In the days following my parking lot breakdown—a spiritual disintegration I didn’t yet have adequate language for—I was strangely at peace. Change was inevitable, and I knew it—even if I couldn’t yet say it out loud. But change rarely comes without fear or discomfort, so the peace I felt was unexpected and foreign. I couldn’t return to the status quo of the past twenty years, but I couldn’t abandon belief either. The contradictions of traditional Western Christian theology—where eloquence and sophistry often masked cruelty; where God was portrayed as both merciful and monstrous—had become obstacles I could no longer ignore. With no map and no clear alternative, I looked forward—introspective, uncertain, and searching. This was wholly new territory; for the first time, rather than looking outward toward borrowed and questionable certainties, I looked inward for real answers. Something had to be wrong—either with how I perceived God, or with the very nature of the One I believed Him to be. So I opened the Bible—not as a follower looking for rote instruction, but as a seeker—searching for the God who might still be good.
With quiet, hesitant resolve, I knew I had to silence every voice telling me who God is. To hear His voice, I had to end the cacophony in my head. So I turned off the preachers, shelved the books, and muted every input but the Bible. I approached Scripture with confidence—convinced the truth was within reach, waiting just beyond the next page. My heart full of anticipation; I could feel He was near, ready to be seen. Like a parent playing hide and seek with their toddler—never truly hidden, just waiting to be found.
Discouragement came quickly. With every passage, I didn’t find fresh revelation—I found the same God I’d always been taught to see. Each verse, paragraph, and chapter filtered through years of theological conditioning, reaffirming the very conclusions that had driven me to question in the first place. It felt like being locked in a cage with a key that didn’t work. And honestly, I was afraid. Afraid that the God I’d tried so hard to believe in… might actually be real.
That’s where I lived for quite some time—wrestling with memorized interpretations that clashed with the quiet voice inside, the one insisting God wasn’t like that. I wanted to seek counsel from family and friends, but I wasn’t ready to let them see my questions—or my doubt. To them, I was the guy who had it all figured out. And honestly, I had too much pride to let anyone think otherwise.
Then one afternoon, standing in the copy room with the phone pressed to my ear, a radical thought broke through. So radical, I couldn’t take it seriously at first. What if the Bible isn’t wrong about God—but I’m wrong about the Bible? And what if, to truly see God, I need to leave the Bible behind?
Could it be that years of reading and studying what others said the Bible meant had turned me into a parrot—mimicking doctrine, yet incapable of forming my own thoughts and convictions about the words I was reading? If that were true, how could I fix it? Should I seek out voices that contradict the ones that shaped me? How do I know which is right? How does one willfully unlearn something they were taught to call truth??
My entire life had been spent learning the Bible, or more precisely, I had been learning what others said it revealed about God and how a wretch like me could relate to Him. Catchphrases, holy words, profound prayers, right belief—all the ingredients required to be a “good child of God.” Things like “God is in control,” “His ways are higher,” “by grace, through faith.” These weren’t just phrases—they were liturgies of self soothing hypnosis. They offered answers that would make you feel better, not the Presence that makes you whole.
I was convinced that somewhere in the text—buried beneath millennia of man’s interpretation—lay the key to knowing God.
Or was it just the key to not burning forever?
The key to silencing fear?
Fear of the me no one sees.
Fear of God.
Of the judgment in every eye.
My utter lack of control.
With nothing and no one I could knowingly trust, what was left to do? Time and distance were the only things that made sense. As with any trauma—physical, mental, or in this case, spiritual—time and distance became the recipe for healing. And like physical healing, the cure was often as painful as the wound.
In this case, it felt like betrayal. Like I was abandoning everything I knew. Walking away from my safety net. I had been taught my whole life that the Bible was the final authority on all things good, holy, and spiritual. Any question, any problem, could be solved with enough time spent in its pages.
Yet the only approach that made sense was to walk away from the Bible entirely—and give myself time to forget. So that’s exactly what I did.
I stepped onto this path with no idea what to expect—or even what success might look like. Much to my surprise, in walking away, I found relief. I felt free. Like dropping a sixty-pound pack after trudging twelve miles uphill.
Progress on this journey was slow. So slow, in fact, that once the newness faded into normal, I sometimes forgot it was a journey at all. Gradually—almost without realizing—I began to slip out of the “if/then” pattern of thinking: If I do (or don’t do) X, then God will accept and be proud of me. Or its just-as-cruel twin: If I do (or don’t do) X, God will be angry and punish me.
Everything that once belonged to the recipe for approval—each step measured, each outcome judged—began to fall away. In its place, there was no grand revelation. Just a slow, steady shift from judgment to life, as the Good God quietly revealed He had been beside me all along.