Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

My growing-up years were dominated, even straitjacketed, by a vow she made—that my brother and I would redeem that tragedy by taking on the mantle of our father’s life.

An awful new realization hits me. My brother and I are the atonement to compensate for a fatal error in belief. No wonder our mother has such strange notions of parenting, and such fierce resistance to letting us go. We alone can justify our father’s death.

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

I haven’t yet found a philosopher who tells you how to get rid of guilt. Only God can do that.

Increasingly he saw himself as an albatross around the neck of his wife, who already had two young children to care for. “I guess you’re sorry you married me now,” he told her one afternoon. “You got no bargain.” “No!” she protested. “When I vowed ‘for better, for worse, in sickness and in health,’ I meant it.”

Guilt feels like acid in my stomach.

grave of Jefferson Davis, which has this inscription carved in stone: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That is the myth of the Lost Cause that I believed as a boy and through my adolescence.

Mothers are supposed to make their children well when they’re hurt, not the other way around.

Maybe God is like my mother—a superperson who both loves me and schemes to break me.

I sincerely want to follow Jesus’s steps, but then I tell a lie or do something stupid the next day. I feel attracted to holiness and repelled at the same time, like two magnets brought together.

All summer a crisis of faith smolders inside me. The church has clearly lied to me about race. And about what else? Jesus? The Bible?

For the last two years, I have worked on ways to advance myself, not to lift others.

One thing becomes clear, though. If this is the Victorious Christian Life—if this is what a person who hasn’t sinned in decades looks like—then I want no part of it.

In my reading I have discovered Augustine, a connoisseur of women, art, food, and philosophy, who celebrates the goodness of created things. He says of his preconversion years, “I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls.”

Nature teaches me nothing about Incarnation or the Victorious Christian Life. It does, though, awaken my desire to meet whoever is responsible for the monarch butterfly.

Conversions only make sense from the inside out, to the fellow-converted. To the uninitiated they seem a mystery or a delusion.

In the end, my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God.