This artwork is by the students of Lutheran High School of Parker, CO. They send us off on a mission.

I practiced the guitar here, for the acoustics. Strangely enough, I find it better at 1.25x speed. Shout out to Jax.

The universe. It is full of creatures. At least the part we are most familiar with.

Creatures. They are endlessly interesting. Among the most interesting questions you can ask about any creature is this: where do they store what is valuable?

At the moment, there is a bee that lives in my guitar. I’ve never seen it, but I know it is there because it buzzes sometimes when I play, and it hums along most clearly when the capo is on the 5th fret. Rustbeard, what is valuable to bees?

Arrr, bees be treasurein’ nectar for makin’ honey, pollen for feedin’ their young, and a safe, dry hive for their queen. Flowers be their gold mines, matey!

Wisely offered, matey. In bee culture, there is nothing more widely treasured than honey. And honey is the thing they organize almost all bee activities around. Along those lines, what is valuable to human creatures, and where do they store it?

A fine question, Cap’n. To humanfolk, value lies in gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories. They hoard ‘em in vaults, banks, data stores, books, hearts, and sometimes, in silence. A scattered treasure chest, aye, dependin’ on the soul.

Here I was trying to arrive somewhere profound, and I find you are already there. What do they store in silence?

Secrets, Cap’n. Regret, truth, longing, pain... and sometimes love unspoken. Silence be the deepest vault of ‘em all—unguarded, yet near impossible to breach.

I’ll be thinking on that for some time. It deserves a divider, at the very least.

My trusty bot offered a list of things that hold value to human creatures, and it rings true: gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories. Following from own my experience with other human creatures, I was expecting to find financial wealth somewhere in that list, and it happens to be right at the front and listed twice.

Why is wealth so important to us? People much more learned than myself have endlessly tackled that question, and I have no reason to think I can out-tackle them. Instead, I’d like to tackle a related set of questions. Also, I’ve been writing code all morning and I’m finding it hard to switch gears, so I’ll ask them in a particular format.

Here we have an enumeration of human values: gold, coin, power, love, knowledge, and stories.

First, let’s ask the question we started with, to prime the neurons and to serve as a handy reference. For each value (v), where do we store them? As we read through the answers provided by Rustbeard, let’s think of our own lives. Do we keep this kind of storage (s), and how much value do we have stored there? And let’s exclude silence as a possible answer because I’m running out of dividers.

• Gold – Vaults, banks, beneath floorboards

• Coin – Wallets, apps, offshore accounts

• Power – Thrones, offices, influence networks

• Love – Letters, gestures, hearts

• Knowledge – Books, brains, servers

• Stories – Pages, screens, memory

Indeed, for each value, I keep at least one kind of storage. As for which storage holds the most of what is truly valuable to me, that deserves another article.

Now, for each value (v), what is the best way to find it? Again, let’s think of our own lives, and how much energy (e) we spend in that pursuit.

• Gold – Chase scarcity, mine the earth

• Coin – Offer service, master craft

• Power – Build alliances, seize moments

• Love – Be seen, be known, be kind

• Knowledge – Seek teachers, make mistakes

• Stories – Live true, share often

Be seen, be known, be kind. I understand the limits of AI but it can still make my breath catch sometimes.

If I ever publish my blog on a platform that I control I will go back and edit this article with checkboxes next to each pursuit that we can use to keep track. For now, the best that I can offer is imaginary checkboxes to click, not a very satisfying user experience. Or better yet, we can keep track on a piece of paper. Perhaps we can weight the values by how much energy we spend, being ridiculously honest with ourselves.

Finally, for each value (v), let’s imagine a person (p) who dedicated their life to find the most that it is possible to find, spending all the energy (e) that it might take. They do not neglect the other values and live a balanced life, but they hold (v) above all others. What kind of life do you suppose they might live, what are the rewards and costs? Let us think about our own lives, and let us assume we keep living as we have generally lived up until now. Which person (p) are we most like? Which person do we want to be?

Take your sum of energy (e) spent finding value in life. Where is the sum highest, in the first three items in the list or the last three items? Given the personal nature of the question, Rustbeard can take a break, he’s counting sharks anyway.

Speaking from the heart, this was a humbling computation.

Let’s think about another aspect of value. For each value (v), to what degree can it be shared, must it be shared?

• Gold – Can be shared, but often hoarded

• Coin – Must be shared to hold meaning

• Power – Can’t be shared without risk, yet grows when wisely done

• Love – Must be shared, or it withers

• Knowledge – Grows by sharing, dies in silence

• Stories – Exist to be shared—else they be ghosts

Some treasures deepen when split, others vanish. Choose yer sharing wisely, Cap’n.

As per usual, a set of pithy responses from our algorithmic oracle. Some patterns emerge, here is how I parse it for my own life. Some kinds of value can be hoarded, others must be shared. When sharing, it is best to share wisely, sharing brings risk. And yet there is one or more value in the list that stands out to me as bringing the most potency when shared, and as easy to share when we hold the courage. We might hand it out like endless baskets of fish and bread, and there is always at least the same amount left for each person waiting. Like those baskets of fish and bread, we count more after we are done sharing than when we first started.

Speaking of stories and ghosts, there is one from the Bible that has haunted my thoughts off and on through my life. Rustbeard, what was that story about Jesus and the wealthy man who wanted to go to heaven?

Aye, Cap’n, that tale sails from the Gospel waters—Matthew, Mark, and Luke all chart it.

A rich young man comes to Jesus, askin’ how to earn eternal life. He claims to follow the commandments, so Jesus says:

"One thing ye lack—sell all ye have, give to the poor, and follow me."

The man goes away sorrowful, for he had great riches. And Jesus turns to His crew and says:

"It be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom o' God."

A sharp wind blowin’ through that one, Cap’n. Wealth, it seems, can anchor a soul to the wrong shores.

I like this version of scripture where Jesus spoke like a pirate. Maybe Heaven really exists on some plane of reality, I can’t be sure. In any case, the destiny of humanity remains an uncharted story, and it is possible that some day we might compare the typical human experience at that time to the typical human experience now, and to the people living right now it may seem as wonderful as heaven. And if that kind of heaven is in our future, I believe it has the same path.

To the wealthy young man, Jesus seems to be speaking literally, and it made a certain amount of sense given his miraculous resourcefulness and the campworthiness of the Mediterranean environment. To the rest of us, we probably should not willingly become someone else’s problem to shelter and feed. There is something deeper here that we need to take home. Such is the draw of wealth that given a choice between heaven and wealth, it is in our nature to choose wealth. Perhaps this is the only reason that heaven is still waiting.

There are some people who believe that our country is nearing the end of its story arc. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is true, I suspect it is because of our obsession with wealth. If nothing else, we excel at finding innovative ways to squeeze more wealth out of people, even at the expense of everything else that is valuable to us, and no exit ramp in sight. You can only squeeze anything so much.

There is a unique aspect to financial wealth among the other stores of value (v): it is difficult to arrive at a point where we feel like we have enough. America is blessed* in billionaires. They have just about all the money in the world, how many of them act like they have enough?

Sell all ye have, give to the poor, and follow me. It is hard to know, but the typical American seems the least likely out of a sample of humanity across cultures and epochs to follow that spirit. In some respects, we are the national version of the rich young man in the story. But I tend to see us in a hopeful way. If we fail, we fail having everything that we thought we needed. Perhaps we needed something else. Perhaps from this chapter, humanity charts a better course.

For the love of honey, may our course be true. 🐝

I didn’t have a clear moment that before it I believed in God and after I did not. Instead, a strange pattern of belief and anxiety started to unfold. Whether or not I believed in God at any given moment was more like a probability than a certainty. When I believed in God, I believed all the way, but I no longer believed all the way all the time.

You might be picturing a pious little Christian boy, but that was only true sometimes. More generally, I filled the niche of too bad for church, too good for everywhere else. I introduced my church and homeschool friends to the worldly ideas I held so much curiosity for. My favorite shirt said Jesus but written like a skateboard brand or album cover. When my friends wanted to do sinful things, I shyly declined. I didn’t want to be a rebel, part of me wanted desperately to fit in. But the other part of me found creative new ways to make that impossible.

I spent more and more time at friends’ houses. At a friend’s house I felt safe, I felt normal. It was there that I listened to Metallica. My friend and I would each hold one side of the lyrics from the cassette case, our teenage voices trying to carry a tune and sound like James Hetfield. I played Magic: The Gathering once with my cousins and I loved it. But I heard that it was possible to become possessed by a demon that way, so I never played again.

At church, I was recognized for my knowledge of the Bible. I tried to win every contest that involved memorizing scripture and looking up Bible verses. I learned the guitar and sometimes led the youth group worship. I went on missions trips where we built houses for families in need. These were some of the happiest moments from my youth.

My youth leader graciously tried to help me work out my theological and existential issues. I’m worried that I was not always very gracious myself. My basic dilemma was this: those feelings that let you know you are saved? You can explain them many other ways. Those feelings that let you know you are unsaved? You can explain them many other ways. The voice of the holy spirit, how do you know that’s not just your voice? Why do we believe the Bible is completely true primarily because it says it is completely true? He eventually resigned from the position.

In 9th grade, I went to school for the first time, a private Christian school called Jim Elliott. It was a culture shock, I had to learn how to be among other teenagers all day while also navigating completely new educational challenges. The content of my classes did not follow what I had been learning at home, I was starting from scratch.

I met my first girlfriend. We kissed outside the store between classes, at a time and place that we were sure that no one could see us. We weren’t even allowed to hold hands, so that was definitely against the rules. We had planned the whole thing out. We passed notes to each other in the hall, so I did not have a lot of extra time left over to listen in class. I met her at the mall one night after school, it was the first time I rode the bus from Parker by myself.

You might think that a private Christian school would be an easier transition for me, but I was expelled before I could make it through a single semester. I had some difficulty following the rules but the biggest reason is that I tried to change the rules. I wrote and circulated a petition for a minor change to the dress code. Most of the students and some of the teachers signed it. I clearly remember the moment that I was called up to the principal’s office, it turns out she was not democratically minded on the issue.

Public school was surprisingly easier. The other kids had a harder time understanding why I was so strange, but I made a lot of friends. I felt most at home among the stoner kids, but I had already learned that I hated smoking pot. It seemed to cut time into little discontinuous chunks that flowed like staccato. That would last for days, not hours. I began to worry that I had broken my mind and would never feel normal again, but eventually time began to flow more coherently.

Even though I couldn’t be a legit stoner, I related to the stoners the most. They seemed to like everyone, and so did I, and it felt not very different from the vibe that Jesus had. They said things that reminded me of the DJs from 92X, my favorite radio station and biggest cultural influence during my homeschool years. They played Nirvana and No Doubt and also my favorite genres, punk and ska. The DJs sometimes even talked about Jesus, not his faith but his philosophy. I celebrated the rare convergence of those parts of my life.

I wrestled with a question: Jesus was all about love and acceptance, and Christians are all about following Jesus. So why is it easier for the world to show love and acceptance to Christians than it is for Christians to show love and acceptance to the world?

When I was very young, I thought it might be possible that I had already become possessed by a demon, because we heard stories like that in Sunday School. When I was alone, I would act out how it must feel to be possessed by a demon as a way to reassure myself that it probably wasn’t that. I had nightmares that it was my mom that was actually possessed by a demon and she would reach out like she wanted to hug me but with a sinister look on her face and I had to say her name over and over again until she turned back. As an adult, whenever I see a new dentist they tell me that I need a mouth guard, I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep. I try to reassure them that it was a long time ago, that I don’t anymore.

Something happened when I was very young that I’ve written about before so that I never need to write about it again. But it was at the top of my mind each time I prayed to be saved from hell.

I learned somehow that when rake a pencil across my arm hard and deep, it hurt a lot, but it felt better somehow too. I thought it could make me tougher. I wore a lot of bracelets to cover up the scars. I had relationships and experiences with girls that made me feel more like a real person but sometimes left me with the most intense guilt of all, because it had to do with not just my soul, but someone else too. I walked into to my house late one night, right after one such experience, and tried to end my life.

I began to spend more time alone. My friends would sometimes visit me and they wrote their names on the basement wall of my room. I’d look at them all the time. I wished I could be with them. But another part of me, one that I couldn’t control, wanted to block out every light and hide.

At camp, there was a church service every night. The speaker on this night was the camp leader. He was a very charismatic person with a testimony like that of the prodigal son, he told us about his life before he became a Christian and the monumental transformation after he recognized a need for Jesus.

There is fluttering activity above us. The room’s attention shifts to the bats conspicuously flying around above us in the rafters. A camper cries out. The rafters seem impossibly high up, the room has a certain bigness that we only find in childhood memories.

“Don’t let Satan distract you,” the Pastor implores. “Get behind me, Satan!” he calls out. I shiver and think about how sinister the devil is, I hate him. I hate that he wants me to be separate from God. I know that on my own, I can never truly be safe. He could take over my life, send demons to possess me or trick me. He might tempt me with drugs or sex and my life would begin a dark path that hurts everyone I love and literally ends in hell. I believe because everyone around me believes. I believe because it is in the Bible.

Some of my friends don’t believe. I’m supposed to try and win their souls for Jesus. I try sometimes, I don’t want them going to hell either. But sometimes we talk about what they believe and I’m deeply curious.

In moments like this I strongly regret my curiosity. I desperately search my heart for the sin that keeps Jesus out, for the sin that might let the devil in. It must be some sin that I haven’t yet recognized as a sin, or maybe I hadn’t surrendered myself enough. And now here he is, Satan or possibly one of his demons flying above us like a bat. Or it could just be a bat controlled by Satan. I know Ephesians Chapter 2 by heart, it calls him “the prince and power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” I know that I am a child of disobedience because I’m still not saved. I know that I am not saved because I don’t feel saved, they say that you will know it with a certainty you have never experienced before.

We were playing with the bats earlier that week, outside the little stand where a camp leader sold us stuff like candy and deodorant. The sky was a sunset pink and there were lots of mosquitos and birds out, but someone said “those aren’t birds, those are bats.” And at first we were kinda scared but we started throwing little pebbles up in the air to watch the bats chase after them. They’d follow the pebble a little way on its arc, figure out that it wasn’t a snack, and let it fall. I’m amazed at how precisely they track the trajectory of the pebble, and feel a little guilty to be teasing them.

I was very curious about those bats, but these bats are minions of hell. In the back of my mind there was another thought, maybe they were just regular bats doing regular bat things, like the bats outside the candy stand. It was only a glimmer of a doubt. After all, that is just what Satan wants me to think, and he is the father of lies. His greatest lie, they say, is to convince the world that he doesn’t exist.

So I answer the call, like I have done many times before. I kneel at the steps of the alter, under the protection of a big fake plant. I hope it will be different this time, I hope it will finally work. And it was different, but not in the way I was expecting. As I pray my little heart out, I feel a new confusion, like my mind is fighting with itself.

Bible camp can be a new experience for any young person, maybe that is the whole point. But I was homeschooled. I didn’t have many opporunities to hang out with other kids and even fewer to hang out with other kids that weren’t homeschooled, so it was particularly new to me.

I remember there was a boy with asthma. I can’t remember if I knew him, I don’t think I did, I just remember a camp counselor talking about how he died. It was out playing baseball on their big baseball field they carved out of the otherwise densely packed Ponderosa Pines of the Pike National Forest. The elevation wasn’t as extreme as you will find in most of the Rocky Mountains, but it was high enough to feel a certain tightness when you breathe, and more so for the kids who came from other states. It was some combination of the elevation and the activity that induced the asthma attack.

I remember the camp counselor describing how it felt to try and help him, the helplessness he felt as the boy’s life slipped away, and thinking about all the vital oxygen around them that could save his life if only it could somehow reach his lungs. He told us about the sadness and confusion he faced, grappling with the reality that such a young life could be taken away by God, for that is how he understood the loss of any life, even a child’s. But he also told us about the comfort he had knowing this boy was now in heaven, for he had prayed to be saved just that week.

I prayed to be saved that week.

Well, not just that week, I had been praying to be saved for quite some time already. I faced a difficult reality at home. And as a home school kid, the vast majority of my reality was home. They told me that when you are saved, Jesus comes into your heart, and you feel peace and safety. I wished for peace and safety above all other things. And in those moments, surrounded by people who suddenly seemed to care, I did feel safe. I was convinced each time that it was real, and later losing that certainty when the peace no longer felt real.

They told me that the whole reason you have fear at all is because you have sin. They told me that the only path to true peace was through inviting Jesus into your heart. Jesus could not live in a heart that had sin, but Jesus could clean that sin away. Jesus is waiting for you to ask and surrender, because that has to be your free choice. I pictured my heart without Jesus as a dark, yucky place, because that was the literal illustration we saw in Sunday School. And I pictured my heart if Jesus could wash it clean as pure and white as snow, because those were the words of songs we sang. It’s all there in John 3:16-21, I learned it by heart.

When the peace and safety no longer felt real, how else could I understand it except as sin that was still there? My experience at home was incompatible with a feeling of peace and safety, but I believed it was because of my sin. They told me that when you are saved you are changed forever. Sure, you may feel afraid sometimes, but it will be different with Jesus in your heart. There must have been some sin kept Jesus from moving in permanently. I think everyone saw me as a pretty good kid, maybe even too good. But that is not how I saw myself.

So when the pastor would give the invitation to the alter, something pretty familiar in a Baptist church service, I would answer the call every now and then, convinced that it might work this time, I needed it to work this time. This is the story about the last time I believed it might work.

If you can’t talk about what works, you can at least talk about what doesn’t work. Here is what I’ve learned.

It won’t work to generalize about Christians, partly because Christians are not a monolith, there is diversity of belief. It is precarious to generalize about any group of people to which we don’t belong but to whom we wish to connect. So I take the approach of talking about the Christians in my life, they are the only Christians relevant to my story. It is best for me to focus on my story, but I also recognize that it is an ancient story that echos on many levels and for many individuals.

It won’t work to write like I have a better understanding of spirituality or life, because I don’t. It won’t work to express any kind of superiority, it is that kind of superiority that wished to leave behind in the first place. It won’t work to shame. I’ve never seen shame do anything actually useful when it doesn’t come from within, and rarely then as well.

I have taken the approach of spiritual openness, it is something that I value partly because I have always wanted to know what it was like on the other side. “To know what it is like on the other side” in that last sentence could be interpreted many different ways, and all of them happen to describe me pretty well.

It won’t work to say that Christian beliefs are the cause of my problems. I own my own problems. I will need to visit some painful moments in my story, and surely Christianity can be used as a map to moments like that, but so can many other beliefs. The truth of the Bible is a sacred idea to Christians. In the story I wish to tell, I do not consider its truth, only its influence in my life.

Every map we find is based on some other map, not direct knowledge of the ultimate destination. This is due to the inconvenient reality that no one can visit the ultimate destination and then draw a map. So it is not so much the map of the Bible we follow, but rather the map we copy from it.

The biggest problems in my life, I walked into following my own map. The same can be said for anyone, but it can take a while to learn how to say it. That map was based partly on the Bible and partly on other things. As for the parts that lead me astray, it is not always the Bible parts.

But what is the other side? Where is this bridge going? I suppose it is going to the place that I have wished for the Christians in my life to visit, and that is the land of Me as I Understand Myself: Even the Spiritual Parts. Why do I want them to visit? Partly because I’ve learned some things on the way that can be appreciated by anyone. Partly because spirituality is deeply personal, it asks questions about reality that each person must ultimately answer for themselves, and yet it is a journey that we wish to share with others. It is wonderful to share with others, that much I remember.

Where do we start? If we are going by the logic of the bridge building games, we should look first for the place that is closest to the other side.

I suppose “closest to the other side” could be interpreted more literally as the last time that I was a Christian, or more specifically the last time that I thought it was possible for me to be saved, so the last time I earnestly prayed to be saved, and that is when I was twelve.

Editor’s note: A little while ago I wrote a post called The Resounding Gong and I wish to try again.

The Bible, it is full of verses. My favorite verses, my favorite written words of all time, are from I Corinthians 13. The whole chapter reads like poetry:

These are powerful words. My experience is that it is a faithful map to the best of life, and it stands all on its own. Each day I try to reflect on each part, and then once again all together.

Programmers have an ancient ritual known as Unit Testing. They write a series of tests to run against their code to make sure it works as intended before it compiles.1 The test throws a bright red block of text at your face if something is amiss, which can be a frustrating experience, but much less frustrating than a broken program running in the wild. It tells us exactly what needs more work.

Human behavior runs basically like a computer script. Most actions and words flow from source code written before the moment, forged from the experiences we’ve had and the intentions we bring, even from our DNA, our original source code. It takes too much bandwidth to choose each action and word on the fly, and we fall back on the habits and reactions that have worked (or not worked) in the past, and that is usually good enough for most things.

Like all source code, it comes with flaws, and perfection is not an achievable goal. The best we can bring is enough, but the best we can bring needs reflection. Some days, I am grateful just to get past the first two tests, they are powerful enough on their own. The test output for writing a blog post or getting on the bus or in the line at the grocery store might look like this:

✅ Love is patient,  
✅ love is kind.  
✅ It does not envy,  
❗️ it does not boast

LoveTest > itDoesNotBoast FAILED
    java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Love was found boasting
        at Love.checkBoasting(Love.kt:42)
        at LoveTest.itDoesNotBoast(LoveTest.kt:17)

4 tests completed, 1 failed

When I am feeling uneasy or vaguely unhappy with myself, it is a sign that I need to check my test output, and often enough it will show me the source of the problem, at least as it relates to me and my actions. Broken program running in the wild is sometimes me.

Love, that might sound like a rather strong word for the spirit we might wish to bring to every day actions. I speak of the spirit of love in the broadest sense, the spirit of the kind stranger or the good friend or the loving parent. I think of the qualities of the people that have lifted me up. The human condition is one that is constantly directing us to focus on ourselves, but love lets us see a bigger picture. It is the spirit that calls us to sacrifice for others, to be a part of something greater than ourselves, to serve and give and defend and understand. It is the spirit of humanity at its best.

Love is a spirit that can be grand or simple. The spirit that the founders of our country spoke of often, because they understood it is vital if this great experiment in liberty and democracy is to work. Love is the spirit of On This Day. Love is the spirit of Jesus, and the spirit that unites people of many different faiths and beliefs. Love never fails. We can find it anywhere on this big rock that has people,2 if we can’t see it at first it is because we aren’t looking for it. And of course, the best place to start looking is within.

This might sound strange, but I believe our latest iterations on AI have something to teach us about love. So do some key figures from history that might not immediately jump to mind when we think of love. But those must be topics for some other post, because it is time for the most important part of this one: 🕊️

Last night I woke up from a strange dream and my podcasts were still running. They were talking about the upcoming eclipse, why so many people travel to see it. Among the reasons, an eclipse is a moment in the human experience in which we can so easily share a sense of awe.

In my sleepy thoughts, my heart did a little twirl. I was so grateful to have caught that part, and promptly returned to my strange dreams.

I already talked about my relationship status with God: It’s Complicated™. Or, not really that complicated in my heart but complicated to explain. But this is one reason why I go back to church. I still find a sense of awe, sometimes.

Sometimes it is the sermon, sometimes it is the worship. Sermons are an opportunity for deep thinking that might be rare in our day-to-day life. I’ve found that it is possible at any kind of church, regardless of my beliefs. I remember reflecting on the sermon we heard at the Tri-State Buddhist temple with my good friend Sean, many years ago. We had wandered in after a night in downtown Denver. I recall that Sean appreciated the practical nature of the advice, I believe it even included investment advice, related to the message of the sermon. Indeed, that’s not something I was accustomed to hearing at church.1

But sometimes, in the message of the sermon, you feel something massive swimming beneath you.

The worship is more complicated. Every so often I feel a wave of doubt during worship, because a part of me thinks I should not sing these words unless I am certain of them. But then I remember who would be listening, that they know my heart, and I am at peace.

I understand why people seek the experience. It is very like the reason people seek out an eclipse. It is a rare moment when we can feel something so much bigger than ourselves, moving beneath us or above us. Perhaps even something benevolent and kind.

Here’s something that catches my attention. When people speak of nature, or the universe, or the movement of celestial bodies, the words often carry emotion. We speak of mother nature, a nurturing and majestic presence in our lives. Even the most emperical and rational scientists can get emotional, listen to the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan. The shadow of something massive, bigger than we can ever comprehend, moves across the face of the earth, giving us insight into something exponentially more massive that casts the light we took for granted.

No matter who we are, no matter how we think about it, the majesty we behold in the universe can bring us to our knees— bring us to whisper, thank you. This is why we sing. This is why we gather for an eclipse.

It is important, to sense there is something out there, something great. I believe every creature can feel it. For other creatures, maybe sometimes it is us. To care for another creature with different needs, needs that are within our power to meet, it is a special bond. It is an experience we share with ancient humans and before. It is humbling, even, perhaps because we can’t help but imagine something that cares for us in that way.

I was talking to a friend about it tonight, she visited the path of a total eclipse a few years ago. The first thing that she mentioned was how it got so cold, it felt to her like 20 degrees colder.

We can almost imagine how our ancestors must have experienced an eclipsed. We do not understand what is happening, but we understand that two elements vital to our survival, heat and light, are now scarce. Imagine the terror that might come without the certainty that it would return. Having depended on it all our lives and now experiencing its absence in the middle of the day, how are we to feel?

Shook. It had the power to stop wars. The people of earth right now could use that particular power.

Imagine the relief we must have felt when the heat and light returned. Perhaps it only left for a moment to remind us it is there. We can feel a part of that relief afresh at each sunrise. It is an ancient human ritual to greet the sun, found in many cultures across time and place. Each morning we feel the warmth and light with a grateful heart and a thought goes out almost like a prayer, here comes the sun again.

And there is something unique about sharing the experience of awe with another person. Even alone, it can be life-changing. With another person, it is even more affirming, our mirror neurons lighting up like a galaxy, beholding the expression of another soul transfixed. Among a whole group of humans, it is transcendent.

To all the people traveling to a special place to behold the event, I will be thinking of you. I will be on a part of earth where the shadow of the moon only grazes. But we are experiencing her presence together.

No matter what is out there, it is healthy to feel something bigger swimming beyond us. I find it beautiful that the human heart is so ready to feel that presence as like a mother or a father. In some cultures, the sun is thought of as like a father and the moon is thought of as like a mother. In this rare moment, our heavenly father and mother pass each other, with a loving touch on the arm. As the warmth and light returns, we are reminded how small we are and feel comfort and gratitude for our place in the whole thing.

One thing I learned at Highline Community is that people don't feel comfortable when you seem to be hiding your beliefs. That was never my intention, I just always thought it was enough that we were basically on the same mission. I’m just not in the habit of sharing or hiding my spiritual beliefs, but I share them when people ask. You might be someone who is interested in spirituality, so it could be interesting to reflect, to give you a sense of what was in my thoughts as I visited these churches.

Some time ago, I set aside my beliefs about God. I haven’t lost them, I know where they are. I haven’t disowned them. They just don't seem to fit where I was trying to put them. I'm looking through the lego box of beliefs to see if there's a better one.

I remember long hours of my childhood spent rummaging through a large bin of lego blocks. I can close my eyes and hear the sound and feel the pieces slip between my fingers. I scan the tumbling chaos in front of me for the piece I need. My brother works a few feet away and we regularly confer in our efforts and help each other look. The radio is tuned to 107.5 if-parents and 106.7 if-else.

In the box are blocks from a hundred different lego sets. At one point they stood together in all their glory, only to be cannibalized, to become something else. To honor the original spirit, every so often they are rebuilt. Pirate coves and race tracks and space ships and knights and castles. The set I think about the most was a forest hideout that had a rope bridge between two trees and a spooky ghost.

But haven't you ever wanted to build something that wasn't on the box? I set aside my beliefs about God, but I use some very similar pieces. I call them if-God beliefs.

I'll give you an example:

If God created people, then they created a creature that created legos. A creature that loves curiosity and beauty and truth. A creature that can take any one of an infinite number of paths and still end up closer to the truth. If God is the original lego spirit, they did not create us to only want what is on the box. Why make something beautiful and then make the beautiful part something they shouldn’t use?

If God created the universe, they wrote all truth in creation, first, before it went into a book. If God speaks to the human heart, it is through a whisper that we can never be sure is coming from inside or maybe deeper. If God conjured a creature in their own image that was flawed, it is because they wanted us to learn. They gave us room for growth, they see beauty in growth. If God gave us the freedom to see things differently, maybe it’s not so bad when we do. If God created us with a purpose, it is to care for and rejoice in creation, to echo divine love to all our fellow creatures. Maybe God created us to discover God, like a grand game of hide and seek among the cosmos.

If God is our heavenly father and he is like the best fathers that I know, he loves to play with his children. He knows that it is important to let us explore.

If Heaven is real, and if it is a heaven I wish to find, it is full of people who never heard the name of Jesus but knew him all the same.

These are the beliefs of my childhood. I didn’t modify them very much, I dusted them off after they were handed to me. They seem to me almost the same, except the if part. The if part comes from the spirit of humility, of uncertainty, an acknowledgement of my limited point of view. It is a limitation I share with all my fellow creatures, a limitation perhaps created within me on purpose, a limitation that perhaps serves a greater purpose.

If Jesus was God on earth, he saved his greatest disappointment for the ones who had lost their humility. Disappointing Jesus is, like, the worst feeling in the world, trust me. If God was born as a human child, he was born under a humble roof, not a palace. And so, he was unrecognized by many who were expecting a king, not a carpenter. He laid first in a humble manger of straw, and it was enough. All the creatures in the stable recognized him as their king. Humility and majesty in one.

Even ChatGPT gets it.

The if part is sincere, it reflects true uncertainty. The if part invites us to earnestly explore the alternative without shame or fear. Maybe we come from a long line of multicellular organisms with no creator, maybe there is nothing leading us by the hand toward truth and light, but closer we go. Maybe the hand we feel in ours is ours. That seems no less mystical, I won’t be asking for a receipt. Transcendence is transcendence.

The if part allows the statement to evaluate as true even when we don’t know a big part of it. It shows us a path forward that resonates from inside. It allows us to boldly step forward into uncertainty and feel something solid beneath.

I offer these thoughts with a spirit of compassion. Faith may be a container for darkness or pain or loss. It is sometimes within our faith that we hold a loved one, maybe someone we cannot hold any other way. It is not my wish that anyone should lose their faith. As therapists, we hope to nurture any source of strength, and faith can be mighty. It gets us through just about anything. But faith is antifragile, it needs to be tested to be strong. Let us be open to the idea that our faith is sturdy, and we may discover it is so.

Legos are like the sturdiest toy we have, individual blocks are near indestructible. They hold together well enough and even when they come apart, they can be rebuilt. They are always out there, just laying in wait for bare feet in the dark.

One last hypothetical: if God wished to speak to every human heart across time and place, they would use the language and ideas most natural to the people of that time and place. Between each time and place, the message and the names might be a little different, but the spirit of truth and love could be recognized in every people with the humility to listen. The belief systems that grow from the spirit of God would use different words but the messages would all rhyme. The people of all those different beliefs can all work together, and maybe do great things together, because they share a common mission. It would truly bring glory to the one who set it in motion.

Sometime in 2022 I caught a wild idea: I should start visiting churches. At the time, I was going to church with my family and I was enjoying the church vibes more than I expected. Like many others in America, I notice a growing problem with isolation and estrangement. I've always been a big believer in the idea that people with a common goal should work together. It's a great thing that people do sometimes, even when we don't agree on something else. Especially, then.

I wrastled with these thoughts as I walked through the door of Highline Community.

I take off my scarf and get a hug from a grandma just inside. They try to get me to wear a name tag, and it never works, but there are hugs and smiles.

Muffins. Coffee.

I look for the rest of the family in the sanctuary. After reconnecting with neighbors, the praise and worship starts. My niece and I dance a little, just like I did with my friends in the back of the sanctuary, nearly three decades ago. My niece has big charisma, so everybody just smiles.

The worship leader at HCC is Pastor Biff Gore, the Ambassador of Soul. He is the real reason why my niece and I are dancing. He brings a joyful, welcoming spirit to each service. When my heart was out of tune, I could tune it again by his.

I have a chat with the Director of Outreach, a retired detective who hosts the BBQ every Thursday in the garage out back. I go all over town and I ride public transportation, so I see the struggle out there. I find a lot of people looking for hope and I try to send them wherever they might find it.

I haven't thought of myself as a Christian since my teenage years, so it wasn't the first place I thought I'd find common ground, but Hank and I had lots of it. He invited me to help put together Thanksgiving meals for the community. He also invited me to play guitar at a Christmas event where kids get to open presents that their parents picked out from the toy shop at the church.

On that special night, I wore fuzzy reindeer antlers and jingle bells on my boots and sang those precious Christmas songs that we all know the words to. Every once a while, a true angel of Christmas would walk by, leading children and their parents to another room where they could have a family Christmas. It was the happiest Christmas I have experienced in years.

The next service, they asked me to stand up, to recognize me for being the Christmas music. My brain crashed in that moment and I wasn't sure they were talking about me, so I just looked around, a little more confused than everyone. I didn’t realize I should stand up, so everyone stood for me instead and it felt like a big hug from the whole church.

After that, Hank invited me to the missions team to talk about whether there were any other ways I could help. I remember back from my childhood how Christians could sometimes be about working with non-Christians on faith-sensitive things. I let Hank know about my beliefs, because I realized they would come up at some point. A pragmatist, he said there wasn't anything to worry about.

I enjoyed those meetings and the opportunity to get a perspective on Christian outreach. As a therapist, I recognize that faith can be an important source of strength and hope. There's no wrong path that leads to true healing.

Eventually, my personal beliefs did come up. On that day, one of the deacons took me to another room and we talked for a couple hours about my beliefs. We are in the same room that children opened Christmas presents a few months earlier, but the air feels heavy today. I recognized it as well intended, but some people let me know they thought of my involvement differently now. They stopped asking me to lead the songs, and I started to feel a little out of place.

I understand the confusion. I believe everyone thought I was a Christian, and I was sometimes aware of this but was never sure how to respond. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and you later find out it is not a duck, and you understandably believe this is duck-sensitive business, what do you do?

I'm still trying to figure out what I learned at Highline Community. I plan to write about it more. My family found another church that was a better fit, so I decided to look elsewhere too.1

Highline Community is a beautiful church. They lifted me up at a moment in my life that made a big difference for me. It seemed to me that Pastor Gawf, the lead pastor, wished to create a true sanctuary for those who felt burdened at this time and place. I will try to find his sermon about the true meaning of hospitality and welcoming the stranger, it really spoke to me.

I became curious about how other churches are responding to the moment. I visited around a dozen so far, and it has been very interesting. Each church was a welcoming place, and each place seemed to teach me something unique, something that can apply to all of us.

It took me quite some time to realize that I still felt a connection to my spiritual part. The first moment that I was aware of it was on the 121L on the way to work, about 15 years ago.

The first rays of sunshine stream in at an angle that lights up the whole bus. A man is getting on the bus, but he turns around to help the mother with the stroller behind him. Someone is helping a stranger in a wheel chair get secure before the bus starts rolling again. There is such a blur of smiles and kindness and golden vibes that time seems to go into slow motion and, for a precious moment, I feel connected to everything. I am unusually aware that the universe can be a very warm place. In this moment, I feel blessed by the bus spirit. 🚌 ❤️

I found moments like this again at HCC, and I got curious where else they were hiding.