As with the death of someone dearly loved, I felt the absence of my faith most profoundly in those everyday moments when it used to be present—in church, in prayer, in the expansive blue of an autumn sky. I became a stranger to the busy, avuncular God who arranged parking spaces for my friends and took prayer requests for weather and election outcomes while leaving thirty thousand children to die each day from preventable disease. Instead I lay awake in my dorm room at night, begging an amorphous ghost of a deity to save me from my doubt and help me in my unbelief. Reading the Bible only made
...more
