Click Save, Don't Print

Last Thursday I was going through all our old backed-up files from Scotland on mine and Scott's shared drive, looking for "Throwback Thursday" photos to post on Facebook. I found some really old and fun pictures!

I also found a lot of old graphic design projects and documents. (Some of my designs I still think were good; some I was like "WHAT?!")

Then I ran across a letter I thought I'd long since deleted. But nope. It was still there. For some reason I kept it. I don't know why, because I was embarrassed about it right after I penned it.

It was a very old letter addressed to a friend. I am so humiliated by it that I will never ever admit anything about who it was addressed to. It was a friend. A long time ago. That's all I'm saying.

(Don't ask me if it was you. I won't admit a thing.)

I had written this letter out of conviction. A friend at church (someone I still love and adore and respect) had recommended writing this kind of letter to our non-Christian friends. I felt convicted after that to do so. I typed the letter up. I saved it. But I never had the guts to print it. I wanted to have the guts; I distinctly remembering praying for the courage to mail it. But I just couldn't. Maybe that's why it was still in My Docs. Maybe I had left it there until God had given me the courage to mail it. But I never did. And very soon after writing it, I was beyond embarrassed for ever even considering mailing it. I was SO FREAKING THANKFUL that I hadn't.

I had not forgotten this letter, by the way. I just thought it had been deleted. But no, it was anything but forgotten. I have thought about this letter a lot, so many times since writing it. I have thanked my embarrassment a gazillion times for keeping me from mailing it. It is terrible.

When I saw it in my old documents folder, a little bit of repulsion rose into my throat. No way I'm reading that again. I CANNOT face reading what I wrote.

But tonight, curiosity, and a little hubris (I finished my book! Feeling pretty chuffed!) enticed me to open up the letter and read it.

UGH. OH MY UGH.

I cannot share all of it. (Identifying details. I'm not telling you or anyone ever who it was addressed to so don't ask. It might have been you, but it probably wasn't.)

I will share some of it though. This, folks, is who I used to be. After finishing the book about my life as a Christian, I wondered if I had made myself sound too religious, more religious than I actually had been. Did I come across as a totally self-righteous prig?

Well if I did, it's because I WAS a totally self-righteous prig.

Here's the proof:

This is kind of a strange thing to do, but it’s been on my mind for ages now, so I guess I’ll just get on with it. For a while, I’ve felt like I should share with you how important my faith is to me. I suppose because you are my friend, and you’ve become one of my good friends, and it feels weird to me that I’ve never really talked about it much...

To sum it up, being a Christian is the biggest thing in my life. It is what makes me what I am. It enters into all parts of my life. I am easily able to talk about Jesus and prayer and what God has been doing in my life with friends from church, but it’s not as easy to do with friends outside church. Yet, because it really is so important to me, I want to be able to talk about it with anyone I’m close to.

Being a Christian for me isn’t just about going to church on Sundays and praying. It isn’t just something I do; it’s something I am. My beliefs enter into everything I do and think. The way I raise my children comes from my faith. The way I talk (though not always perfect) comes from my faith. The way I try to live my life, everything, comes from my faith. Often in conversations with my friends, I feel I can’t say certain things because it’ll sound odd because it sounds ‘religious’. But really, that is who I am. I don’t know why I can be so ashamed of it sometimes.

I also feel like it’s something I ought to share with my friends in another way, because I believe it is so important. I believe that only a life-changing experience with Jesus Christ can save us. I believe in heaven and hell, and I want the people I care about to know Jesus the way I do. This is the hard part, because I don’t like the idea of shoving my beliefs down anyone’s throat. I don’t like telling people what they should or shouldn’t think or believe. But I also feel that if I don’t at least tell them this is what I believe to the be the truth, then how can I really say I believe it that much? If I knew a certain drug or something was dangerous and could kill a person, or if there was a miracle drug that could save a person, wouldn’t I tell you? It’s the same with being a Christian. I believe that we must be saved by the grace of God to have eternal life (and not by any good we do ourselves), to spend it in heaven, so it only follows that I ought to tell my friends that too. Because I genuinely do believe it with all my heart. Would I be able to forgive myself if one of my friends died without me ever at least stating that? After that, it’s up to my friends to want to know more or not, but I should at least say it. So that’s what I’m doing here.

So really, this letter, hard as it is to write, has two purposes. One is to kind of ‘get it out in the open’ how real and important my faith is to me, so I don’t have to feel awkward when I want to say something, however casual , about it, and two is to just let you know that I really believe it’s important for everyone else too. Because you’ve been a good friend for a while now, it’s just been on my mind and my heart a lot to share it.

One reason I’ve put this off for so long is I’ve worried it’ll make our friendship awkward. I hope it doesn’t do that. I hope instead it makes our friendship more real, more honest. Don’t think I’m going to start shoving religion down your throat – that’s the last thing that will happen. I really don’t think that’s the right thing to do ever. I just hope our friendship can be more like the ones I have with people in my church, where I’m able to just say anything I’m thinking without worrying I sound like a weird religious freak... I’d only ever really get into deeper things if the conversation naturally went there. I hope that makes sense.

Okay. So now that I’ve written this, I’m going to go back through it, edit it and then decide what to do with it! My friend recently did this same thing; she had a friend she’d felt drawn to share the same things with, put it off for years actually (for the same reason – worrying it would ruin the friendship), but now that she’s done it, she says their friendship is better than ever – much more real and open and deep. I hope that’s the outcome with us.

I can sympathize with myself for writing this. I meant it so sincerely and so humbly.

But I know for certain it would have been SO SO WRONG to send it.

On the other side of the faith spectrum now, I can assure you this kind of letter would completely undermine a friendship. As sincerely and humbly as it was intended to be, it would have been a giant "DANGER" sign to the reader. With a smaller "THIS PERSON THINKS YOU ARE GOING TO HELL AND HAS ULTERIOR MOTIVES FOR THE FRIENDSHIP" disclaimer underneath.

Please, friends, don't ever do this. Christians, pray for your friends to be saved, as often as you like. But please never send them this letter.

Screen Doors

Just over a year ago, I came out as an atheist. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I still remember how my heart pounded, how I kept the post in my drafts folder for days, trying to decide if I should publish or not. How I asked my husband repeatedly if he was okay with  me outing us.  How I worried about all the people who would be upset, all the doors that would slam in my face.

I ended up posting it, though, with shaking hands but an enormous sense of relief. The truth was out. I could finally be honest. Now I just wait for the reaction.

And the reaction was more positive than I ever could have hoped. A few people Facebook-unfriended me. A few people stopped talking to me. But the overwhelming majority of people offered me either words of encouragement, words of solidarity, or words of love. Some people offered their own faith and prayers, which I appreciated. Some people confided that my story resonated with them deeply and mirrored their own feelings and experiences. Very few doors slammed.

I was still fairly new in Arkansas at the time, only back a year. I was still making friends. I joined a book club around that time, the best book club in the universe, by the way. They made me feel safe, accepted, unjudged.  I made friends at the gym. They treated me as someone they trusted, cared about, someone worthy of their friendship.

These people around me - they kept the doors wide open and welcomed me freely into their lives, because of who I am, not what I believe (or don't). Most of them are Christians. They believe in living out the kind of life Jesus asked them to in the Bible, one of love, compassion, and acceptance. These people around me - they succeed in their quest to be like Jesus. I waited for the judgment to eventually fall, but it never did. They just loved.

I thought maybe coming out as an atheist wasn't nearly as terrible as everyone said it would be. After all, very few people shut the door in my face, which was far cry from what I'd braced myself for. Those who did were never close enough friends to begin with.

Now a year has gone by. But as I look back over the past year, I see something else that I never expected.

As time wore on, I noticed that some other people seemed to shy away from me, put up their guard. They hadn't shut me out, but they made some distance. This was to be expected. I imagined many people around here knew nothing of atheists beyond the loud, outspoken, and frankly not very nice Richard Dawkins types. They probably had reason enough to be concerned, a little fearful, a little unsure how I was to change. I noticed people who didn't shut the door in my face had at least taken a step back. A curious step, perhaps, or maybe a suspicious one. There was a distance there that hadn't been there before.

A screen door.

Like one who didn't want to give a salesperson too much encouragement, I realized people were standing behind their screen doors to talk to me.  They weren't shutting me out completely, but I was no longer invited in. There was an unbreakable politeness and a general kindness, but the warmth had cooled. At first, I passed it off as my imagination. A year later, though, I'm not sure it's my imagination after all. There are still screen doors making sure I don't get past the threshold.

I guess keeping the screen door closed to me is less cruel than slamming the front door entirely, but it's only slightly less hurtful. It keeps me on the defensive, paranoid, constantly over-analyzing. Is this really happening? Do they really feel this way? Was that me they were referring to? Publishing my memoir has made it even more complicated. It's one thing to be out on a blog with a small readership. It's another to be featured on the popular FriendlyAtheist.com.

I have been so lucky to have so many friends - every version of Christian even, from evangelical to liberal to Mormon - keep their doors wide open. People who can look at who I am and still believe I'm the same trustworthy, good person I've always tried my best to be. I doubt every atheist in the Bible Belt is so fortunate. I'm also lucky to know who not to bother with anymore too - the door slammers.  Good riddance to them. That kind of rejection simply makes my life easier.

But the screen doors?  Where do I go with them? Where do we stand? Will I ever prove to them that I'm not an awful human being simply because I don't believe what I used to? Are these doors locked forever or just temporarily? Is there even any point in worrying about it?