Faithless in Seattle

Our youngest daughter graduated from college and wanted to move to Seattle. My brother-in-law offered us jobs at his hardware store and gave us a great deal on one of his rentals, which happened to be his family home in West Seattle.

            I began as a stocker. I arrived at 5:00a.m. to rip open boxes and arrange merchandise. My supervisor was a 60-something-year-old man who took his job very seriously. He worked hard and expected me to follow suit. Every couple of hours a Matt Nathanson song came over the store P.A. system, 

I’ve got a king sized bed and a PhD
in the way it used to be.

The song filled me with remorse. That was me, the guy who flushed his career down the toilet to work for minimum wage at his brother-in-law’s hardware store. Way to go. 

I discovered that some men take their knowledge of hardware very seriously. They love to come into the store and show off. One of them approached me and asked if we had some doohickey I had never heard of.  

“I’m not sure what that is but I’ll bet they can help you in tools.” 

He sized me up scornfully. “What were you? Insurance salesman?” 

He assumed I had chosen some inglorious path in life and failed. How else could you explain a man of my years working in a hardware store and not even being any good at it? It was all I could do not to dump my resume on him. I was a respected pastor and professor. I had a Ph.D. I had built my own house and raised three kids. I had held onto a beautiful woman for 30 years. But all he would have heard was “washed up preacher,” which was even worse than “washed up insurance salesman.” I pointed silently to the tools department. 

When I got off at that afternoon, I trudged through the weeds in the front lawn and into the house. Julie’s shift began later so I had the place to myself. I surveyed the scene bleakly. Prior to our arrival, the home had been occupied by one of my brother-in-law’s sons who was raising six kids. The place was a wreck. There were holes in the walls and crayon marks on everything.

I sat at my desk, trying to come up with my next move.  The tenant downstairs also worked at the hardware store and was gone for the day. He had three dogs and three cats. The cats ran loose and peed on our belongings which were stored downstairs. The dogs were crammed into two cages. Mournful howls and the smell of urine pierced the floor and gave perfect expression to my inner state. Later that night, he returned, adding the pungent aroma of marijuana to the mix.   

The one redeeming feature of our house was a panoramic view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula. It was so stunning it could have made up for everything. Instead, it taunted me. It didn’t say, “Look at what you have.” It said, “Look at what you missed.”

One evening, I finished teaching an online Greek class, a final remnant of my former life. I closed the laptop and entered the kitchen where Julie was slumped over the sink, staring blankly at the dirty plate in her hand.  

“It’s weird being so good at something you know you can’t do anymore,” I said.

She lowered the plate slowly to the sink and looked at me. 

“How did you lose your faith?” she asked. 

It was a question, not an attack, but it landed like a punch. It was the first time I realized my faith was gone and would not be coming back. I stood in silence, searching for an answer. How had I lost my faith? I guess like I lost my hair. Somewhere in my thirties it started to fall out, piece by piece. I tried to make it grow back but nothing helped. One day, I looked in the mirror and it was all gone.

I felt stupid, like the last kid to stop believing in Santa Claus. I had two pastor-friends in Yuba City who ran into the same thing. They both killed themselves, one with a gun, the other by self-neglect. I do not judge them for this. I wanted my stupid life to be over too.

I turned to the atheists and found bitter comfort in their gloating attacks on the absurdities of Christianity. I went online and found others leaving Christianity in droves. Most were angry at pastors, though, even repentant ones. I found a group of pastors who were leaving Christianity but they were a minefield of quirky ideas, hot buttons, and utter confusion. In other words, they were just like me. I didn’t need any more of me. 

It would have been easier if I could have shared my struggle with someone. It would have been nice to let my parents or sisters in on my struggle but I had no words for what I was going through. Would they even know me? My old church friends would have gone to great lengths to be there for me but their way of helping would be to bring me back into the fold. Nope. I was on my own.

I never have trusted myself on the edge of a cliff. It’s not that I think I’ll slip. I’m afraid I’ll jump. My life had been a series of crazy leaps. Each time, I trusted an invisible hand to catch me. Each time I kept falling and falling.