"How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."

- Elijah, I Kings 18:21

I'm getting tired of the arc. Is all this Jesus stuff just wish fulfillment? A way to feel more important than I am? If not, why doesn't a good woman (yes, I know, ALL have sinned and fallen short blah blah ad nauseum) like my wife believe? I'm a terrible witness. That much I am certain of.

A lot happened since my last post. I got in contact with the local OPC pastor. He advised me to go to a nearby PCA church. I should have listened, but instead went for the dramatic and begged my wife to come with me to said OPC church, to hear what I hoped would be a clear presentation of the gospel. She refused and took my urgency wrong. I actually held her down at one point, trying to get her to hear me. Can't believe I did this, but I did. My oldest daughter walked in on the scene. I wanted to kill myself, and actually came near doing it the next day.

The subsequent weeks were a replay of the last time I tried to do the OPC thing back in '06. Mrs. VoW started out trying to keep her distance and not get in my way. Then she started to argue and hector and accuse me of betraying her. I gave in, I gave up. I convinced myself that I had been wrong, that no merciful God would demand that I trouble my family this way. I denied God and Jesus. Again.

Not immediately, though. I went through the arc. Back to Episcopal church. Then back to skepticism. Then back to something akin to Ayn Rand's objectivism. This was helped along by a visit to a Buddhist temple in China, where I saw people worshipping or praying (or whatever) in ways that were so obviously (to me) pure superstition that all religion started to look bogus. Incense and drama and helpless people trying to control something by petitioning God: could be Christianity too, I thought.

But I don't really believe that. In my "religion" as in other aspects of my life, I can't believe I'm a product of brute forces; or if I am, they have produced something that has a deeply-ingrained illusion of its own purposefulness. But I'm no child of God, either. Jesus has left me behind. My wife has made it clear that an expression of belief in Biblical Christianity on my part will also be taken as an expression that I want to be alienated from her-- that I have rejected the core of what makes her who she is. She wasn't threatening divorce, not even threatening to withhold sex. She was, however, threatening to withhold the intimacy, the sympathy that we have generally shared in our marriage.

Several weeks ago we had a conversation where I told her that I had become skeptical of Christianity; that my China experience, combined with the fact that the supposedly-living Christ is never available for interviews, combined with my poor experience and track record in my efforts to be a Christian, had left me pretty much bereft of my previous faith.

Then I got sick. Something put me down for a week and a half, maybe two weeks, with nausea and headaches. (My doctor's current theory is gallbladder problems, but that's not material to the story.) I was reminded of my helplessness. I prayed a little, because nothing else helped.

And then I felt a little better. I'm not stupid. It's probably coincidence. But I realized that either way, I didn't totally disbelieve. I told my wife I thought I might like to go back to church, after all. Episcopal church. The church that's not a threat to her. She's all about that.

But the arc is always the same. If Christ is real, then he's real. He's not relative, he's not therapy, he's the Lord, and he commands us to do a number of things, some of which (to be honest) mainline Protestantism blithely ignores. I can't stand on its slippery slopes. I'll either slide down to the hell of materialistic nihilism or else to what is frankly, to me, the slightly different hell called the Lordship of Christ. I don't mean to be heretical just for effect here: it is painful beyond anything I've ever experienced to suffer my wife's distrust, disapproval, disrespect; and I have seen time and again that this is the sure consequence of professing Biblical belief.

And here I sit. Halted, helpless, and crying out to Jesus when I can bring myself to believe he is what I've always been told he is.