i can't take you with me

 

Questioning my Christian faith has been a process full of many different kinds of fear. One of the biggest has been the fear of leading others down a path that goes somewhere I don't know. Often the people I want to be most honest with are the ones I am most afraid of hurting with my doubts. I wrote this after one such conversation, and feel it often. 

 

 

 

I can’t take you with me.  I’m trembling as I sit and answer your questions, watch your faces pause and your brows furrow slightly, hear you probe deeper to wonder if I’m really saying what it sounds like I’m saying. You know me well enough to hear the catch in my throat that even catches me off guard, but I swallow it and we continue. The book sits between us on the couch from where you left it this morning after you opened its treasured pages and soaked them in gratefully. Even as I speak the words about it, I want to take them back. Not because I don’t believe them - I do. But because I’m not sure I want you to. Maybe I don’t really want to reveal the cracked foundation we’ve built all this upon. Maybe you don’t need to excavate your basement like I’m excavating mine. I’m dedicating my life to these questions, these ideas, these realizations, these implications. I thought I’d be honored to share them with you. But suddenly I’m hoping you won’t even talk about it after I leave. I hope you forget it all and move on with your day and make lunch together and rock your baby to sleep and get up in the morning with your Bible again. As I drive away I feel the tension holding my body together, and I wonder who I am and how I became the bearer of bad news when all I sought was truth. I promise myself not to put any other friends through this again, not to tell of all I’ve learned until I can hand it to them in a carefully wrapped package with a note that reads: “Nothing to fear inside.”