I Have Decided
When "see you at church" requires too complicated of an answer
It was the second time at the drive-thru window that the cashier said, “hey, I know you from church!”
There had been another drive-thru meeting with the same person where she introduced herself, and both times I could not remember at all meeting her at church. She was kind and friendly but still, I felt immediately shaken.
“Ha ha, oh yeah! I haven’t been in a while…” I felt panicky, not knowing what to say next.
My relationship with church is…still complicated.
As I look back on my time, I’m grateful for so much of the foundation it laid in my life for my relationship with God, my understanding of the Bible, and relationships with people who felt like family (many still do). This time away has also made me aware of the ways I was spiritually formed and malformed there, as well as the cognitive dissonance between how I was taught to live and what ended up being true behind the scenes.
In all of my wrestling, I never meant to burn bridges. I truly love the people there, and tried so hard not to cut ties. The system is the thing that drove me away. But now people there just don’t know what to do with me. I am guessing from past experience that many of them think I’ve walked away from faith completely. I don’t know. We haven’t talked much.
Because it’s been complicated, and because there are a lot of relationships involved, I’ve been back a number of times. When sitting through service didn’t work for me, I’d go for the worship and leave during the sermon.
What’s becoming more and more clear is this: my body goes into anxiety overdrive there.
The past few times have left me sobbing in the parking lot. There’s this gigantic chasm between who I used to be and what I believed and what it all represented for me then, versus now. So much has shifted. So much has come to light. That chasm in between is full of tension, anxiety, anger, and grief.
The times when I’ve tried to push through a service and white knuckle it, I’ve come out on the other side as if I’ve been through a battle. I break down.
How do you describe all of this in a five minute conversation with that person from church you bump into in real life?
We used to sing a song when people got baptized: “I Have Decided To Follow Jesus”. It wasn’t until recently that I found out this wasn’t just a song my church made up. It actually goes back to India, attributed to either Sadu Sundar Singh or Simon K. Marak in the 19th century.
The song went like this: “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.”
It was part victory, but also part battle hymn. A charge. No turning back.
I carried this song and others with me for many years, since I was little. I took them for all the seriousness they seemed to convey. Another lyric that stayed with me was, “when I die, let me die in the service of the Lord.” The way my young mind understood it, I literally thought it meant dying in a Sunday morning church service, and timidly I agreed with God that if it came down to it, I would do just that.
As I write this, it’s my “spiritual birthday,” the day I chose to make Jesus Lord of my life and was baptized.
I cry thinking about that little girl today, the one who so sincerely gave her life to God, believing that at that moment God had wiped her slate clean, but going forward it was on her to keep it that way. Every scrape, every ding, felt like another way of failing God. She imagined him shaking his head at all her faults, questions, and doubts. She feared if people knew the mess she really was, the whole thing would unravel and she’d be humiliated and left alone.
Funny how 25 years later, she was the one who chose the unraveling.
A little over a year ago Jennifer Garner put out a video on social media simply reading a poem by Mary Oliver. It was called I Have Decided.
Since I don’t know the copyright rules of posting an entire poem, you can listen to Jennifer’s recitation of it here, or read the poem in full here.
In it, Oliver essentially describes deciding to go to a beautiful home in the mountains, embracing the silence and the chill, finding a connection her soul longs for–and then expresses that she doesn’t actually want to go anywhere. May the reader understand.
This has been a year of venturing into the unknown, untethering, unraveling, unaccompanied.
Often it feels like God too is silent in this journey, though glimpses appear sometimes.
So many of us are walking this journey, I’m learning. So many of us can’t go back to the way it was, even if we sometimes long for the comfort of certainty. So many of us are finding our way forward.
It’s not a conversation for the drive-thru. It is one I envision having with you over coffee: tears welcome, words relating, eyes meeting, whole-self listening. I’m lucky enough to have been able to do that in real life with some of you reading. If not, I hope you can feel welcome and find room for that in the spaces I’m cultivating online.
I have decided. I decided then at 12 and have made the decision again and again at every crossroads. I’m not turning back.
But at this stage, it’s less about the battle hymn and more about the poem—an acceptance, a settling of the soul. As the poem describes, there’s a sense of finding safety and comfort and discovery within. A journey with God and a full, whole, unique soul, mess and all.
I can almost feel my newly baptized self years and years ago give a giant exhale of relief.
the drive-thru scene feels like a veil-thin moment, where an ordinary window suddenly opens onto the whole hidden weather of the soul, and there is only so much trembling a person can gather into a smile
It feels like I could have written this. I've had this same experience many times in the past few years and it's always unmooring. I still don't have a good elevator pitch for something that requires an entire book(s) to explain. Such a strange experience to feel so adrift when I was once so firmly planted.