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  Jesus was my answer to that gnawing sense of brokenness at the center of my being. I was told Jesus could heal me. He could make me clean and take away my shame. By following him and being pure, I could live in the light and vanquish the shadows that haunted me. I just needed more passion, more faith, more humility in order to be who I was supposed to be! But the more passionate I became about becoming pure, the more shame I felt for not fully living up to my purity ideals. This created a strange sort of cycle in my life—a self-reinforcing loop where more shame led to more passion which led to more shame.

  Of course, all of this religious zeal did have its perks. I got my first megachurch worship leader job in high school. By the time I was twenty, I was leading a music department of over a hundred people. I was married to my second and final girlfriend, Lisa. She wasn’t quite as puritanical as the first girl, and my purity ring ended up a bit dented both literally and metaphorically, but we technically made it to the purity culture finish line. We built a house. I had a small staff that answered to me. I had a company car, and my schooling was paid for. By the time I was thirty, I was a Grammy-nominated, Dove Award–winning Christian musician traveling the world, leading worship in churches, clubs, theaters, arenas, and even a few stadiums. We had moved to Denver and started a church in our living room called “Bloom.” It was small, but it was young and vibrant and full of beautifully unrealistic dreams about changing the world.

  Through all of these years of following Jesus, I had witnessed a pretty broad swath of Christendom. I had been on the stages of the largest churches in the country and the living rooms of some of the smallest. We had played, visited, and worshipped with nearly every Christian denomination I’d ever heard of. We had played Christian festivals, universities, and the conferences of the largest evangelical Christian movements like Hillsong, Passion, Catalyst, Willow Creek, Saddleback, Acquire the Fire, National Worship Leader Conference, and the like.

  In other words, I had succeeded. I got what I wanted—to live my life in worship of God with the people of God. To play a significant role in the work of the Lord on the earth. I always thought that all of this would have made me okay. But I still wasn’t okay. In fact, it was almost as though as all my dreams came true, I was becoming more and more miserable. I was like a kid who had stayed up all night next to the Christmas tree waiting to open his presents only to discover in the morning, one by one, that every box was filled with broken glass. The accolades hadn’t made me love myself. The applause hadn’t provided the ground for my being that I had hoped it would. I felt alone, confused, and angry. I had thought a life dedicated to the faith would lead me to a place of peace and love, but through all of the years of experiencing the backstage underbelly of evangelical Christendom, I had slowly and steadily become less and less certain that the faith of my childhood was good, let alone true.

  I began to question the validity of the idea of a loving God. In my mission trips and other travels, I had seen some of the harshness and extreme poverty in places like Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Jamaica, China, Thailand, the Philippines, Siberia, Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya, and I knew that I hadn’t even seen the worst of it. I once visited Auschwitz—the piles of children’s shoes and mounds of hair had forever annihilated any remaining simplistic concepts I had about God’s goodness or providence.

  When I looked at all the war, abuse, racism, sexism, bigotry, greed, inequality, poverty, sickness, fear, and suffering of the world and contrasted it to what I believed about the God who was supposedly sovereign over the world, it just didn’t add up for me.

  Omnipotent + All good + Omniscient + Sovereign = the Holocaust?

  Nope. That didn’t work. Over the years, I had tried tinkering with each of those variables in the equation. I had tried tweaking the “omnipotent” variable with a free will/Fall caveat, à la C. S. Lewis and friends who argued that true love demanded freedom. If we weren’t free to choose to love God or not love God, how could it really be love? We as a species had chosen to not love, and it was this “original sin” of humankind that was responsible for all the evil in the world. But I ultimately found the attempt, valiant as it was, to explain away billions of years of death and entropy by blaming it on human sin a bit far-fetched and narcissistic.

  I had flirted with the ideas of Calvinism for a while. Calvinism had solved the problem of evil by arguing that God was sovereign over it and was glorified in everything, even in things like the Holocaust that we humans couldn’t understand. In debating through some of the ideas with a Calvinist friend about how a good God could be ultimately responsible for sending people to be tormented in a lake of fire for eternity, it was explained to me that diamonds are often displayed at jewelry stores not on gold or other shiny surfaces, but on black velvet. The idea of God not only being responsible for the evil of the world but doing it because it somehow made him look better in comparison to his horrible creation was not an acceptable solution to the problem. In fact, it seemed to me that trying to solve the problem of evil by making God responsible for that evil was a bit like trying to solve the problem of not being able to come to a consensus on where to eat with your friends by slaughtering and eating your friends. I had no interest in worshipping or believing in any sort of god who created glory for himself by burning his children alive for all eternity. I’d much prefer Deism (the belief that God created the universe but doesn’t interact with it) or even atheism to that. A cold, meaningless, godless universe would be a far better reality than one in which most of the beings within it wind up spending their eternity in conscious torture.

  I became an open theist for a while. Open theism solves the conundrum of God’s goodness in the midst of evil by tweaking the “omniscient” variable, positing that God’s omniscience would not necessarily extend to a future which does not yet exist. This is basically another theological loophole for free will, but ultimately left me unconvinced given the fact that space-time doesn’t behave in a linear and humancentric way. The theory of relativity reveals that our human experience of time (a series of separate events) is completely relative to our speed and location through space. Like my friend, Science Mike, once eloquently stated when we were both a little drunk, “Human beings exist somewhere in the middle of a photon and a singularity.”6 If a photon could see, it would see past, present, and future as one single “event.” Wouldn’t an all-powerful God transcend space-time at least as much as a photon?

  By the time I would lose God at the luxury spa in 2012, my religious views had zigzagged across the theological spectrum of Christendom as I searched for the truth that could set me free, that could solve that fundamental sense of not-okayness at the center of my being. This would all turn out to be an exercise in futility.

  Most parents are wise enough to know that if their exhausted toddler throws a tantrum when a soap commercial interrupts her YouTube videos, the most effective solution would probably not be to write an email to YouTube, demanding that they ban all soap or soap-related commercials from their platform, or to start a neighborhood petition to boycott all soap until all their children’s YouTube-related tantrums have disappeared. The problem isn’t the soap.

  I, on the other hand, was not so wise, as I spent decades of my life trying to chase away the shame and malaise at my core by adjusting the dials on my theological assumptions monitor. I thought that I could be fixed if I could just think the right thoughts, understand the right concepts, live a pure-enough life. Then I could be okay.

  But the problem was never the soap.

  Broken (1999)

  Something was off. Why hadn’t my dad shown up to service? He always showed up, especially to Friday-night service. He was the pastor of a hip and quickly growing megachurch. We had gone from zero to three thousand people in just a few years, and our Friday-night service was one of the hottest events in south Tulsa. He almost never missed it. None of us did.

  As the mob of people, most of whom were college students, flooded in from the line of traffic on Gar
nett Avenue, they were met with the smiling faces, and often-costumed bodies of the parking ministry golf cart drivers. The congregants were dropped off at the front door where the balloons, candy, and high-energy music welcomed them to a church service like they had never experienced before.

  I was the worship leader, and our worship team was the Dave Matthews Band of the Oklahoma church music scene. With lightning-fast acoustic guitar licks, heart-pounding djembes, and soul-rending soprano sax solos, Friday-night worship was like making love with my apparently very skilled next-door neighbor in college—sweaty and loud and it lasted at least an hour. Sometimes it went so well, my dad would decide to spontaneously keep the music going the whole service. Those nights were always especially exhilarating. People would sometimes yell out songs they wanted to sing. There would be extended improvisation and singing “in the Spirit,” which usually sounded like people singing between the dominant and tonic notes of the scale with phrases like, “We ascribe greatness unto thee,” or “Deeba Rojo Seta Keeno” for the most charismatically adventurous among us. My dad’s singing in the Spirit was always a little more sophisticated than the average person’s and always tended to sound a bit Caribbean somehow. (He is Puerto Rican, but he grew up in Neillsville, Wisconsin, so I’m not quite sure where his musical influences came from.)

  As one of the hordes of horny Christian college boys there seeking wives, I can attest that the Friday-night scene wasn’t made any worse by all the sexy college girls lifting their arms to the sky and writhing in spiritual ecstasy. This particular Friday night was one of those that had spontaneously turned into an all-music night, but this time it wasn’t because my dad had given me the nod to keep going. He simply hadn’t shown up. I was worried and immediately talked to one of the associate pastors after service to see what had happened. I was told to head straight home.

  I tried calling. No answer. I rushed home.

  When I arrived, my mother was a wreck. Why hadn’t she answered? What had happened? Was he hurt? Worse?

  “He left us,” she whimpered. She handed me his cell phone. He had left it, too.

  “What do you mean he left us?”

  She told me that he had an extended affair with a close family friend. And now he was gone. He left us for her.

  The world turned red. I smashed the phone against the wall.

  My problem was never really about my beliefs. It went much deeper than that.

  Shoes on the White Couch

  This was not who our family was supposed to be. We were not supposed to be just another religious leader’s sex-scandal story. We were better than that. My father was better than that. He had been my mentor. My hero. He always said how, aside from God, our mother was the most important part of his life and his primary spiritual responsibility was loving her well. He wrote a book called Supernatural Relationships.7 He had taught me that you don’t even look at naked girls that you aren’t married to, let alone have sex with them.

  I once watched him tearfully preach about how cheating on my mom would be the last thing he’d ever do because of the consequences it would have. He talked about how he’d have to face God, and himself. He’d have to face them, his congregation, and how painful that would be. He’d have to face my mom and see her heart broken. And worst of all, he’d have to face his kids and tell them how he had betrayed them and their mom. Maybe that was why he left.

  As the thoughts and questions began to pile up in my mind, I did the only thing I knew to do—I picked up my guitar and began to sing worship songs. Crisis has the tendency to reveal the deep parts of our hearts, beliefs, and identities. And the deepest parts of my heart, belief, and identity were all aligned with the idea of me being a worshipper. King David (whose Victory Christian School award, you may recall, I was the esteemed recipient of) was a sinner who did horrible things like murder and adultery, but he apparently worshipped God a lot, and I was told that it was because of that he was called “a man after God’s own heart.” That’s the kind of man I aspired to be. That’s how I believed I could eventually be okay.

  So, on that mournful Saturday, as I thought of the story where David’s playing drove the evil spirit and torment out of King Saul, I did the only thing I knew to do. We sat in the living room on the nice white couch together and sang old church songs like “You Are My Hiding Place” and “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” I hoped the words were true. Normally, my mom didn’t want us sitting on the nice white couch in the living room. That couch was for looks and could possibly be of use when we had special guests at the house, but otherwise, the rule was stay off. And if you had your shoes on while sitting on it, you were basically taking your life into your own hands. But today she didn’t care about the white couch or even whether any of us were wearing shoes. Today, we just sat together, emotionally devastated, but together at least. Most of us anyway.

  We’d cry. We’d sing. And cry some more. And then someone somehow got a hold of him on the phone and the room erupted into a frenzy. My nine-year-old sister got on the phone and cried and begged for Daddy to come home. I eventually snatched the phone from her and asked my answerless father who he planned on taking care of his kids for him. Who would be a father for David, who was just a kid still? Who would walk Lissa, his little girl, down the aisle when she got married? We begged him. We told him that we would forgive him, and he should just come home. Come home now. We love you. Please. Come home.

  I was furious, of course. More than furious; I hated him for what he had done. His life seemed to me to be the worst kind of lie, but I could not let myself feel that. I had to do what needed to be done for him to come home. I had to step up and be a strong man of God for my family.

  • • • • •

  I sat on the floor in my parents’ bedroom with my guitar and my new fiancée, Lisa. Lisa and I once again sang “You Are My Hiding Place” in harmony, tears rolling down our cheeks. Lying in the bed, sobbing, were both of my parents. My dad had come home. He had told us he was so sorry. He was a coward. He was a liar. He wanted to make it right. I hated him. But of course, I still loved him. He was my dad. I’d always love him. His face was under the pillow. My mom held his hand, but she didn’t look too happy about it.

  We sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” with thick, stifled voices between the sobs. This time, I believed the words were true.

  Bitter

  I remained seated in the pew Friday night while everyone around me rose up. They had all erupted into a standing ovation for the associate pastor who had taken over the church with such wisdom and grace, hadn’t he?! No, he had not. These people were clueless. They had no idea what had been going on behind the scenes.

  A few days earlier, this emotionally unstable pastor had scolded me sternly for being manipulated by my parents because I had dared to question his decisions. His decisions had included posting armed guards at the church to make sure my dad didn’t come back. Armed guards. My dad had no interest in coming back, but this pastor needed to make his new authority and power known. Neither my mom nor dad were allowed anywhere near the church ever again. Never allowed to apologize. Never allowed to grieve or heal within the community they had started. The church’s decisions had not only robbed my parents of their much-needed community but of his retirement as well. I was still really pissed at my dad, so I had a little extra patience with this pastor’s harsh treatment of him. But my mom? Why punish the victim?

  At home I told my dad he had no room to whine about anything. He did this to himself. He accused me of being manipulated by the associate pastor at work. Why was I taking the church’s side? Didn’t I see how cruel they were being to him and my mother?

  I am a 5 on the Enneagram. That means that I have often tried to find my security and worth with information and knowledge. When I experienced the relational firestorm unleashed throughout my life as a result of my dad’s affair, I didn’t want to admit that I was being anything but objective in my judgments. I was not biased. I saw things how they really were. And ev
erybody but me was batshit crazy.

  I couldn’t understand why people couldn’t just see the truth. It was simple. Right was right and wrong was wrong. I was disgusted by the emotional groupthink that I saw all around me, and I was completely blind to where it existed in me. I didn’t see then, or through the next decade and a half of suffering while trying to make the world make sense, how intrinsically my “pure” ideas—what was right or wrong, true or untrue—were tied to my tribe. I couldn’t see how my view of Heavenly Father would be filtered through and largely determined by my experience of earthly father. I couldn’t see how my experience of my local church formed my view of the universe. I couldn’t see how deeply and inextricably my “rational” thoughts were tied to my emotional wounds.

  So when part of my tribe stood to mindlessly slap their phalanged meat hooves together for the man who was tearing my sense of tribal belonging apart, I was angry. I thought my anger was about truth, reason, and righteousness. This was not about my feelings being hurt or that I felt lonely and alienated—I was stronger than that! It was that I was too smart to condone this sort of facade. Everything was not alright, and I would not bow down or play nice within this kind of foolish and misguided Christianity—this oppressive power system that uses shame and manipulation to maintain power. No. Screw all of this. While they all stood and applauded him for a difficult job well done, I sat. I sat with all of the sit I could muster. I wore a hard scowl across my face and a visceral clench in my chest.

  Church Boy

  Lisa and I had left Tulsa shortly after we got married in 2000. Things had gotten so stressful at the church, and it had spilled into our entire lives. We could hardly go out on a date without being interrupted by somebody coming up to our table and asking what was going on with the church or my parents. So when a big church in west Michigan offered me a job as their worship leader, I said yes. I went from leading barefoot, sweaty, sexy college-kid megachurch worship to west Michigan, Dutch-reformed-turned-mildly-charismatic, Banana Republic suit–wearing, seventeen-minute megachurch worship.