How hope and faith were formed, fractured, and slowly re-shaped
Before I can name what I believe, I need to tell the story of how my faith was formed.
I grew up in the United Methodist Church and completed confirmation in junior high more out of obligation than conviction. I learned a little about John Wesley and the history of the church, but I didn’t walk away with anything resembling a lived faith—or a sense of God’s nearness.
By high school, I had concluded that if God existed at all, God was distant. Calling myself agnostic felt more honest than atheism, which seemed overly confident about something so unknowable. That posture carried into my early college years, where I sharpened my ability to argue against the idea of a moralistic, rule-keeping God—especially one who condemned people to hell for getting things wrong.
Everything changed in the second half of my sophomore year after a heartbreak that left me unmoored. Looking for stability, I went to see my academic advisor, a gentle and thoughtful man who also happened to be a Catholic priest.
After listening carefully, he asked about my faith.
I told him I was agnostic. He asked why. I described my rejection of a God defined by rules, fear, and punishment.
“That’s not the God I believe in,” he said. “My faith is in a God who loves unconditionally—infinitely. Jesus showed me that.”
There was no argument. No pressure. Just a calm confidence rooted in love. He also offered to help connect me to a community.
Looking back, I consider that conversation the moment I fell in love with God through Jesus—the first time since childhood that God felt not only real, but compelling.
Soon after, I reached out to a close friend who—despite being wild and crazy—had quietly lived his faith without ever trying to convince me. When I told him what had happened, he responded with joy and simplicity. He gave me a Bible, suggested I start with the Gospels, and invited me into Young Life.
Young Life exists to serve unchurched high school students, and I joined as a volunteer. Its approach to faith was relational: love came first. Belief followed—sometimes slowly, sometimes never. The guiding conviction was simple: God is love, revealed in Jesus. Only through genuine friendship could anyone “earn the right to be heard.”
For nearly a decade, this love-centered faith shaped me. Theology felt secondary. Everything was measured against the life and love of Jesus. If a belief reflected that love, it was embraced. If it didn’t, it was set aside.
Then life shifted. Career demands grew. Community thinned. We moved. My family and I went searching for a church closer to home, assuming we’d find the same love-first faith we had known.
We didn’t.
Over the next thirty years, I moved through various expressions of American evangelical Christianity. Jesus was present, but love often felt eclipsed by anxiety about correctness, control, and conformity. Faith became more about interpreting Paul correctly than living like Jesus. God’s sovereignty loomed large; God’s love felt increasingly abstract. Hell re-entered the picture. Discomfort grew.
At the same time, my professional life accelerated. I thrived in leadership roles within consulting and technology firms, eventually adopting what I can now see was a “master of the universe” posture—convinced my work was essential and my presence indispensable.
Eventually, that illusion collapsed.
Craving coherence between what I believed and how I lived, I moved into work aligned with education and justice. That path led me into a Christian school whose theology—though presented as non-denominational—was deeply Calvinist in nature.
What followed was not merely disagreement, but spiritual rupture.
The God being presented was controlling, distant, wrathful, and deeply invested in hierarchy, obedience, and exclusion. I was told humanity was fundamentally depraved, that suffering and evil were part of God’s plan, and that fear was an appropriate spiritual posture.
The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. In the first year, I found myself cringing at what was said and celebrated. In the second, that discomfort hardened into anger—an anger I didn’t yet understand. By the third year, the school declared open opposition to LGBTQ+ people, framing it as a “culture war” to be fought in the name of love. I refused to participate. Not long after, I was dismissed.
What followed was a season I now understand as spiritual trauma. Deconstruction was in full motion—painful, disorienting, and, I’ve since learned, completely normal.
I deconstructed relentlessly—reading, listening, searching—trying to recover the God I had once known. Along the way, voices like Richard Rohr, N.T. Wright, and The Bible Project helped re-anchor my faith in its Jewish roots and broader Christian story.
I also encountered a lot of noise. I found myself sifting through content that didn’t truly connect with my mind or heart—and, in many cases, didn’t seem to connect with God either. Too often it felt like personal, social, and political agendas on display, with occasional mentions of Jesus used to build platforms under the “Christian” label.
Eventually, I encountered Greg Boyd and Woodland Hills Church, where a Jesus-centered, nonviolent, love-shaped theology resonated deeply. Through that community, I entered the School for Everyday Mission (SEM), where my faith continues to be formed—not toward certainty, but toward discernment.
That brings me here.
This is not a story of arrival. It is a story of formation—through love, loss, fracture, and repair.
From this story emerged convictions I now hold carefully and humbly.
SeePhas 