The Day God Died

When Your Faith is Swimming in Circles

Author’s Note: I posted this last year and it still feels right, so here it is again:

The trouble started when God died.

In April 1966, Time Magazine’s cover blared the headline: “Is God Dead?” Back then, I was an ordinary middle-class girl just starting high school in Phoenix, Arizona. My Christian upbringing had been mostly grandmothers dragging me to Baptist and Methodist churches while my parents donned their bikinis and spent Sundays doing yard work.

Time reported God had died because He was no longer useful to a modern space age society. After that, the God is dead idea barged into my thoughts whenever I wasn’t mooning over some pimply boy or explaining to my adoptive father why I didn’t deserve to be grounded again. I was confused—secretly, I wouldn’t miss a God who seemed to always want to catch you doing wrong.

At the same time, heaven was utopia in the clouds, like an Afterparty Eden where suffering, pain and ugliness weren’t allowed. Because I’d survived polio resulting in one arm's permanent paralysis, I had this nagging feeling that heaven might only be for those deserving, like Hollywood A-listers or at least people who’d given up smoking, dancing and cussing. Heaven seemed obsessed with perfection. But for me, perfection felt impossible.

I began to wonder if love was best expressed in imperfection. Outcasts, lepers, tax collectors and girls with paralyzed arms had only their pathetic selves to offer to God, after all.

I started looking for meaning in life’s mistakes: love expressing itself as widow’s mites or dandelions offered by tiny grubby hands. I looked for beauty in lopsided smiles and awkward limps. I found holiness in the homely stuff, things I could see and hear, touch, taste, smell.

It made me think of a birthday cake my mother once baked for me. The chocolate layers fell apart and she cried as she glued them together, piling on thick frosting until you couldn’t see the damage anymore.

The cake was pathetic—it listed to one side, and melting icing puddled on the plate. Mom kept saying she was ashamed, but both God and I knew that cake was held together with pure love. At age fifteen, I wrote a little poem:

If God is there, then I should love Him,

but if there is no God,

then what is there to love

but my mother's fallen chocolate birthday cake,

glued together with frosting?

The tears in her eyes outshone all the candles,

and God smiled as I blew them out.

Even so, I knew I was damaged goods, despite my parents' exhortations to try harder, and to be as normal as possible. If Mom tried to salvage my broken cake, wouldn't God at least wish me happy birthday?

If God was dead, He wouldn't be around to comfort nine-year-old me when I was sent away for months at a time for orthopedic surgeries on my paralyzed arm and hand. A dead God couldn't defend teenaged me against a cruel and soon-to-be-ex boyfriend who casually asked if my arm's paralysis meant I could only swim in circles.

Being compared to a one-oared rowboat spun me into spiraling cycles of indecision. Did I prefer a vengeful God to smite that wisecracking jerk? Or had God really checked out altogether? I didn't know, but I was desperate to find a loving presence to believe in.

In 1966, God must have been amused at a society that thought it no longer required his services to keep the universe humming. But I wondered. Would God really abandon all the broken people, the lost and hopeless and smelly unwashed people? People like me?

I hoped not. Yet even in the 1980s, I encountered Christians who said Jesus would give you a miracle if you had enough faith. Big if.

One day while working at a Christian bookstore, twenty-something me restocked a greeting card display when a pair of ladies sidled up to me. Middle-aged strangers, they spoke in low voices—as if they were certain they were God’s messengers. One said, “You know, “she said, pointing to my left side, “God would heal that arm. If you had enough faith.”

Her partner nodded. I stood frozen, not sure if I should ask them how to get that kind of faith, throw a punch or run away screaming. These messengers of doom left the store without buying a single thing, and I never saw them again. Even my faith wasn't good enough.

In spite of my puny faith, God didn't exactly die, but I locked Him in my head. In my mind, I could block out everything except the idea of God. And I swam in circles, looking for a way to make my heart believe what my head said was true.

Of course, when I talk of my paralysis, I’m careful to mention quadriplegics, war refugees and other marginalized groups. I can always find someone who’s had it worse, for longer, walking backwards uphill in the snow. I’ve tried to remain thankful for God’s guidance, even if my gratitude has sometimes accompanied by a bit of snark. But if anyone has ever needed a bigger God, it’s me.

And maybe, it's you too.

If you're like me, you drift from church to church, seeking a spiritual home, asking too many questions. You're beyond broken but you hope no one judges. Even so, you keep doubts quiet and ix-nay any views that go against official talking points. You long to be accepted. Me too.

We buy books by the stack. Trauma, disease and bad news stalk us at every turn, so we tune into seminars, podcasts and YouTube videos with celebrity Christians who promise us answers. We're parched for that living water, but we can't let anyone know that we can only row the boat in circles. We wade in the shallow end, hoping no one notices our crippled places.

It's exhausting, and few answers materialize. At the end of the week, we're tired of the high-temperature shouting that passes for civil discourse. The promised, perfect solutions either confuse us or ask for our money. No wonder we're so tired.

But maybe we're also scared. Scared that if we disagree with the loudest voices, we'll be marginalized. Afraid of losing the respect, fellowship and love of our long-time friends and acquaintances. Of being labelled "CINO" (Christian in name only). The possibility of being shunned terrifies us.

Despite the many biblical commands to "Fear not," we seem to spend our days clutching that single oar, hunkered down in the waterless valley. The boat is sinking. There's a hole in the keel.

Down in that valley of the sinking boat, it's dark. We squint to make out Jesus on the shore but it's really hard to keep the Lord in sight. God gets booted into the mind's attic, where we can only worship an idea of God—abstract, out there somewhere, like a personal savior who sends form letters. I've often imagined this unapproachable celebrity God, who never gives out his private number and who's always booked solid until Infinity.

Unless I become even more broken or break some rule, Idea God doesn’t bother me. Even then, God tha Idea is mostly a finger-wagging and eye-rolling grump who happens to look a lot like my adoptive dad wearing a beard and sandals.

Sounds ridiculous, but it's easier to identify with an abstract God who's "out there" and who rewards and punishes. Comparison comes naturally in our transactional society. If you win, you deserve it. If you lose, it's your own fault.

And if it's not your fault, a raft of cliched platitudes quickly remind you that your faith doesn't measure up. A gazillion prayers go up against cancer or bankruptcy or death. But if there's no miracle healing, suddenly everyone's talking about God's will, closed doors or opened windows. The God who's locked in the human mind can rationalize anything. But the heart still bleeds.

The ladies at that 1980s Christian bookstore uncovered in me that same wounded child who had swum in circles for so long. But I hated keeping Jesus behind the child-proof gate. Somehow, I eventually stopped dog-paddling long enough to let Jesus out of my head and back into my heart. Follow me. Just follow me. Jesus beckoned me into a universe with low lights and echoes of love.

I've been searching for the real deal, both to tunnel deeper into the mystery of God and to kill off the imposter. I've a long way to go, sure. But these days, for me, a certain God is dead—the God who hands out demerits and keeps the riff-raff outside the pearly gates. The angry God whom I once believed excluded all but a favored few has passed away. As I would have said back when the Time magazine cover premiered, that God is “deader than a doornail.”

But the God who was and is and is to come is more alive to me than ever. The sorrow and pain and twisted imperfect limbs—mistakes that I was so sure had killed God—is nothing less than the sacred stuff God uses to show us what love looks like. And it always looks like Jesus himself.

Some people say Jesus rose again to save us from sin. Fair enough. But I think Jesus arose for love. God’s son came back so I could learn to love, as unlovely as I am. And on days when I don’t hide from him, Jesus glues back together my imperfect and unlovely places with sweet, generous dollops of peace.

And don’t we all have an unlovely defect or three that we’re constantly hiding under a thick layer of buttercream? For love’s sake, Jesus begs us to come out, to uncover our hearts, to show the world the beauty and terror of being alive. To prove to a world of death that love never dies.

As Christians through the centuries have discovered, a deeper life with God may be painful or beautiful or exhausting or treacherous. This life is not without risk. Love is dangerous. But when you experience real Love, you'll know it in the deep end of your heart.

Whenever I think of my mother's sad little chocolate birthday cake, I taste love for the first time all over again. There, among the layers of my imperfection, I dig up Jesus. He comes alive, calling me by name.

He's calling your name too.

Happy and holy Easter to all who celebrate.