C (4:25)
It's a Saturday morning and I'm working in a housing project, knocking on doors. I'm in this hallway with brown industrial carpeting. The sounds of daytime TV are spilling out from the apartments along with the smell of cheap soap. And I turn to the door on my right. It's my turn to knock. I knock on this hollow core door and I can hear the sound reverberate in the apartment. And as usual, I'm praying metaphorically that the person won't come to the door. The door opens up and the first thing that I notice is that the apartment is pitch black. And as my eyes adjust, I see the man that I would come to know as Paul. His face looked like he hadn't aged at all, and he had aged horribly at the same time. It was round and kindly and cherubic, but it was also pale and pockmarked and weathered. His hair was just a tangled mess like he had had bedhead for a decade. And I noticed that his fingers wrapped around the door jamb were just stained yellow with nicotine stains. Then I noticed this tangle of burned flesh at his wrist. And it disappeared under the sleeve of his long john shirt. And then it reappeared right at the base of his throat and wrapped around the back of his neck, up across his head. Something horrible had happened to this man. And I was kind of brought back to the moment when he said in this really kind way, hi, what can I do for you this morning? And I launched into the presentation that I'd done a million times. Hi, my name is Scott. I know you weren't expecting me. I won't take up much of your time. And then I'd get into some kind of existential theme that I could sort of get behind. And I asked him, do you think it's reasonable to believe in the face of all the injustice that we see in the world today that there is some kind of God that exists and is interested in us. And I really didn't have an answer to that question at this point, at least one that satisfied me. But fortunately not too many people were interested in hearing my answer. So it worked out. But Paul was. He said, yeah, I have no doubt that God exists, and I'm equally sure that he has no interest in. I had been one of Jehovah's Witnesses almost my entire life, and I had always really struggled with the structure, with the regimen of that lifestyle. I hated going to people's doors like this and telling them things they didn't want to hear when they didn't want to hear them. I hated having to explain to my co workers that I didn't celebrate Christmas because originally it was a holiday that honored the Roman God Saturnalia. When inside I'm thinking, who gives a shit? There's a lot of good reasons not to celebrate Christmas that isn't one. I just struggled with the whole structure of the lifestyle. But on the flip side, I totally bought the belief system. It made sense to me. It provided satisfying answers to a lot of the big questions. Whether or not God existed and if so, what was my responsibility in the face of that? Why is the world so fucked up and is it going to get better? These all had satisfying answers. And fundamentally it felt true. It felt like I had truth. And if I had truth, then suddenly I didn't have any choices to make. What I wanted didn't matter. That was irrelevant. All that mattered was truth. But when I hit 30, the old story started to break down and I could feel that I just didn't have the conviction that I once did. And I had this nagging doubt in the back of my head that if this wasn't truth, if this wasn't truth, I'm as obligated to get out as I had been to stay. But I also had to consider the implications. Because if I walk away from this faith, I am entirely losing my community. Friends, family literally will pass me on the street as though I'm a ghost. So I need to be pretty damn sure. There's really no taking a break either to sort this stuff out. If I stopped going to meetings or stopped going out in field service, that is knocking on people's doors, I'm going to hear about it out of concern. My friends are going to pay attention because they're concerned. And attention is the last thing that I wanted when I'm trying to sort this stuff out. So I decided to try to work it out under the radar and just go through the motions. And that meant continuing to go out in field service. Knocking on people's door on a Saturday morning is weird. Even if you're not experiencing a crisis of faith. You're there wearing a tie, you got a book bag and a Bible, trying not to feel like a salesman, and nobody wants you there. People would slam the door in my face pretty regularly. One guy came to the door cleaning his gun in some kind of gesture. What you really wanted were return visits. That's when you had already called on somebody cold and they agreed to let you come back so you got a better chance of seeing somebody with a friendly face. They may not answer, but the other benefit is that you get to drive out to their place on a Saturday morning and eat up some time when you would normally be knocking on doors of people that don't want to talk to you. So RVs are the place to be. I remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, we couldn't have been older than 12. I had a friend that announced in a car group when we were out in field service that he had a return visit, this guy that he really had to get back and talk to. So because this is just more productive than everything else we could be doing, we drove the 45 minutes out to the return visit. And then we just start driving up and down these suburban streets because he can't remember the address. And we're just hunting for this house for almost an hour until he finally gets really excited and points and says, that's it. That's the house I totally remember. So we pull over, he and I jump out, we run up to the door, and just as he's about to knock on the door, he turns to me and admits, I have no idea who lives here. I'm totally faking this. So we just sort of pantomime knocking on the door for the sake of the people in the car and then run back. But, you know, it ate up two and a half hours. And if I'm honest, things really hadn't changed a lot for me at 30. In the face of this period of deep crisis of faith, I had encountered this man, Paul, that seemed really interested in what we had to say and what we were talking to people about. At the end of our chat, I asked him, as I always did, if it would be alright if we came back, if we set up a return visit. And now would be the time for Paul to say, no, I appreciate you stopping by it was great talking to you, but I'm all set. But Paul didn't say that. He said, yeah, that'd be great. Look forward to seeing you next week. So the next Saturday, I went back to Paul's and miraculously he answered the door again. We picked up the conversation right where we left off. And it was in that conversation that Paul told me how he got those burns. He had suffered from mental illness almost his entire life, and when he was much younger, that manifested itself in this deep and real sense that he was evil. When he reached his late teens and early 20s, he started to hear this internal voice and it identified as Christ. And that voice said to him, paul, you're beyond redemption. It would be better if you didn't exist. You are an enemy of mine. In his mid-20s, and he really started to take on what that voice was saying. He said, one night I had just had it. I just felt like I was drowning in these voices and I decided to do something about it. So I climbed a utility pole by my house and I reached out and I grabbed a hold of the high tension wires. And the last thing that I remembered was just an explosion of white light. The next morning, Paul woke up in the emergency room. He'd survived, but of course now he was horrifically disfigured. And as he laid in that ER bed in the days after, the voice came back to him and it said, you survived, but don't think that anything has changed. You're still beyond redemption. And after he left the hospital, Paul became a recluse. And one Saturday morning I knocked on his door. So as I kept going back to Paul's and we kept having these conversations, I was really wrestling with what to do because he seemed to really be enjoying the message that I was sharing with him. But it was a message that I really didn't value anymore. He seemed to derive hope and comfort from the thoughts that had sustained me for so long. But to me they just seem vapid and hollow. Now and then I thought, who am I to impose my crisis of faith on this guy who seems to really be responding to it. My doubts are just a voice that I'm hearing. It really has no place in this conversation with this man. So instead, I told him what I knew I could, what had worked for me for so long. He would tell me, scott, I'm telling you that I'm so confident that I'm doomed, that I'm just waiting out my days. And I would tell him, that's really not what the Bible says. There's no such thing as I understood it, between being damned for all time and saved for all time. Doesn't work like that. We're each free moral agents making decisions in the moment. And if you want to choose differently, if you come to understand that God expects something different of you than what you've been doing, you get to do it right now. The past is the past. And again, Paul, that just resonated for him. But each time I went back, as the weeks and months went on, Paul seemed to respond less and less to that message. As much as I tried to reinforce that his fate had not been written for him, he constantly had objections, whether it be the voice that he heard, his own feeling of self worth. And he started to pull back from our conversations to some extent simultaneously. My doubts were not going away. And I stopped using the literature that we would use. I started just relying, and even this rarely, on some of the Bible verses that were kind of existential and had given me pause for reflect over the years. But even that was tough. It was tough to hear my own words. Things were falling apart. One Saturday morning, I went to Paul's apartment in field service, and I saw his car parked in the parking lot. When I went in the hallway, I heard his TV playing in his apartment. I knocked on his door and Paul didn't answer. I knocked again and I could hear him moving around inside, but he didn't want to answer the door. So I went back the next Saturday morning. And the same thing happened the Saturday after that. I decided to give it one more try. So I went and met with the group that was going to be going out in field service before I went to go visit Paul. And when I walked into the building, a good friend of mine came up and she seemed really concerned. And she leaned in and whispered to me and said, there's a message for you on the machine that I think you should hear. So I went into the back room and hit play. The answering machine started to play Paul's voice. And he said, this message is for Scott. This is Paul. Scott, everything you've been telling me over almost the past year, the entire message that you've been sharing with me has left me more fucked up than I have ever been. I feel so turned around and confused. I. I don't know which way is up. I feel despondent. I can only assume that that was your intention. And so congratulations, but please never, never stop here again. And I remember as that message played out, feeling like my feet were just anchored in concrete. I was leaning forward towards the machine. And it just felt like I could lean forward and touch my nose to the ground without falling over. And I remember thinking, he's mentally ill. This isn't about what I was telling him. This is not about me. I hadn't caused him any harm. And then I wished that I could be so sure. And that was the last time that I ever heard from Paul. That was the last time I ever went to anybody else's door. And it was the last time that I ever felt like I had any kind of responsibility to a God that I couldn't understand.
