To Everyone Who Will Ever Be Disappointed in Me
Like most of my peers in the early 2000s, I spent my early mornings and nights as late as I could get away with designing my MySpace page, complete with entry-level custom code and the music I felt best represented my feelings that week. I uploaded grainy photos, posted surveys that—in hindsight—gave away too many security question answers, and painstakingly arranged my top 8 friends.
Then there was the personal section—relationship status, hometown, zodiac sign, religion.
When this MySpace page got back to the grown-ups in my life, I was outed as an atheist in seventh grade. Some people were disappointed in me. Words like “atheist” and “agnostic” didn’t fly around my small town, and someone was concerned enough to alert my mother.
I was able to comfort some by claiming to be an “agnostic theist,” explaining big theology words I’d read online and offering some semblance of a belief in God. That was good enough for most people, but eyes were still on me as the questioning, pensive teen.
When I became a Christian in college, some people were disappointed in me. This was ten years ago, but I still remember friends who said they thought I was an intellectual and “should’ve been smarter than this.” They said they expected me to be beyond what they called fairytales and the brainwashing of religious thought.
The pattern you see in both these situations is a lesson I’m still learning today: when it comes to the decisions I make in my life, for my life—especially when it comes to what I believe and don’t—some people will be disappointed.
I can only hope that anyone I might disappoint in the future will read this and, when they become disenchanted with me, remember what I’m about to say here. Everyone who is reading this has in the past and will continue to disappoint people; I can only hope you’ll begin to grasp what my therapist said to me earlier this year: “You can’t grow the way you are without disappointing someone.”
If you know me enough to feel frustrated by my decisions, you know me well enough to know that I read widely and diversely, ponder and pose questions often, and find fulfillment in studying (even if the topics are random and have nothing to do with my life). I challenge my beliefs, and I may have even challenged yours. I don’t apologize for that. I also don’t apologize for the version of me you were proud of—at the time, she was an honest, genuine edition of the woman you know.
I bring up my annoyingly studious ways and the highbrow aspirations of my childhood to emphasize that none of my shifts have been made hastily. If I change my mind, my mind has been changing for years. I’ve likely read twenty books, listened to forty podcasts, and consulted ten scholars on the topic before I surrendered to change. Not only because I live to be bookish and feeling uninformed feels like I’m starving, but because I don’t even like change very much.
It’s a dizzying experience to disagree with your former self. To say I love her, I see her, and I now believe that she was wrong. She did her best with the information she had, but she’s moving in a new direction that could cost her some of the sense of belonging she’s been building for years. In the very human quest for belonging and faced with fading camaraderie, she discovered, as Sarah Bessey described in her new book, “What we thought was love was actually mutually agreed upon like-mindedness.”
I've awkwardly apologized to my comfort zone for disrupting it as I squeezed past it and into the scary possibility of changing my mind. With my feet still somehow planted firmly beside Jesus, I’ve become more comfortable with holding some ideas loosely, giving them room to shift and grow. They may bounce back to what I’ve always believed, or they may grow out of your expectations. But I hope you know these ideas were wrestled with fiercely and studied with fervor. I need you to know that I’m still the same me.
This isn’t an announcement. Nothing is changing in my life today. But life has taught me that change can always be around the corner, and when it picks me up, someone will be disappointed that I got in the car. If that someone ever turns out to be you, I graciously ask you to do what I reluctantly did: ask questions of yourself, interrogate your disappointment, entertain the idea of being wrong or merely that your ideas of right and wrong, truth and lie, heathen and saint may not be as black and white as you’ve thought them to be.
This isn’t an announcement. Nothing is changing in my life today. But life has taught me that change can always be around the corner, and when it picks me up, someone will be disappointed that I got in the car.
I know what it’s like to hold so tightly to one position that letting go feels like a betrayal or loss of identity. Even entertaining the thought of being wrong can feel so scary that doubling down in defense of your position against anyone who challenges it seems like the only way to stay afloat. I’m learning that it’s not. Won’t you learn with me?
There is freedom in being open-handed and curious, in not trying to force the people around you to align all of their life decisions and personal beliefs with yours. It’s possible to learn not to speak prescriptively about what other people should be doing and instead become fascinated with how and why they came to their conclusions (should they choose to tell you).
One day, you might discover that we share some beliefs and not others and that discovery may throw you for a loop. If you never begin to embrace the concept of nuance, the lessons in doubt, the necessity of questioning, the complexity of the Christian faith tradition, or the triteness of certainty…you will always be disappointed in me.
If you never begin to embrace the concept of nuance, the lessons in doubt, the necessity of questioning, the complexity of the Christian faith tradition, or the triteness of certainty…you will always be disappointed in me.
I’m not the first to think this, but I wholeheartedly believe that if I reach the end of my life with the very same beliefs that were handed to me at the beginning of it, I have failed. If that happened, I’d have wasted my life in cruise mode with not a single original thought to my name. I would’ve neglected other possibilities that may have been more just, more loving, and yes, maybe even more true.
I would rather deal with the discomfort of examining my beliefs only to ultimately confirm that I still believe they’re true than never question them at all. And for those of us who believe in the Christian God, I think that never looking into your beliefs is not to recognize the overwhelming vastness of God. There’s a quote by George Bernard Shaw (who very much did not believe in the Christian God, to be clear) that wraps this up nicely: “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
I’ve been on many sides throughout my life and in my faith, and I reserve the right to change my mind. Entering a new stage of being or belief isn't unusual for me—I've moved from a rural hometown to a big city where I didn't know a soul; gone from atheist to agonistic to Christian; from Baptist to nondenominational to reformed to card-carrying, church staff member Arminian to secret reformed-adjacent Baptist (also known as nondenominational); from half-hearted Democrat to wary Christian moderate to loud, Bible-waving moderate to unapologetic but civil liberal/fledgling feminist killjoy... As Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, "I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."
But I realize that as I creep toward the familiar but terrifying terrain of changing again one day, the landscape might be foreign to others in my life. This is why I want everyone who will ever be disappointed in me to know that I didn’t want to change either. An unrelenting pursuit of answers, compassion, and the true Christ must have made it so. The well is deep, I promise.