Deconstructing...from the very beginning

On longing, learning, and whether it's possible to deconstruct even before your faith is fully formed.

I have always thought of myself as a Christian, but my faith didn’t become real and a force that guided me until adulthood. I joined the Catholic Church when I got married, and I felt myself being drawn towards God in a new way. But it wasn’t until a friend invited me to her church—an evangelical, historically Pentecostal church—in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (when I was in my early-30s), that I actively pursued God.

I felt such hunger. Such a burning desire to know more, to grow closer to God, to figure out what this faith thing was all about.

This was back in the days when you couldn’t stream music, but you had to look at the song lists on the cassette tapes and albums and cross your fingers and hope you liked what you bought, without knowing for sure until you unwrapped it and played it at home. I wandered the aisles of music shops, looking for God. Hoping against hope that whatever was on that tape would bring back the feelings I felt when I was in church.

I stopped at Christian book stores, touching all the books, trying to develop certainty through osmosis, apparently. Flipping through all the Bibles, feeling the silky softness of the gold-leaf edges, leaving with stacks of clearance books stuffed in bags. Books on what the Bible has to say about money, about family, about forgiveness, about hope. Books of prayers. And books of questions, lots of questions.

The books that transformed me, in good and bad ways

From the very beginning, I was desperate to read about faith—not so much books about theology or Bible studies, but memoirs, first-person accounts of people’s lives. How they came to belief or turned from it. How they processed what they learned. How they experienced the Holy Spirit. What it all meant to them. I read books like Girl Meets God by Lauren F. Winner, about a woman who chooses to become an Orthodox Jew but finds herself drawn to Christianity and wonders how to embrace the new without abandoning the old. And I read O Me of Little Faith by Jason Boyett, about how faith and doubt actually work together in our pursuit of God.

Throughout that decade, I read fictionalized accounts of the lives of key Bible characters like Esther, John, and Paul—and of course, The Left Behind series. And I started writing about my own life of faith.

I did Bible studies like The Excellent Wife (which I do not recommend) and Captivating, trying to learn how to be a godly woman—but fought what they taught with everything in me. Finally I discovered Rachel Held Evans’s A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which provided a much more expansive view of a woman’s role, and books like Jesus Feminist by Sarah Bessey.

As I prayed and wrestled with God and begged for the “Holy Ghost,” or gift of tongues, I read every book by Catherine Marshall, in particular The Helper, trying to make sense of the Holy Spirit. In 2013, as I was finally used to hearing phrases like “washed by the blood,” I read Addie Zierman’s book When We Were On Fire, which looks at the terminology of the evangelical subculture and about untangling oneself from cliché in search of a faith worth embracing.

Communities that shaped me

As I attended a weekly prayer group, during which women from my church shared deeply and authentically, I embraced (and offered and received) prophetic words. We leaned heavily on scripture, always the beloved King James translation favored by our church leaders—and then, when the pastor wasn’t present, I brought in a stack of different translations and explained how they varied and watched womens’ faces light up when a different translation opened up something new for them in the word of God. During sermons in which the pastor would preach for 20 minutes about a particular word in the KJV, I circled the one word in my NIV that said exactly whatever concept he was traveling such a long way to find.

As I did Bible studies with women from multiple church communities, we debated things like how we couldn’t lean too hard on grace—so as not to let ourselves off the hook for our inherently sinful nature—and I also read The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning, which essentially is all about grace, about how we can never have too much of it, about how we cannot do a single thing to earn any more of God’s love than he’s already given.

I heard sermons about how we must live in order to make it to heaven as I also devoured books like Philip Gulley’s If Grace is True: Why God will Save Every Person.

As I started pursuing writing books about prayer and faith—declaring with certainty the ways God would come through for us—I also read Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, which is about discovering a spirituality that stands up to questions. I identified with Thomas the Doubter—yet I lived in a world that was all about declaring the absoluteness of the Bible and of God.