Issue 6, Mar 2008
I’m having a difficult time with this. Al asked me to write about my journey back to faith. For some reason, I kept putting it off. It’s much harder than I realized it would be. It’s because I’m still in the process of returning. I’m not all right in God’s eyes, and that’s very difficult to admit.
I turned my back on God and my faith after my father died and my mother was horribly injured in a plane crash in February of 1992. I was still in college, just about to graduate when my world fell apart. But it was also an “appropriate” time for breaking away from old beliefs, trying new things. If I had a close church family I might have had more support, but there had been a rift and our church had broken up a few years prior. My aunt, a missionary who came home from Pakistan to be with the family, noticed, but her attempts to talk to me were clumsy, and made me madder at God than ever. I guess I figured that if a representative of God could only come across as condescending and as out of touch with reality as she did, then God really had no place in my modern world.
Periodically, though, bits of faith would filter through to me. There is a line in a Rosamonde Pilcher novel,
The Shell Seekers, wherein a local village minister speaks of a recently departed parent to an adult child, “She may not have believed in God, but I’m certain He believed in her.” That line has stuck with me, I still felt God on my shoulder, looking to see what I’d do next.
It was easy to not be a Christian. I had finished college and gone on to flight school on the opposite side of the country. I had one close friend who moved with me to California, but everyone else was new in my life, with no expectations of me. It was easier to talk about my parents’ accident than the fact that I had grown up a Christian. No one expected me to go to church, no one expected me to behave in a certain way, and I didn’t.
This way of life continued for many years. I moved back home after a (thankfully) failed relationship, but my mother and I never discussed religion. She got cancer. I perceived it as just another slap from God. She wouldn’t accept much help from me, or anyone else; it was obvious how much she missed my dad. I didn’t understand how God could, would let this woman go through so much without the support of her loving husband.
I moved out to continue my aviation career, was hired on in an airline, and moved back home again since starting pilots make welfare wages. I was excited, though. Flying for an airline seemed like a pretty cool job. And unexpected, both in the fact that females make up an incredibly small percentage of pilots, and that my father died while flying. I liked shocking people.
Meanwhile, I found out Mom’s cancer had come back. However, since it was misdiagnosed, three or four months had gone by without treatment. By the time she had her oncological check-up, the cancer had metastasized into her bones. So while I was just starting out my new life, hers was in the process of ending. I don’t know how many of us in the family realized this.
Just a few months later, I was in an airplane in Newark, boarding passengers on a beautiful September day. I turned my head, and saw smoke pouring out of New York’s Twin Towers, followed shortly by an explosion from the second. I missed having God to shout at, to cry to or to lean on that day. I went with Mom that Sunday to her Quaker meeting and listened in horror as a twelve year old boy stood up in meeting and talked about how he believed those terrorists to be brave for what they had accomplished. Quaker protocol won’t allow a person to speak in retaliation of another’s words so I had to keep my mouth shut. But I refused to believe that there was any good in those actions. I also realized Quakerism was not for me.
Something started stirring in me that day. I wanted God back. But the next few months saw furlough, and then Mom’s death. I ran away again to California and started attending a church. It didn’t fit and I made no attempt to find another. I was recalled, moved back east, worked, tried to find a church on Sundays I wasn’t flying. I moved to Texas, kept looking, never finding a church that made sense to me. I ended up leaving my job, got married, and finally found a church that felt like coming home. I thought all was well.
Instead, I’m angry and I’ve turned my back on the people who love me. We eloped this past summer, mostly because I couldn’t face a wedding without Mom, but with Mom’s siblings. I feel abandoned. I wasn’t good enough for her to fight to live. She saw my brother get married and have two children, but that was enough. She gave up. She wasn’t around for my wedding. I blame God for not giving her the chance to live, nor the will to fight. My aunts, uncles and cousins are reminders that they have families who love them, have their histories intact. I do not. I have an abusive brother I won’t have contact with, an ex-sister-in-law who is busy putting her life back together and a new husband who loves me, but doesn’t see the broken pieces inside me.
Going to church doesn’t seem to fix anything. Hopefully the love of God will restore the person I should be, provided I can bend enough to ask for His help.
I’m still a work in progress.
-------------------------------------------------