Kristen's Notes

I’ve been thinking a lot about the extremist direction some people in this country want us to return to and it makes me reflect on the issues I have with religion.

Once upon a time I was a born again Christian. Honestly it’s receded far enough into the background now that I don’t think many people who know me are overtly cognizant of it, and the majority of the time it doesn’t affect me much unless The Bible is a Jeopardy category. However, I figured I’d tell the story of how I became an ex-Christian as a way of explaining why I am so concerned about the direction some of us seem to want to go in.

I don’t know if this is true for everyone but my faith evaporated in a single sentence. Oh it’s true I’d had struggles for awhile, but one day something happened and it was gone in a way that was just unrecoverable.

The place? Nebraska. The year? 2008, Spring. I was in my last year of college and my sister was living with me while she did her Master’s Degree. She was younger, only 22 but she had graduated school early and she was doing a one year Master’s Program. A couple of days a week she drive to Bellevue to her job at a defense contractor. it was about 50 minutes each way but it wasn’t too bad until one day a deer ran into her Explorer.

Well now this was a problem. I lived, worked, and went to school in Lincoln, which is a not too huge and mostly flat town. In a pinch I could basically walk everywhere I needed to go, but that way wasn’t going to work for my sister. I couldn’t just lend her my truck, because she couldn’t drive a stick shift and she couldn’t rent a car while hers got fixed because she was too young. My mom and dad wanted me to rent a car and let her drive it, but I was unwilling to do so because if something happened I couldn’t afford the liability.

Anyway, at the time I went to a pretty large church in Lincoln and they had a separate church service that was geared towards the “College and Career” crowd. People mostly in their 20’s and early 30’s, and even that group was sizable. Within that group I belonged to a smaller bible study group made up of about 15 other women my age. I want to be really clear that I don’t have anything specifically to gripe about with that Church or with any of the ladies in my group. They were all incredibly nice and incredibly well intentioned, but that is where the trouble for me starts.

So my sister gets into this accident, and that night I go to bible study. When it’s time for prayer requests I tell them what has happened and ask for prayer. Everyone agrees that it’s a tricky situation and that they will pray on it. That’s Wednesday.

My sister takes Thursday off work and doesn’t have to go to Bellevue on Friday because she has class. On Thursday I go into work and share the story with some work friends.

At that point in time my work friends and I did everything together. I think it’s pretty common for life to be this way at that stage of life, but we worked together from 2-10 and then partied together from 10-late into the night and the next day we did it again. We had keys to each other’s apartments, everyone’s parents knew everyone and we were just a tribe that rolled together.

Anyway I share the story with my friends, they agree it sucks, and that’s that.

Saturday morning I get a call from one of the guys named Taylor. Taylor wants to know if I can pick up Sandra from class Wednesday afternoon and drive her across town to work. Sure, I say, is Sandra okay? So Taylor explains that the group of them had gotten together on text chain, and had agreed that Taylor could drive Sandra to work on Monday and Clarissa lived in the same neighborhood so she could drive her to work on Saturday and also take her to go grocery shopping with her on Friday and so if I could pick Sandra up from class on Wednesday and take her to work, Sandra could loan my sister her car until her Explorer got out of the shop.

I was floored. Obviously I appreciated my friends, they knew this was stressing me out and I felt pressure as the older sister to solve the problem. My friends had seen this and worked to solve the problem for me even though they weren’t actually close to my sister. After some convincing I agreed to their plan and was insanely grateful.

On Sunday I went to church and afterwards at lunch some of the girls from my group asked how the car situation was going. I told them about the plan my friends had worked out and they all gasped in astonishment. That ladies, one of them said, is the power of prayer. They all nodded knowingly.

And like a balloon that lands on a hot surface my faith popped. It wasn’t the power of prayer. It was the power of a group of people who care about each other enough to inconvenience themselves when someone needs something. It was the power of friendship and shared resources. It was the power of optimism and the refusal to accept no solution as the end result.

In that moment I realized that the real danger of going to church and being sucked in by that whole song and dance is how absolutely attractive and reassuring it is to believe that someone is driving this car and we can trust that someone else will fix the problems. The reality is that no one is driving this car and it will crash if we don’t grab the wheel.

Whether it’s climate change, caring for the unhoused, education or a myriad of human rights that are under attack there is no cavalry coming. We are the calvary.

All of these people who are attacking trans kids, and teachers, and drag queens are doing so because the feel like that is their priority. They want things the way they remember it because they can’t see another person’s perspective, and remember someone else (God) is going to handle the big problems.

I’ll never join another organized religion. I meditate, I try to be mindful of my thoughts and actions, I do what I think is best for myself and the people I care about and if I’m wrong, well. I guess I’m wrong, and I’ll take that.

But I don’t worry a whole lot about answering to a capricious god.

Anyway how does my story end? My sister drove Sandra’s car for two weeks while her Explorer was repaired, and returned it with a full tank of gas. Sandra never asked for anything more in return.