Night Driving Synchroblog: Is This Even Faith Anymore?

I was on fire once too. My faith burned bright and hot, full of certainty and passion, as electrifying as all of the other emotions and experiences of adolescence. Then there were the eye-opening college days, the shock at learning there were other ways of being a Christian, the wonder of a God who was bigger than I had imagined, the freedom in discovering how to be wrong. I married a man newly graduated from seminary. We set out to be missionaries and nearly lost our faith and each other on a bike path next to the Rhine River. Then came the angry years of my mid-twenties, three years of grad school and drinking too much and pretending I was too busy for the church where my husband pastored. I found my way back to that church shortly before we started to lose our babies, miscarriages over and over and over again, and I felt held there. The God of grief met me during all those early infertile years. It was sweet and intimate and quiet, even if it looked not very much like I was taught that it should. And then there was the morning in the coffeeshop in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, one final culture war battle lost, where I renounced the label evangelical in what is becoming a rite of passage for so many of us who were once on fire.

As I feel my way forward, away from an evangelical Christianity I can no longer claim as my own, a pastor-friend recommends I read John Shelby Spong. I pick up the book and wear out a yellow highlighter on it and when he writes that he can no longer think of God as a being "up there" or "out there" who could and would intervene, answer prayers and reward and punish according to the divine will, I set the book in my lap and look up.

And nothing breaks. Nothing shatters, or cracks. I feel nothing give way beneath me. There is very little angst. There is just me and the growing realization that I may have already let go.

It's spring here. The redbuds and the dogwoods are in lush, ecstatic bloom. I wake in the middle of the night to a symphony of birdsong outside my open window and I report to my balcony faithfully for the sunset on the progressively later evenings. I stare and I admire, I marvel at it all with a sort of detachment I am not used to. I am not moved by it, not animated by it or by whatever force is supposed to animate us both.

The husband and I escaped to a hillside winery a few days ago in the middle of the afternoon. Good books, cold white wine, a canvas bag full of sharp Irish cheddar and salt & pepper Triscuits. It looked perfect. It Instagrammed perfect. I pretended yes, this is exactly what we needed. But all I really took with me from that perfect afternoon was a sunburn on my left arm. It got hot and we drank the wine too quickly and I had to keep shifting his head from my lap so I could go pee again. I feel like I cannot even show up for my own perfect moments.

Wise people tell me not to fear this detached, darkening place. That I am not staring into an abyss, I'm on the precipice of my own becoming. That the God I'm certain I have lost is as close as my breath, sitting with me now even as I recount this emptiness, here in this cliched Nashville loneliness: lit candles, Eagle Rare whiskey on the rocks, the Liturgists album on repeat. I don't know that anymore. But I see that God was there in the heady, passionate days and there when I nearly set my whole life ablaze just to watch it burn to the ground. God found me in the angry years and the grieving years, I can see it now, trace a merciful hand through all that pain. Is God even here, when I am not certain of anything except that I seem to have misplaced God somewhere along the way? Find us, Addie writes in Night Driving. Find me. I starred that line in blue pen in my book today, as much of a prayer as I can manage: find me.


A Synchroblog with Addie Zierman to celebrate the release of her fantastic new book Night Driving (read this! It was so honest). Read the rest of the synchroblogs here