I have recently been reflecting on my past with particular focus on my 20s, years in which by my choices I determined the course of much of the rest of my life. I was 19 when I traveled with Tim to the Middle East and spent several months with his family in Beirut, a visit which made a profound impression on me. They were Southern Baptist missionaries, demonstrating in their lives the combination of devotion and pragmatism essential to success in that field, and I recognized in the environment which they cultivated in their family and extended to me, a love which I felt that was missing from my life. I believed their claim that their love came from God and concluded that through God I too could obtain that love. It was about a year later, after reading the Bible hoping for an experience of God, and meeting my Christiin girlfriend Anne in college I asked Jesus to be my Savior.

I found God, or so I thought, but I did not find love. Or rather, the love which I found was conditional, freely offered but only granted if I achieved a certain level of social and moral performance, a certain measure of goodness which though ill-defined was nonetheless obligatory. The love I found turned out to be very much like my own conditional self-approval, though I did not recognize that at the time. Since I generally did not approve of myself, neither did God generally approve of me. A more gracious view of God's love remained out of my reach. Furthermore, in attributing my own self-condemnation to God, I relinquished the authority to change it myself, for I could not change God. I devoted my efforts to changing myself to meet what I thought were God's requirements instead of recognizing and acknowledging that it was my attitude towards myself which needed to change. Instead of seeking to know and accept myself, I sought to become someone else.

That was a fool's errand, bound at least in my case to fail. I was blessed nonetheless, blessed first of all with a pathway into adulthood through my wife and church, blessed with a reasonably happy marriage and blessed with two goodhearted children who as adults are each in their own way a blesssing to the world around them. I was also blessed with a challenging and rewarding career, blessed with opportunities to indulge in a variety of creative and fulfilling activities and blessed with a community of working friendships. But I did not succeed in meeting what I thought were God's requirements nor did I succeed in transforming myself into someone who could meet those requirements. As far as I could tell, the Holy Spirit did not succeed in transforming me either. I remained myself through it all, unsurprisingly, but what I did eventually succeed at was developing an understanding of who I was and what I had done with faith.

My faith was founded on the hope of becoming good so that I could be loved, that is, so that I could accept myself with love. I did not become good but I at some point agreed to grant myself the love I sought anyway. I would like to be able to say that there was a point during my journey towards self-acceptance at which I was able to receive love from God even before I was able to love myself, but it did not work that way. Instead the love which changed me was that which I experienced from my wife Darchelle. I trusted her love for me and in experiencing her love, was able to eventually internalize it. I think that is something which I misunderstood about love from the very beginning. I thought I could find it by myself with God, but love comes through people. I can imagine love in a virtual relationship such as I had with God only after I have internalized it through interpersonal relationships - parents, siblings, friends, mentors, lovers.

One might think that having now found love through other people and having internalized that love in myself, I could now receive it from God, but it has not worked out that way. Faith was always a means to an end, a vehicle through which I could become good and thereby obtain love. Having found love, and that love having accepted my goodness as sufficient, I have found no further use for faith. My image of God seems to be irredeemably contaminated with that self-condemnation which characterized so much of my life. Having for so long so thoroughly conflated God with my own attitude towards myself, I can no longer distinguished God from self. My reading of Scripture seems to be likewise contaminated with an irresistible compulsion to literalism, a legacy of years spent immersed in conservative Christianity. Another legacy of those years is a conviction that Scripture is the only authoritative source of information about God. Now, although I can conceive of a God who is at least as kind as a loving human parent, I cannot deduce that God from Scripture. A loving God remains for me hypothetical, a hypothesis insufficiently supported by the available evidence.

That is not the whole story. Faith served another purpose for me back in my late 20s and for several decades after that. After college I spent several years exploring different activities but could not settle into a job or a long-term relationship by which I could graduate into adulthood. I concluded after a time that I was incapable of managing my own life, but I was also unwilling or perhaps ashamed to ask anyone else for help, so I instead sought direction from God. After a hiatus from faith for several years, I turned my life over to God again. Let go and let God... But it turned out, for me anyway, that God delegated the responsibility for managing my life to the people around me, people who ultimately acted more in their own interest than in mine. I don't blame them for that; I would do likewise, but I would have been wiser to seek help in understanding what I wanted and pursuing that for myself rather than entreating others to discern my desires and fulfill them for me. When I finally took charge of my own life again, decided what I wanted and pursued it, faith was more of an encumbrance than an aid in that process. Faith appeared to encourage, if not actually require, a passive approach to life, a relinquishing of my agency and denial of my understanding, and as I have finally discovered, that did not work for me.