From Chapter IV: Sanctuary

I had a habit of examining church marquees and collecting them, like you collect stamps or baseball cards. It was my hobby, and everyone comes to a point where they need a hobby. A hobby was, for me, a buffer against the ever expanding nothingness I was noticing in the world around me. Depression pales in comparison to the realization that despite immersing yourself in a life of faith, of hope, of love and community and togetherness, you still feel lonely when you’ve been on the road for six hours to promote some book that you wrote. Some book full of lies that you once believed. Some book that you now despise.
I was a Christian, Goddamn it. I was supposed to have the solution to these problems ready made, stored away in my book of orthodox dogma for the modern male. I wasn’t supposed to be feeling things like loneliness. I sure as hell wasn’t supposed to have even the vaguest notions that life was meaningless, that there was no Jehovah Agape up there in the sky, looking down on my pitiful frame and thinking, “Yeah, that’s my kid.” I was supposed to be the one taking my friends aside, telling them why their emotions were ill-conceived, childish, and probably sinful.
Psychologists would say my feelings sprang up from a childhood devoid of a solidified father figure. I know, I’ve looked it up. Charismatic preachers would say it was demonic oppression. I know, I’ve been told this directly. Neither of these ideas is particularly helpful on some dark stretch of I-80 on a winter midnight in Illinois. So, as any sane person does in that state, I considered a hobby. Stamp collecting seemed like something antique, something from the fifties. Kind of lame. Same with baseball cards and archery and anything else Tom, Dick, and Jane talked about in the schoolyard.
The hobby I chose had its genesis years ago, when I was still in Bible college, still fighting the good fight and scaring the hell right out of the unbelievers. I was a person who wore business suits to class and yelled scriptures into a megaphone on street corners near liberal universities. Back then, I looked a lot more like my doppelganger than I did on the night I fell into a puddle in Flint. I had the clothes, I had the hair, I had the winning smile and the heart for lost souls. I was driving by a small baptist church, and the little glowing sign out front read, “We’re the church the Devil warned you about”. I wasn’t quite sure what that was supposed to mean, really. Was I to believe that the devil goes out and warns non-christians not to attend a specific church because it would instantly make you a better, more denomination specific person? Was I supposed to laugh at this? I didn’t really find it funny, but at the time I convinced myself it was clever in it’s own Christian way. I memorized it, slipped it into conversations over coffee in the cafeteria and discussions in my Modern Cults class. To my dismay, my discovery was nothing new.

Writing continues.  I'm having fun, which I guess is the real goal right now.