People say I'm not a person of faith like it is a factual statement about their lives, and I have never once believed it.
Not because I think everyone is secretly religious. Because I think the word has been narrowed until it only means one thing, and the thing it originally described is happening to you constantly.
You turned a key this morning
and believed the car would start.
You opened your eyes and believed the floor would be where you left it. You stood up and did not first verify gravity. You took a pill manufactured by someone you will never meet, checked by someone else you will never meet, carried across an ocean in the dark by a third person while you were asleep, and you swallowed it without a moment's hesitation.
That is not recklessness. It is a functioning trust network, and you are held up by thousands of strangers before breakfast.
one cup — 0 of 7 found
a cup of coffee
you trusted every one of them this morning, and you never once thought about it.
faith is the car starting. faith is your eyes opening. faith is the floor. faith is gravity, and not checking. faith is the stranger who built the thing, the stranger who packed the thing, the stranger who carried the thing across an ocean, in the dark, while you slept. faith is. not just in prayer.
from dependence to the other thing
Now — the honest part. That argument gets you to faith exists. It does not get you to God. I know the difference, and I am not going to pretend the second one follows from the first, because it doesn't.
What the first one did was clear away my main objection, which was that faith was a category of thing I did not do. It turned out faith was a category of thing I did constantly and had simply never audited.
Once that excuse was gone, I had to actually go and look.
what looking was like
Slow. Unspectacular. Not a lightning strike.
Reading things and not understanding them and reading them again. Asking a question and being given an answer that was clearly the standard answer, and having to decide whether to accept it or push. Pushing, mostly. Being the guy in the room with the follow-up question.
Prayer, badly, for a long time — mostly a running commentary addressed slightly upward.
Question
Does questioning this destroy it? If I keep pulling the thread does the whole thing come apart?
What I learned later
It didn't. Questioning is what turned it from something I had been handed into something that was mine. I have never met a faith worth having that could not survive being asked about.
and where she was in this
Careful. This is the bit that is easy to get wrong in the retelling, in both directions.
She was not the reason I became a Christian. I was already searching before she existed to me — that is chapter four, and I put it before chapter five on purpose.
But she was in the room while it happened, and it would be dishonest to pretend the room does not matter. Faith was part of the environment we shared. We talked about it. Some of my questions got sharper because somebody was there to ask them out loud to.
Fact
I was searching before I met her. I was still searching after.
What I thought it meant
For a while I let the two get braided together, which meant that when one came apart I was afraid the other would too.
What I learned later
The braid was mine. I made it. Untangling it was the hardest and most necessary work in this entire book.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.