Salvation Army Band is playing this hymn
And Your grace rings out so deep
It makes my resistance seem so thin

God’s grace may feel elusive, but the kindness of my friends is undeniable. I room with the same three guys throughout college. When we aren’t studying (or when we should be), we binge-watch anime, discuss Lord of the Rings trivia, and debate the merits of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Gradually, anxieties that I’ve tried to hide assert themselves, and I’m surprised to find that they don’t sink my relationships. If anything, bonds of trust deepen. When I fret about speaking too much, request pardon for things said weeks before, or apologize after every disagreement, my roommates encourage me to rest easy. They’re quick to forgive and eager to understand. After a while, I become convinced that I need to tell them my worst mistakes; if I don’t, my brain argues, then I’m being two-faced. I lay on my bunk, elbows splayed across my pillow, and stammer out my darkest memories. My heart thuds against my ribcage. When my roommates say that their opinions of me haven’t changed, I heave a sigh of relief.

Midway through sophomore year, I ditch my English major for anthropology. I’m taking a class called “Third World Issues,” where a bald professor lectures on the historical fallout of White colonialism, the roots of systemic racism, and the impact of poverty on global migration. I’ve never heard of these things. The Baptist church that raised me never mentioned them. In class, we watch videos of doctors treating Malaria and UNHCR workers handing bundled provisions to refugees. By contrast, the Shakespearean plays that I’m analyzing and the poems that I’m editing start to seem ridiculous, like limericks in a house that’s on fire. Does the world really need more storytellers? Millions of people are suffering and dying without the hope of eternal life that Jesus offers. I want to help them, but I also want to know that I’m doing God’s will, and literature has become a selfish pursuit.

For the first time in my life, I stop writing stories. Maybe God wants me to be a writer. But how can I be certain? If there’s a more responsible road, I’ll choose it every time.

VII.

In the summer before my senior year, I accept a six-month internship with a missionary organization in a Southeast Asian slum. I’ve been warned that it’ll involve difficult work, but I’m a budding anthropologist who’s eager to see poverty up close. I want to put names and faces to it, as liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez recommends, and to encounter Christ in what Mother Teresa dubbed “the distressing disguise of the poor.” The fact that Christian proselytizing is illegal in this Muslim-majority country only adds to its allure. As my flight touches down on foreign soil, missionary dreams from childhood resurface, hovering like mist over the palm fronds outside the windows.

My supervisor and teammates – a crew of locals, Kiwis, and Americans – engage in something which they call “incarnational ministry,” living with the poor in imitation of Christ who “became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (as their beloved Message translation of the John 1:14 puts it). The slum is nestled between a busy toll road, high-rise hotels, and two enormous trash dumps, and the shacks that fill this undeveloped land appear to have sprouted from the rubbish – jumbled collages of plywood and asbestos and corrugated iron. Each morning, when the rooster outside my shack sounds his infernal alarm, my neighbors rise to collect the city’s waste, lugging it home in rice sacks slung over their shoulders. They spend the rest of the day sorting recyclable materials to sell to local factories. I crouch beside them on moldy rugs, swatting away flies, and watch as they slice plastic labels from water bottles with utility knives, bundle strips of cardboard with twine, crack metal with pliers and sledgehammers. Their speed and stamina are remarkable.

At first, my host family won’t let me to help with their work. “Too smelly,” the tattooed patriarch says, waving a hand in front of his nose. But I keep asking, and one day he hands me a bag of trash. This is new territory for a germaphobe. I stifle nausea as my fingers grasp used tissues and diapers, banana peels and lumps of ambiguous sludge. Yet I grow to love these sorting sessions under sweltering midday sun, the visits to the trash field to discard unusable scraps at dusk. Once, back at Wheaton, I saw a painting in which Jesus breaks bread with a group of Mexican farmworkers. I was raised on White Jesus – his trim beard and hippie mane and Neutrogena skin – but the Christ of this painting arrested me because he looked like his migrant companions. You couldn’t tell which figure was him. Now, while digging through bags of trash, I envision Jesus as a scavenger – see him stretching sore legs, puffing on cigarettes, and sharing instant coffee with the old man who visits every evening and mumbles for an hour without stopping. These are his people – “the least of these” described in Matthew 25:31-46. I feel honored to walk among them.

My neighbors are bemused by my presence. They ask many questions: “Where are you going?” “Are you a Christian?” “Have you met Barack Obama?” “Are you from Texas or California or New York?” “How much did your plane ticket cost?” The most common query concerns my marital status. I tell people that I have a girlfriend, and they nod their heads in approval. She and I met in Wheaton and began dating a month before my trip overseas. Already I love her deeply, but I can’t tell her that. The voices in my head won’t let me. When we chat over Facebook Messenger, I strain to hear her over the din of my doubts: How can I be sure that God wants me to date her? Are our theological views compatible? What if she’s not the one, and I let things get too far, and we both get hurt? I start dreading our conversations. Ask to reduce their frequency because I want to be present where I’m at, which is true but also a lie.

When I took this internship, I thought I knew what undercover missionary work entailed. I didn’t. My teammates do nothing but good. They teach literacy and sewing classes, care for pregnant women, and accompany widows with tuberculosis to nearby hospitals. Yet missionary outreach – even in the form of humanitarian work – is forbidden by the government. By moving into the slum, I’ve become a squatter on public land. Once a month, I ride a minibus downtown and sit in an immigration office with a folder of forged paperwork, my right foot twitching on the tile floor. Forgive me, Father, if this is wrong. Back in the slum, I type anxious emails to my professors at Wheaton: Didn’t the apostle Paul tell us to “be subject to the governing authorities” in Romans 13:1? How much law-breaking is permissible for the sake of the gospel? Couldn’t my teammates assist slum-dwellers from legal addresses? Electricity in the slum is stolen from city power lines, and I ease my troubled conscience by refusing to use it. Months of restless, sweat-soaked sleep follow. An unused pedestal fan gathers dust beside my mosquito net.

At the end of June, my host family drives east to their village to celebrate Eid al-Fitr – the end of Ramadan. I travel with them, greet their relatives, eat more cookies than I can ever remember eating. One afternoon, everyone gathers at the local cemetery. Men from the village chant Arabic verses over the graves, and I stand with their wives and watch. Afterwards, parents toss coins for their children to gather between the headstones. My supervisor later tells me that my friends were pleading with Allah to pardon their ancestors. That night, I lie awake in my shack, watching cockroaches scuttle across the bamboo rafters overhead, and I think about all the generations that have lived and died here without hearing about Jesus Christ. The old men bowed under sacks of trash. The mothers frying sweet-and-spicy tofu. The children flying kites. These tired, resilient, ordinary strangers whom I’ve grown to love. Are they bound for eternal torment? I’ve never doubted the doctrine of hell before. It’s there – bleak and recognizable as a graveyard – in the New Testament. Mark 9 and Matthew 25 and 2 Thessalonians 1 and Revelation 20. The fate that I deserved. The reason Jesus had to die. Why does it still keep me awake?

I leave the country as the wet season begins. The rain here isn’t something you walk around in. It pounds like angry fists on rooftops, swamps houses and highways, turns garbage heaps into murky brown oceans of filth. God’s voice, sent from the heavens, putting slum-dwellers out of work. As I head to the airport, I watch it trickle down the windows of my Uber – my return ticket to a world of comforts that my trash-picking friends will never see – and a verse from the book of Isaiah springs to mind: “I form light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I am the Lord, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). Does Yahweh identify with these people in their suffering, as my teammates believed? Or is he responsible for it?

My girlfriend and I break up when we return to school in January. She says that I haven’t been emotionally available. She’s right. I’ve hurt her deeply. We stare at each other across a cafeteria table, and familiar words reverberate in my head: Lazy. Selfish. Disgusting. I head back to my apartment. Google porn on my laptop. Say another round of prayers in the dark.

VIII.

After graduation, I return to Michigan to live with my parents, who’ve recently left the suburbs of Grand Rapids for farm country. I’m not sure what to do with my anthropology major, so I accept a social work job at a residential home for undocumented refugee minors. The young men who I work with have all experienced horrors – war, famine, torture, imprisonment, gang violence, sexual abuse. Some days, we drink chai and play soccer and I listen to their stories. Wish to God that I knew how to help them. Other days, someone’s buried trauma claws its way to the surface, conflicts erupt, and then my coworkers and I hold on for dear life.

I want to leave the job, not only because it’s exhausting. I’ve started reading fantasy novels again. I burn through Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, delighting in its zany illustrations, and I carry Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone home from the library like it contains actual sorcery (J.K. Rowling’s books were taboo in my evangelical youth). Little by little, memories of my fourth-grade stories flicker, catch flame. Those tales delivered joy, shaped my hopes and values, and connected me to others. How could I have ever believed that writing was superfluous? Now I’m dreaming about becoming an English professor and starting a blog that explores Christian elements in popular movies and music. Yet I can’t shake the fear that my literary ambitions are arrogant. What if I’m seeking my own pleasure and comfort, and God has a rougher road in store for me? I ask God to help me choose between writing and overseas missionary work. Sometimes I sense that he wants me to be an author, other times the alternative. Four years pass, and I’m still mired in social work, slogging toward a fresh round of burnout. God hasn’t shown me the way yet, but I believe that he will. He has to.

Dark thoughts persist, and I still repent after each one. Two, three, four times in a row, depending on the circumstances. When these visions become unbearable, I promise God that I’ll never commit the acts they contain. I make a similar vow intended to drive away lust, telling God that I won’t date anyone for six months if I view pornography again. This decision to raise stakes is my lightweight alternative to Biblical eye-plucking and hand-severing. Surprisingly, it doesn’t work. I request a meeting with my pastor, who says that my oath is binding and encourages me to accept its consequences. My perennial battle with porn was already a deep wound; this well-intentioned battle strategy has added a generous helping of lemon juice.

Religious rituals spring up like weeds. Riding shotgun in my grandpa’s Toyota pickup, I listen as he explains his refusal to defy the speed limit. “God commands us to obey the government,” he says, “and the government sets speed limits. Unless there’s an emergency, breaking the law means disobeying God.” This argument makes sense to me, so I ask for God’s forgiveness every time my speedometer nudges past the posted limit. When I pass stationary cars on the roadside, I say a short prayer, asking God to provide for their drivers’ needs. These rituals might seem benign – compassionate, even. However, they’re not optional. If I don’t apologize for speeding or don’t pray for an unfortunate traveler, my mind will gnaw and scrape like a caged beast until I do. Worse still, I close my eyes during these prayers to ensure their sincerity. When I do so, for a few brief seconds, my car hurtles down highways under the command of a blind pilot.

I revisit the movie Cast Away around this time. Strangely, I’d forgotten the final scene. Chuck Noland, that plucky FedEx fellow, has grieved the loss of his girlfriend and attempted to reorient himself to civilization. He’s standing next to a dusty crossroads in rural Texas, peering at a map and trying to get his bearings. A pickup truck pulls over next to him, and an auburn-haired woman leans out of the window.

“Where are you headed?” she asks.

Chuck looks up. “Well, I was just about to figure that out.”

The woman climbs out of her truck and looks around. “Well, that’s 83 South. And this road here will hook you up with I-40 East. If you turn right, that’ll take you to Amarillo, Flagstaff, California.” She smiles and gestures toward her farm. “And if you head back that direction, you’ll find a whole lot of nothing all the way to Canada.”

Chuck thanks the woman, who wishes him well: “Good luck, Cowboy.” She returns to her truck and drives off. Alone again, Chuck walks into the middle of the crossroads. Slowly, he turns to face each direction. The camera turns with him, showing each highway laid out towards the horizon. Finally, he turns toward the camera, staring down the road taken by the auburn-haired stranger (and at us). The hint of a smile appears on his lips. And then the credits roll.

It’s a simple, quiet scene, but it moves me more deeply than any movie moment I can remember. After this viewing, I start taking rainy-day walks to an intersection near my family’s home. On the way, I ask forgiveness for my selfishness, my lust, and my inability to trust that God will provide. Jesus’ gentle responses are audible in the rain – fainter than they were in high school, perhaps, but still there. When I reach the crossroads, I mimic Chuck Noland’s slow revolution. Something about this place fills me with hope. Those miles of pavement stretching out to who knows where. They feel like a fresh start – like an unwritten future where grace might still, despite plane crashes and pornography and paralyzing doubts, have the final say. This good news – this “gospel” – has been preached to me all my life. Standing there in the rain, I can almost believe it’s true.

IX.

The first thing I notice is her eyes. Not just because they’re blue like seawater on a clear day, but also because she’s wearing a surgical mask. The year is 2020. The young adult ministry at my church is hosting an outdoor social, the COVID-19 pandemic is in full swing, and my friends are introducing me to a blonde graduate of Wheaton College. Our first interaction lasts for a minute or two. A week later, I dust off the old Church Kid’s Courtship Playbook and volunteer to stack chairs on the church patio. Move toward her and strike up a conversation like I wasn’t already planning to. She’s interested in psychology and refugee outreach, the writings of George MacDonald and Charlotte Brontë. Like me, she grew up as a missionary kid in Eastern Europe. And I’m hooked.

In February of 2021, we meet in the empty church café. I tell her that I’d like to date her… in a few months. My six-month abstinence from dating, which has already been extended a couple times, will end in June. We’ve started having long conversations after Tuesday worship services, and I don’t want her to think that I’m not interested. She’s surprised by this information, but she appreciates my honesty. I’m sheepish and relieved, and summertime can’t come soon enough.

I’d forgotten how awesome dating is. My girlfriend and I visit escape rooms because she loves murder mysteries, swap book recommendations over coffee, talk by Lake Michigan as sunset spreads its watercolor hues over the sand dunes. Friends and family say that we’re perfect for each other, but I’m anxious again. If I have a negative thought about her, then I’ve got to ask for her forgiveness, no matter how fleeting or insubstantial the thought is. When we kiss, I fret about lust. Worst of all, she’s an egalitarian who rejects the Baptist dogma of male headship and female submission in marriage. I spend hours researching Bible chapters like Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3, because I still don’t know what to think, and fears about theological compatibility torpedoed my last relationship, and how can we tie the knot if we don’t agree on this? I share these reservations with her, and she listens. As autumn sweeps through Michigan, setting treetops ablaze, I realize that my quirks haven’t scared her off. She’s still here. Patiently loving me like Jesus does. Once again, the future is an empty road under open sky, because God is paving the way for us. And, once again, the ground beneath me is about to give way.

It begins the morning after I buy the engagement ring. Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I realize with a start that my faith could collapse. Nothing in my life suggests that this will happen; I haven’t been struggling with spiritual doubt. But how can I be certain that it won’t? This insecurity embeds itself in my brain, sends down roots, twines serpentine branches around every thought I have. More questions follow. What if I abandon Christianity after getting married? How might this loss of faith impact my wife? Can I, in good conscience, commit my life to someone despite this risk? It’s as if my brain is hunting for uncertainty, rummaging through cabinets for every theological quandary that’s ever stumped me. Hellfire. Darwinian evolution. The problem of evil. If these issues aren’t resolved quickly, then my faith will rupture, and I’ll never be able to marry the woman I love, and my worst nightmare will come true. Apostasy. The denial of Christ’s salvation. A fate worse than death. “But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven” (Matthew 10:33).

Suddenly, I’m right back in eighth grade, consuming all the Christian apologetics content that I can find. Books arrive in the mail – used volumes on intelligent design, end-times prophecy, the origin of the universe, moral arguments for God’s existence, and the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. Whenever I’ve got spare time, both at home and at work, I’m reading articles on answered prayer and archaeology and annihilationism, watching hundreds of hours of YouTube lectures. I know this search is obsessive, but – surprise? – I can’t stop myself. When I resolve to table my search, the voices in my head reach fever pitch. There’s no time! Don’t you realize what’s at stake? I know, I know. I’m back at it.

I want certainty – crave it like dopamine – but my search raises questions I never thought to ask. Why are the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ birth and resurrection littered with contradictions? Does the arc of humanity’s redemption justify millions of years of animal suffering? Can Israel’s treatment of the Canaanites be classified as anything other than genocide? How can I ignore those ghastly depictions of eternal punishment? Driving home from my family’s place one night, I think about the fact that a trillion years of torment are just the beginning of an unbeliever’s sentence in Hell, and I shake my head over and over while tears run down my face, because this is wrong, this can never be explained, this is what happens to my friends in the slums of Southeast Asia, and the Savior and Lover of my soul has declared it so.

The thorniest question that I encounter concerns the delay of the parousia – Jesus’ glorious return with the holy angels to “reward each person according to what he has done.” Again and again – in Mark 9 and 13; Matthew 10, 16, and 24; Luke 9 and 21 – Jesus says that this final judgement will occur within the lifetimes of his disciples. His apocalyptic fervor is carried forward. It’s there in the epistles of James and Jude, in Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians and Philippians and Thessalonians. Later texts, like 2 Peter and the gospel of John, reinterpret Jesus’ prophecies as history drags on and the promised restoration of Israel fails to arrive. I know these passages by heart, but I’ve never reckoned with them. For several months, I take refuge with scholars like R.C. Sproul and N.T. Wright who advocate “partial preterism” – the idea that Jesus’ doomsday predictions were fulfilled by the destruction of the Jewish temple in A.D. 70. But I can’t fit Scripture into this mold, no matter how hard I shove. Some pesky verses always spill out over the edges.

Debates about Biblical prophecy are notoriously murky, and I’ve heard how folks at church respond to questions like mine: “No one really knows what this stuff means. Why not focus on Jesus instead of worrying about such controversial topics?” But I am focusing on Jesus. If Christ was mistaken about something as fundamental as the end of history, then how can I worship him as God incarnate? I’ve awaited the renewal of creation since I was small. Prayed for it, sung about it, and imagined it during periods of heartache. Aslan’s “further up and further in.” Gandalf’s “far green country.” Sam Gamgee’s tears of joy as everything sad comes untrue. Two thousand years have passed since Jesus kindled this dream. Was it always a fool’s hope?

I share my doubts with pastors. Attend weekly therapy sessions with a Christian counselor. Meet with the elders of my church, who lay hands on my head and shoulders and pray for deliverance. I fast from meals, listen to sermons on faith and doubt, confess every sin that I can think of. I’ve hardly cried in the decade since eighth grade, but I’m crying all the time now. My girlfriend strokes my head as I weep in the driver’s seat of my Honda Accord. She doesn’t think that God will allow my faith to crumble. Says she’ll stick around even if he does.

A month later, surrounded by January snowflakes, I kneel down on the patio outside my church – the place where my girlfriend and I first met – and I ask her to marry me. She cries happy tears and says yes. I cried, too, in my apartment the day before. Begged God for mercy with my face pressed into the carpet.

When fear becomes unbearable, I plead for miracles. This might be arrogance; Scripture warns against putting Yahweh to the test. But he guided the Israelites with pillars of cloud and fire, with manna from heaven and mountaintop thunder, and I’m as desperate as they were. Strange coincidences follow – synchronicities that I interpret as signs of God’s presence. A sermon on hell the morning after my anguished drive. A song about marriage on the radio as I travel to a meeting with my pastor. The epilogue of an apologetics book urging me to leap into the unknown. One night, as I approach my girlfriend’s house, the dying lamp above her family’s garage emits triple-bursts of light – one-two-three, one-two-three – and I recall her habit of squeezing my hand three times to say “I love you.” Might Jesus be saying the same? Tapping morse code through this broken light fixture for a sailor adrift? A few days later, while praying on a park bench, I lean sideways and imagine resting my head on Jesus’ shoulder. The next morning, my church’s worship team introduces a song called “Leaning.” What further proof could I need? Why can’t I trust God like everyone around me does? But it’s not enough. Doubts return like clockwork. Fears that I’m conjuring the very signs and wonders I need to see. So I ask for more.

In September of 2022, I stand under an electric blue sky and watch as my father-in-law escorts my bride down the aisle. She’s beautiful, and my brain is on fire. This is a step of obedience, I prayed before the wedding ceremony. I’ve followed where I think you’ve led, and now you’ve got to help me, Jesus, because I can’t do this anymore. We say our vows, dance an Irish reel with our bridal party, and I put my spiritual search on hold as we fly off to Dublin and Edinburgh. The time away is wonderful, and I breathe it as deeply as I can. But my anxiety is waiting, dead-eyed on the tarmac, when our return flight lands in Grand Rapids.

In the weeks after our honeymoon, a painful fact asserts itself, becomes impossible to ignore. I want to know whether Christianity is true, and I’ve spent a year studying every apologetic argument I can find, but I haven’t exposed myself to contrary opinions. Back in junior high school, I read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and admired the author’s willingness to confront his own biases – to follow the evidence wherever it led. Now, I realize that I’m reluctant to do the same. My research hasn’t killed my doubt – has worsened it tenfold, in fact – and I’m terrified of what might happen if I confront skeptical views on their own terms. Yet I know that I’ll never be at peace until I do.

I take the plunge – read books on eschatology and the reliability of the gospels by non-Christian scholars – and hope dies in a matter of weeks. The damage was already done. I’ve studied long enough to recognize arrows to my faith’s weakest spots, answers that satisfy like religious explanations never could. Late one evening, while scrubbing dishes, I realize that I don’t believe Jesus is God. The revelation is quiet and unobtrusive – a candle guttering out on the windowsill. I try to tell my wife. Stammer for fifteen minutes because my throat has closed and the words won’t come. In the end, I scribble the words on a notecard: I don’t think I can be a Christian anymore. Shudder with silent sobs while she holds me.

The next few months are a blur. I’m petrified of announcing my apostasy to family and friends, but I have to, because I won’t rest until I’ve divulged everything; hasn’t it always been that way? My community is shocked by the news. The crease in my father’s brow as I deliver the dread message, the tears on my mother’s and sister’s faces, the blank expressions of my friends – these sights land like hammer blows. All I’ve ever wanted is to make these people proud. To avoid hurting them. They assure me that they still love me, that nothing has changed, but I know that I’ve let them all down. I start a new project in the wake of these conversations – a summary of all the evidence that destroyed my faith in Christ. After a couple weeks, it balloons to a hundred and fifty pages. My wife urges me to rest, says that this frenzied attempt to justify my deconversion is devouring the rest of my life, and I know that I’m failing her, too. We attend Sunday services together until March, and then I stop going. The songs and sermons are too painful.

Intrusive thoughts worsen after my departure from church – old familiar ghosts acquiring flesh and blood. I sit across a café table from one of my former pastors, and he says he’d probably commit suicide if the gospel wasn’t true, because what point would there be to anything? Someone else asks what’ll keep me from going crazy, abandoning my morals, and injuring those around me. I’ve pictured myself doing such things for years. The Holy Spirit was always there to restrain, but what’s to stop me from enacting these nightmares now? Promises that I can’t trust myself to keep? Kelly and I meet with a second pastor who leans back in his chair and explains that God has revealed the source of my struggles to him: “Satan’s attacking you. You’ve made an idol out of knowledge and neglected your relationship with Jesus. What you really need is intimacy with Christ, not answers to your questions.” My hands shake in my lap. How can I convince him that I’ve done everything I can? That I don’t know how it’s possible to love Jesus more than I already do?

Like Chuck Noland in Cast Away, I’ve woken from storm-tossed sleep to find that the world has rearranged itself. Nothing looks familiar. I stare at my surroundings – trees, cars, dogs, sidewalks, clouds, strangers in restaurants – and I wonder: What holds these things together if not Christ’s sustaining hand? What do they exist for if not his glory? What do I exist for? Lying awake beside my wife, I realize with a start that the bedroom is silent, and no one is listening to my thoughts. My interior world has never been my sole province. I think about Wilson the volleyball, growing smaller and smaller and then vanishing over a watery horizon while its maker weeps. Did I make it all up? His voice, his love, our countless conversations? The magic that infused those sacred stories and swirled just beyond the veil?

Grief breaks like waves. I’ve never experienced it before and don’t know what to do with it. One spring morning, I drive to a cemetery and sit among the headstones. I play some bagpipe music on my iPhone, write a farewell letter to Jesus, and try to imagine him lying cold under dirt. Say goodbye for good. Months later, when the fury at this God who has died and who has also abandoned me won’t stay put, I drive to the empty parking lot of the local Presbyterian church and scream inside my car and punch the seat cushions with my fists. Both of these makeshift therapies, I imagine, would look pretty funny from a distance. Neither brings closure.

In July of 2023, my wife and I move back to Illinois. She has been accepted into graduate school. I’ve been hired to teach math to ninth graders (a job which, for a former English major, is almost sufficient proof of Hell). Each day, I leave our apartment at 5:30am and return at 6:00pm. Months wheel by, and our evenings together feel depressingly short.

On train rides to and from work, I find myself thinking about our marriage. Two facts have snapped into focus: First, my old framework for marital life, which was rooted in scriptures like Genesis 1:20-25, Matthew 19:1-11, and Ephesians 5:21-33, has evaporated. Second, I no longer believe that alternatives to traditional Christian marriage – temporary, non-monogamous, or homosexual unions – are sinful. These facts prompt further questions: Was I ready to get married? Did I choose a lifelong partnership because that’s what I really wanted, or because that was the only option available – what the Christian church indoctrinated me to want? I ponder a line from Kierkegaard – “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” – and imagine myself at the junction of innumerable paths. Choosing a direction means saying no to all the others, and how can I be sure that I’ve chosen the right one when the heavens are silent? That there’s even a right one to choose? I’ve done the right thing, the selfless thing, the Christlike thing, since I can remember. Stacked dreams and desires on God’s altar like Abraham on Mount Moriah. And where has it left me?

A third fact emerges: If I leave my marriage someday, then each day spent with my wife will make our divorce more painful, especially once children have entered the equation. Once again, the clock’s ticking.

It takes months for me to admit these doubts to my wife. When I finally tell her that I don’t think I want to stay married forever, and she weeps silently on our bed, saying that she thought I loved her, then I realize what that old cliché means – rip your heart out – because that’s what this feels like. Ribs snapping, tissue coming apart. The voices in my head have never been louder, and now I know that they were right. I was always destined to fuck everything up and wound irreparably the people I love most, and no apology could ever make this right.

We decide to spend some time apart. My wife moves in with some friends while I stay at our apartment. I begin to notice pale blotches spreading themselves across my hair and the skin of my face. Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I think about the mark that Yahweh gave to Adam’s firstborn son, Cain, after he’d murdered his brother and been exiled from his homeland. “My punishment is more than I can bear,” Cain told God. “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:13-14) I google skin conditions on my laptop. Discover that mine is called vitiligo, is activated by severe stress, and is irreversible. Try to fall asleep in a bed that feels too large.

I watch pornography after work. Binge movies about people trying to find themselves – Into the Wild, Lost in Translation, The Worst Person in the World. One night, I watch Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a grieving man volunteers to have memories of his estranged girlfriend erased, then spends the rest of the movie trying to undo the procedure. When the movie finishes, I stare at the bookshelf above my desk, and I try to imagine what it would mean to toss my wife’s letters into the trash, to remove her watercolor paintings from the walls, to clean out every trace of the life we’ve lived together.

A month after our separation, my wife and I meet up at a park in the center of town. We sit on the edges of a bench like strangers. The wind is tugging at her hair, and her seawater eyes are steady. We’ve both had lots of time to think. I draw a deep breath and tell her that I’ve chosen to stay – chosen her – because she saw me at my worst and could have run a hundred times and didn’t. My head screams as I say these words. I haven’t stilled my doubts about our marriage, and I don’t know that I ever will. Yet, in my ocean of unknowns, I know this woman loves me for the mess that I am. And if the grace of God – the unconditional welcome that I’ve yearned for my whole life – is a lie, her grace isn’t. I’ve seen it up close. It’s what sailed me home.

X.

One evening, while watching a comedy special on YouTube, I see an advertisement for people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve always thought OCD was about neatness and organization – maladies which, outside of my eighth grade year, I’ve rarely been afflicted with (just ask my elementary teacher, who nicknamed me “Pigpen” after seeing the inside of my desk). But the actors in the video are asking questions: What if I act on a scary thought? What if I’m immoral? What if I’m a fake? What if I’ve committed a sin? What if I accidentally ruined my life? I stare at the screen of my laptop, wide-eyed, because I’ve never once heard my intrusive thoughts articulated before. I’m twenty-nine years old.

My wife and I are meeting with a marriage counselor. Efforts to rebuild trust are slow and painful, but we aren’t giving up. I mention the ad to our therapist during one of our sessions, and it turns out she’s an OCD specialist. She sends me a survey that lists symptoms of the disorder and instructs me to fill it out. Scanning the list, I realize that it’s all there. The apologies, the self-criticism, the fear of harming others, the preoccupation with rules. I learn about scrupulosity, a form of OCD that involves excessive worry about moral and religious matters. A diagnosis follows. My therapist tells me that OCD is “the doubter’s disease,” and that’s no shocker. Doubt has been my constant companion since I was a child. The knowledge that this isn’t my fault – that my brain is behind the sinister thoughts and indecisiveness that I’ve battled for decades – is like an embrace after years of solitude. Like oxygen after drowning.

Slowly, I start to untangle the complex relationship between OCD and my religious upbringing. On the one hand, Christianity gave me tools to manage uncertainty. Prayers of confession reassured me that I was forgiven despite my faults and failures. Sermons proclaimed that God was guiding my steps, no matter how foggy the way ahead might seem. Scripture, for all its mystery, offered clear answers to life’s biggest questions – who I was, why I was created, how I was meant to live, and what my final destiny would be.

On the other hand, my religion exacerbated the very doubts that it enabled me to cope with. It emphasized that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with me; that this brokenness – this inherited “sin nature” – was my fault; and that I deserved horrific punishment. The Bible taught me that my heart was “desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9), that my reason couldn’t be trusted (Proverbs 3:5, 28:26; 1 Corinthians 19-21), that my thoughts must be “taken captive” (2 Corinthians 10:5) and confessed, and that God’s grace was the only thing restraining me from moral chaos. As an OCD sufferer, I might have believed these lies even if I was raised outside the church. But Christianity presented them as divinely inspired doctrines that I couldn’t challenge. Deepened my sickness while selling me the cure, and, in so doing, created a cycle of dependency that was excruciatingly painful to halt.

My departure from church is similarly double-edged. Community is difficult to find outside its walls. Once a month, I drive to a nearby city and attend a support group for people who have renounced religion. We swap stories around a library table, and, for two hours, the ruins of my old life are washed by sunlight. I miss so many aspects of that life. Ancient songs and stories. Prayers offered up for the sick and the sorrowful. The quiet grandeur of the Eucharist: Body of Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. I miss the way I once saw the world – the conviction that each spark of goodness was a love letter penned by a divine hand, a gift from the giver of all good things (James 1:17). Can this sense of enchantment be recovered? Most days, I doubt it. And yet, on my better days, I hope.

Despite these losses, I’m grateful that I left the church. My obsessions and compulsions are much less pronounced than they were when I was a Christian. That doesn’t mean they’ve vanished; OCD is a shape-shifter that evolves as you do, latching onto the things you love most. However, I’m learning to make peace with my thoughts, to love the self that I’ve stifled for so many years, and to celebrate the unredeemed and unrepentant beauty that has always existed outside the Christian fold. I wouldn’t have left my religion without my OCD – would have abandoned my quest for truth well before walls began collapsing. If I’m honest, I still feel lost and discouraged sixty to eighty percent of the time. Yet there’s comfort in knowing that I’ve confronted my own biases, that I’ve listened to opposing viewpoints, and that I’ve chased after the truth to the best of my ability. For that reason, as crazy as it may sound, I’m grateful for my OCD, too.

Two years after my deconversion, I decide to write my story down in the hope that it might encourage others who have struggled with scrupulosity. The writing process is agony. I haven’t written a story in a decade, and sometimes I’ve doubted that I ever would again. I cry multiple times while drafting the piece, not because it’s sad, but because the words are never right. Scrap my first draft, write a second, a third, a fourth. My wife puts her hands on my shoulders as I type. Presses her cheek against mine. “It will come,” she says. “Keep going.” I don’t think I believe her, but then I imagine a boy sitting under his grandparents’ maple tree – head bowed, apology note clutched in his hands, so fixated on mistakes he never made that he can’t see the grass under his shoes, the leaves over his head, the birds on the branches, the enormous blank page of the world laying itself before him and daring him to dream and do and get everything wrong and try again. And I keep writing.

One autumn night, I take a stroll through my neighborhood. Rain is falling – a soft, slow rain that drips from eaves and trickles down gutters and waxes the asphalt to a shine. I head straight for a quarter mile before turning around. On the way back, after glancing around for oncoming cars, I walk to the middle of an intersection and stand there with my hands in my pockets, listening. The streets are quiet. Aside from the rainfall and the hum of distant traffic, everything is still.

Closing my eyes, I think about the finale of Cast Away – that scene where Chuck Noland spins in an intersection and then smiles into the camera. I’ve always assumed that this smile expresses some newfound inner peace. Chuck’s old life as a FedEx executive, with its ceaseless deadlines and soul-squelching pressure, is over. He can go wherever he wants to go, do whatever he wants to do, without any burdens of responsibility. His future is wide open. Yet now I wonder whether I’ve misinterpreted the scene. I try to imagine what that would feel like – standing at the center of that crossroads, alone in a world that’s no longer recognizable, with the person you once were dead and buried, the things you devoted your life to undone, and the person you loved most – your very reason for breathing – gone forever. Maybe Chuck’s smile doesn’t reveal the absence of fear, but a resolution reached in spite of it. Maybe the freedom to chart a new course isn’t just a luxury. Sometimes, choosing a direction might be the bravest and most terrifying thing we’ll ever do.

I breathe deeply and open my eyes. Spin around as the rain falls. Turn towards home.