i called myself a closeted agnostic.

I called myself a closeted agnostic. I would sit in my bed at night, watching youtube videos and listening to podcasts about why “God” could not exist, or that he must exist, or that he doesn’t make sense but this other idea does. I would lay in my bed and wonder each night why I was there. Why did I have this fascination with Paris? Why must I write stories about a Jazz club situated in hell? Why must I have paintings of two lovers running along a beach sitting across from my bed if not to inspire? But where did that inspiration for that even come from? I asked myself where did I come from? I asked why do I still feel the need to write, if there is nothing but intense pride in that endeavor? 

I called myself a closeted agnostic. I told myself I couldn’t tell others what I was going through because they “wouldn’t understand.” I told myself that if I told them, they would shun me. I told myself that I must protect myself, I must protect my parents' idea of who I was by not telling them what I believed, or rather, what I didn’t believe in. 

I was scared. 

For the better part of my young teen life my family ran a church. And when it shuttered during the Covid years I found myself questioning a lot. I found myself hurt by the people who had hurt my parents. I questioned why these people who called themselves christians could do such a thing? How could you turn your back on the people who love you because your pride couldn’t handle it? How could you turn your back on the people who loved you because you were too afraid to own up to your own mistakes, while all the while, they showed you their mistakes on a silver platter. Meant to bring you closer, not push your mistakes further away. All of these instances caused a moment of indicative pain. A pain that was so intense I shut down. I didn’t like any one. I didn’t trust anyone. And, because of who I am, I began searching for answers. 

The most simple place to look for answers is obviously the internet, but I also knew that the best way to ruin yourself was to go on the internet. And so, I read. I read articles, papers, and books. I read stories and listened to podcasts by the great “thinkers” of our time. And each time I did, I came back with more questions. More realizations that my sanity was at risk here. More ideas that this reality was not as I had been told, or, what others had told me it was. 

About a year after the church shuttered, I found myself distant from everything. My dreams of soccer became much more distant. I still loved the game, I just didn’t love playing it. And that comes and goes now, but I’ve made peace with my approach to it. I found myself distancing myself from my friends. Becoming a shell of who I was around them in order to appease them. And I found myself looking for brokenness in other people that I could connect with. I sought out the brokenness that would be within people, and to be more specific, the brokenness in someone I could fall in love with. In this endeavor of sorts, I read something special. 

It was a story about this soul. This beautiful, thoughtful, charismatic and funny, brilliant soul. It all shone so brightly, but underneath all of that there was a brokenness that not even the soul itself realized.  And I was drawn to it. I was drawn to the darkness the soul had in the story, but I became so invested as the other characters did in her story that it shattered me. In the darkness and the brokenness that I loved, I found myself questioning my own power and humanity because I was not much better a soul than the very thing I was shattered by. Perhaps even, I broke the soul in the story even more purely because I was such a broken person, with no light to shine brighter to illuminate and rectify the brokenness. 

After reading this story I was seemingly in a darker place. I truly was a closeted agnostic. I had no belief in anything, and I had no balls to say I believed in something. Perhaps being an agnostic is a cheap way of saying you are too scared to believe in something. Or, maybe that’s a reductionist view of a complicated issue. But I’d rather not speak about that now, so I will focus on my questions. 

I often would simply question reality itself. I would ask, well, even if there is no God, where is the basis of good and evil? And I would find answers ranging from the biological research(Sam Harris in a sense) to the more psychological and thoughtful approaches of some other thinkers that caused me to look at this from a different perspective. If we have no good and evil, then what is right and what is wrong? And perhaps those things are just made up constructs of the human mind brought forth by a natural progression of human society. And then often I would ask, well, couldn’t God have set that motion in place? 

And the answer to that is almost always yes. 

After questioning these things for months I began to look in other places, to fully evaluate whether the God of the bible was who he was. And that led me back to books. To Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis to be specific. I reread the Screwtape Letters(one of my favorite books) and it forced me to question what it meant to be a good human. And then I read this essay by G.K. Chesterton about the book of Job. Where in it he essentially tells us that [paraphrased] in order for God to show us as humans his masterful work, he must himself become an atheist to MARVEL in his masterpiece. Because in order to understand us humans and how we view our world, our maker must realize how insane it truly is what he made. And maybe I read that wrong, or interpreted it in the wrong manner, but either way, that idea stuck with me. If God himself had to become an atheist, then how in the world could I be an atheist. I couldn’t. So atheism was automatically off the table. Not because I believed in God, no no. But because if I believed in atheism, God himself became one, and if God can become an atheist, then how in the world could atheism even be real. 

After Chesterton woke me up in that regard, I truly was a closeted agnostic. I had only told a few people of my questioning, and in doing that I had become distant from one friend, and closer to 3 others. As well as closer to my parents during this time. I think all of this is tied in but it will be explored in a letter essay.  To continue - I then read Mere Christianity. C.S. Lewis’s book of sorts based on talks he gave about Christianity. 

I read it front to back, and I have gone back since. And every time I read it, I am enamored by his arguments. I am enamored by the way he writes about a belief in God. That there must be a God if we are to say there is good and evil. If there is right and wrong, there must be a God, or at least, there must be some arbiter of the truth. Humans must have a moral foundation. We must build ourselves upon something. And while some would argue that foundation is purely biological and social, Lewis awoke me to something. Even if that is the case, where do those biological and social drivers come from? How could I question my own biology if that biology was not meant to question itself? Perhaps this is making no sense, but it is my first attempt at rationalizing my belief. So obviously there are going to be moments of confusion, of lostness within my words. But no matter, because I must continue to write this story. 

There is one line though from Lewis that fully awoke me. 

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning; just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

And this statement, going back to what I wrote before, seemingly awoke that very question and answered it. How could we come to be knowing of these questions, if there was not an answer that subjectively answered it for us. I am never going to say you are wrong for not believing, I am just going to say, how do you know? How do you know you are right? And I’m not sure if I can answer that question either, but I do think a belief in God gives a much firmer foundation upon which morality and reality can stand that simply saying, “I see this world as what it is, therefore it is.” Well no, not therefore it is. Therefore I see it as such. That does not mean it is as it is. 

Now all of these thoughts are valuable and they awoke me to something special. That I did believe in God. But that does not mean I was a christian by any stretch of the imagination. I knew there must be something when I was a closeted agnostic, but not I was just a person who believed in God, but had no desire to know him. And then I met a person who sparked something. They sparked this desire to make sure I knew exactly what I knew. To know who God was, because if I just believed that he was real, but had no action to back it up then my belief was as good as nothing. A belief you do not act upon, well, that is just a thought. 

And after meeting this person, I found myself talking a lot more about God with people. With friends, my closest friends. And one night, as we were laying around about to fall asleep, my best friend sat up and asked two questions. “Why don’t I read the bible?” he asked himself. And, “Do you guys ever have that moment where everyone is telling you how great you are and how amazing you are doing and yet when we go home and we lay in bed alone we feel as if we are a failure?” We all answered yes. 

And then something amazing happened. We sat there talking about the possibilities for an hour and a half, coming to no sort of conclusion. 

I was sitting there, on an air mattress with my sweatshirt pulled above my head thinking. A comforter wrapped around my body as it was a bit chilly, thinking. Almost praying it seemed. Because I knew there was an answer to his questions. And then, I spoke. But I can’t remember fully what I said. I just know after, my friend looked at me with a smile and said, “holy crap that’s the answer. I have been asking this question for a YEAR and then in one conversation on a random friday night, sitting around with my friends having one of the deepest conversations we have ever had, it happened.” And my other friend spoke up and said, “He was in the room with us the whole time.” And I got chills. And I didn’t know what to do with that. But then I looked up and said, “I’m going to make a group chat for us. The guys in this room. We are going to read our bibles now. And keep each other accountable.” And then I did. And I am not normally the type of person to do that. But I did. 

And then, tonight, after a deep conversation with someone very special to me, I found myself in prayer. Something I have tried to do more often now. And then I wrote a few letters, and found myself needing to write this. After all, on Wednesday I had written, “maybe it’s your turn to write something about God Titus.” And so now I have. And I think I will continue to do so. Because this feels as real as anything I have ever written, even if it makes no sense right now. 

So, without further ado. From closeted agnostic to a Jesus follower. Here I am. Sitting in prayer. Rejoicing it seems, by writing.