I came armed for an argument

I left church at twenty-two and I had good reasons. I am not going to relitigate them here, but they were good ones, and for fifteen years I did not miss it.

My wife started coming first. I let her. Then she asked me to come once, and I said yes mostly to prove a point.

I had the whole speech ready. Every reason I was done. Every hypocrisy I had catalogued. I was ready to be asked why I did not believe, and I had an answer sharp enough to end the conversation.

Nobody asked for it.

A guy about my age sat down next to me, asked what I did for work, and talked to me about that for twenty minutes. At the end he said it was good to meet me and he hoped he would see me around. That was it. That was the whole encounter.

I was almost annoyed. I had brought a weapon to a place where nobody was fighting.

Turns out I did not want to win. I wanted somebody to sit with me.

I still have questions and some of them are the same ones. The difference is that I ask them out loud now, in a room where nobody flinches, and the answers I get are usually honest — including when the honest answer is that nobody knows.