\n<\/p>\n
Faith and church have been tough for a lot of people<\/a> coming out of the pandemic. I\u2019m one of them. The last three years ushered my wife and me through two job changes, a cross-country move, and months spent hunkered inside, trying to keep our young children healthy and ourselves sane. By the time the world began to reopen, so much felt different.<\/p>\n Until recently, I could count on one hand the number of times I\u2019d physically attended a church service since March 2020. I could give many reasons for our absence\u2014a toddler and a newborn, disillusionment with a church tradition that was once home, enjoying a second weekend morning, sheer exhaustion, and more.<\/p>\n But if I\u2019m really honest, one reason stands out: The further I get from church, the less Christian faith makes sense to me. The physical drift begets an intellectual one.<\/p>\n Although I might sound like a Christian upstart, I\u2019m something of a thoroughbred. I was born and raised in what is now an evangelical megachurch. I graduated with a degree in religion and philosophy from a prominent Christian college, and I finished a seminary degree at another. I got chops.<\/p>\n But when it comes to believing my faith, it\u2019s always been the same. During any season of life when I\u2019ve been separated from like-minded Christians, my faith starts to feel as alien to me as it does to my non-Christian friends. Wait, you believe a man was God? That he actually rose from the dead? Like, his blood and guts cooled and then his heart just started beating again? It\u2019s ludicrous, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Part of my experience of faith\u2014and part of my constitution\u2014is that I\u2019ve always sought out the best arguments against my own positions. And with Christianity, there are plenty of good critiques. Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Freud all offer substantial ones, describing the Christian faith as variations of wishful thinking. Hypocrisy is another good reason for doubt. The church past and present is full of Christians failing to be faithful to its message.<\/p>\n Arguably the best reason to disbelieve is the problem of pain, or theodicy<\/em>, as they say in thinky circles. If God is so great, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?<\/p>\n One particular horror story landed hard with me last year, in the middle of my church absence: news of the passing of Jonathan Tjarks, a staff writer for The Ringer<\/em> who primarily covered NBA basketball. He\u2019d written powerfully about facing a cancer diagnosis a year after the arrival of his firstborn son. I never met Jon, but we corresponded briefly about writing, faith, and sports. Jon, too, was a Christian, and I, too, am a sports nut.<\/p>\n On the website chronicling his cancer journey, in the final entry before his passing, Jon\u2019s wife includes a picture of Jon in a hospital bed, clearly exhausted, his big frame broken down, being helped to kiss his son Jackson. After the pandemic had weakened my formidable insulation from death, the photo\u2019s caption\u2014\u201cJon\u2019s last kisses to Jackson\u201d\u2014wrecked me.<\/p>\n That night, I wept at the bedsides of my own sleeping sons, ages five and two, kissing their warm foreheads. I wept for Jon. I wept for Jackson. I wept for my sons, at the thought of my own fragility and theirs. Really, I wept for all of us.<\/p>\n In the piece<\/a> he\u2019d written before he passed, Jon had talked about the importance of living life intentionally beside others, not just with his family but also with his church. Friends had asked him if he\u2019d been extra careful to isolate during the pandemic. His reply? He didn\u2019t have time to.<\/p>\n Jon\u2019s story compelled me. A few months after his passing, my wife and I agreed it was time to go church hunting. We wanted our boys to grow up in church. And at times, we felt a dull ache on Sunday mornings that donuts and coffee couldn\u2019t alleviate.<\/p>\n The process was hard. Between a graduate degree in theology and my inclination to question everything, I was a bit of a liability. I have enough squirminess about church culture that I knew we\u2019d need to visit a lot of them.<\/p>\n One benefit of the pandemic\u2019s streaming revolution was the ability to peek into a service without dedicating a whole Sunday to each visit. Some mornings, my wife and I would \u201cvisit\u201d three churches without leaving our couch or even putting down the donuts. When we saw a non-starter\u2014like, say, a prayer addressed to Mother Earth, or a pastor leading the congregation in \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d\u2014we could jump off the feed and try the next one.<\/p>\n By the time we found a small church near our house, we loaded up our boys and gave it a go. The first handful of people we met there were kind and welcoming, and neither of our boys hated the kids\u2019 care. So we went back. And we kept going back, enough to catch ourselves saying \u201cour church\u201d in conversations with family and friends.<\/p>\n The church was located downtown and transparent about its dedication to local residents, especially those hurting in the community. The services were fairly short, the sermons sometimes moving and sometimes not, the music unoffensive. The microphone crackled every Sunday, and every Sunday people scrambled to figure out why. After years spent in churches where fog machines outnumbered homeless visitors, the simplicity of the church was a balm.<\/p>\n Our first visit was last December, and since then, our family has been adjusting to a new\/old Sunday morning routine. It hasn\u2019t always been fun to have our Sunday mornings spoken for. But being there has been good. Deeply good. And by the time Easter came this spring, we knew where we\u2019d be, and we were actually looking forward to it.<\/p>\n Getting out the door for church with young children is dependably Kafka-esque, and by the time we found parking and made it inside, even the dusty chairs in the sanctuary were full. Helpful members unstacked the dustiest ones for us. The service looked and sounded normal, aside from the crowd and the unmistakable electric edge of Easter mornings. We celebrated Christ\u2019s triumph over death, and Christianity\u2019s stake in the ground of human history. \u201cFoolishness to the Greeks,\u201d the apostle Paul said.<\/p>\n As I stood there singing, I couldn\u2019t help reflecting on my time away. I\u2019d missed standing in that dim glow, awash in the chorus of voices. I\u2019d missed the gravity of an Easter morning, the intimate force of communion, the Lion and the Lamb.<\/p>\n Wishful thinking<\/em>, I still say on my less faithful days.<\/p>\n Paul once prayed that the Ephesians would comprehend the massive scope of Christ\u2019s love. He added an extra line, though: \u201cI pray that you, together with all the saints, <\/em>would have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ\u201d (Eph. 3:18\u201319).<\/p>\n The strength of togetherness is one of the things I\u2019ve noticed most about being back in church. These days, my faith feels less like a running tally of facts and more like a light switch. Being back together has reminded me that the light switch wasn\u2019t always quite so heavy.<\/p>\n But I can\u2019t help thinking of Jon and Jackson, either. As Jon wrestled through his diagnosis, at least in writing, he never came to some glorious peace about his departure. And to offer him (or anyone) glib answers in the face of that kind of suffering would be, to borrow<\/a> from the author David Foster Wallace, \u201cgrotesque.\u201d Jon still had to kiss his son goodbye, and that pain has a gravity all its own.<\/p>\n After my first Easter service back, I was still thinking of Jon and the passages of Scripture he kept coming back to as his odds got longer and his time shorter. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow (James 1:27; Isa. 1:17).<\/p>\n Jon was thinking of his wife and son, of course. But if there\u2019s one thing the past three pandemic years have taught us, it\u2019s that we\u2019re all in Jon\u2019s predicament. All of our days are measured. We don\u2019t get to decide how long we live. However, we do get to choose whether we spend those days with each other and for<\/em> each other, even in our darkest seasons.<\/p>\n This, I\u2019ve realized, is what I was looking for in a church: a community that takes James and Isaiah as seriously as it takes Paul\u2019s writings about the Resurrection\u2014a church whose care for the hurting can help me keep the light switch on when life feels so unbearably fleeting and mortal.<\/p>\n Luke Helm<\/a> is a writer and coach working out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n