Testimony

 Thank you to the childrens’ Sunday School teacher whose simplistic and dismissive response to 8-year-old-me’s earnest and sincere question led me down this path. If, instead of blaming objective evidence on the deceit of Satan, she had embraced the opportunity to learn together by bringing me and my question to the pastor, I might not have had the opportunity to choose as I do now. I might not have had the opportunity to see things from the outside. I might not be in a position to feel my purpose as wholly as I do. So, to that Sunday School teacher, thank you.

Dinosaurs are cool! The charismatic examples were enormous, powerful creatures that came in an astounding array of shapes and sizes. Our understanding of their fossilized remains and the consistency of God’s creation tells us that they roamed the earth in their greatest numbers from 250 million to 65 million years ago. We make this determination by the very predictable atomic behavior with which God imbued materials like carbon. It’s important to understand that God blessed me with intelligence and left me to develop wisdom the way most of us do, through experience. I was 8. I vaguely remember we’d been learning about Noah when the teacher made claims about the earth being 6000 years old. When I asked about fossils being millions of years old, she blamed Satan, “the great deceiver,” and moved on. I became an atheist at church. At 8 years old, Nuance wasn’t one of my strengths. Neither did I understand that the well-meaning lady who was, essentially, volunteering to babysit with Bible stories while parents attended church, was not an authority on God. I understood and embraced the scientific method and the way scientists have estimated the age of the Earth and fossils. I understood that the Sunday School teacher had given me a choice between science and God. And I understood that science is based on tests and repeatability. I chose hard, verifiable, testable evidence.

I remained an atheist until, at 17, I heard what I call “The Parable of the Lobster.” Nerdy people my age will remember when Nova, on PBS, was all about the science without the politics. Neil de Grasse-Tyson talks about how much he enjoys lobster. He talks about setting the table with a white tablecloth, about the pot of melted butter, and putting on a bib. He talks about setting a plate and claw crackers, and sitting down at the table. He then mentions that no lobster crawls up onto his plate and explains that the empty plate contains no evidence of lobster. He then asks, “Is absence of evidence evidence of absence?” I became agnostic watching a science show on public television.

Over the years, God has let me get right up next to, but not quite over, the precipice of death. I had a head-on collision with a car while riding my bicycle. I rolled onto the hood and windshield, then back onto the street. I got up and walked my bike, with its very un-round wheel, home. While skateboarding downhill and around the corner, I barely clipped the curb, bringing the skateboard to an instant stop and sending me headlong to land just shy of a fire hydrant. I got up and walked home. While riding a bicycle at high speed down another hill, I encountered a logging truck climbing in the downhill lane. I swerved, shot off the road, down into a ravine. I carried my bike back up the hill and continued the descent. Driving my dad’s recently paid off pickup truck down from a hike, I overcooked a corner and fishtailed around 2 curves before heading for the cliff. As the front tire reached the soft edge of the road, the truck spun and rolled onto its roof, the bed hanging out over hundreds of feet of air. I walked away unscathed. I was passing a truck on my way to work when it turned left toward me. I swerved and shot into the cornfield, rolling my Mustang 3 times. It stopped on its wheels and I walked away. About a month after buying my first motorcycle, I ran out of talent mid-corner on the road to Windy Ridge, on the southeast side of Mt St Helens. I rode that Ninja off the cliff and landed in a copse of trees 50 or so feet from where the bike wound up suspended in a tree. We hauled the bike back up to the road, and I rode it the 300 miles home. I high-sided another motorcycle on the freeway, getting thrown into the ground while doing 70 mph, sliding across in front of a semi, slamming feet-first into the curb on the bridge. While I cracked my shoulder blade and several bones in my ankle, I was walking and riding motorcycles again 2 months later. While learning to lead-climb (rock climbing where you carry the rope up with you, rather than it being already in place), another student failed to catch my planned, intentional fall and I plunged 15 feet before the instructor tightened the rope. The right side of my paraglider collapsed on take-off and flew into the side of the mountain, below launch,  at 25 mph. I scrambled back to launch and flew again 15 minutes later. There’s a scene in the Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day, where Phil catches the kid who falls out of a tree. The kid runs off, and Phill says “You’re welcome. You never say ‘Thank You.” I’ve been that kid because I’ve always been happy to accept the alignment of circumstances that resulted in my surviving mostly unscathed. I’ve heard stories from before my first distinct memory, and there have been many smaller incidents, and I’d always been happy to call them coincidences.

I'm acutely aware of the risks I take and that my close calls are a result of my failure to fully implement the safety systems that have been developed for challenging activities. I also use the best gear I can afford to balance safety and experience to the risk I'm willing to accept.

My heels were dug in on the logical position that, as God is omnipotent, and an omnipotent entity can change evidence at their will, God is untestable and therefore not logically knowable.

My parents moved to Ocean Shores in 2019. I left a high-paying, easy-for-me job in the spring of 2023 because it no longer felt rewarding, and because I found the constant last-minute rescheduling of meetings too stressful, and the unilateral addition of on-call to my responsibilities interfered with my passion for the outdoors. I tried to start a business. When that didn’t go well, I tried to find work. By the end of the year, I’d run out of money and had to leave Issaquah and easy access to do everything I enjoy within a few minutes walk to a 30-minute drive. I moved into my parents’ driveway and have been searching for a way home ever since. Shortly after I arrived, doctors found a massive tumor in the lining of my mom’s brain and performed emergency surgery to remove it. I was glad to be with my parents so I could help and started exploring the idea that God may have arranged for me to be there for them.

I asked:

“Why did  I have to come here, instead of having a way to bring them home?”

“What do I need to do?”

“How do I know you’re there?”

“Please show me a way to reconcile the last 34 years.”

He hit me with a pickup truck. I was side-swiped while riding my bike. While I walked away with just bruises and mild scrapes, it made it hard to believe God is both real and loves me. I kept looking. I kept asking. I begged for a way home to Issaquah. A year and a half of helping my parents, of being fired from a lifeguarding job explicitly for following the Red Cross training the employer paid for, and the time to read and reflect between the DoorDash jobs that have been just enough to keep my Dog and I fed, allowed me to see that things keep just barely working out just barely in time.

I’ve made many attempts, over the years, at reading the Bible cover-to-cover and always found Numbers and Deuteronomy to be a slog. I gave up. My motivation had been academic. To understand the references made by literary greats like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Milton. This fall, I decided to speed read all the begetting and counting. I kept reading, finding wisdom that applies today. I spotted seeming contradictions and learned to interpret them as opportunities to explore deeper and find understanding that resolves the conflict. But it wasn’t the Old Testament that caught my attention. Neither was it the miracles. It was Jesus’ faith. His believing so strongly that, despite knowing what was coming, he embraced it and sacrificed his earthly life in exchange for our eternal lives, convinced me that I wanted to believe. In particular, it was Jesus’ pleading in the orchard, followed by his acceptance from betrayal through crucifixion that caught my heart. But I didn’t know how. 

I continued to seek a way to know the unknowable. To reconcile my logical understanding with my desire to believe. I started to wonder if God wasn’t waiting to show me a way home to Issaquah until I’d found my way home to Him. And I understood: It’s okay to believe without knowing. That belief is separate from logic, not opposite. That the choice I’d been offered as an 8-year-old was a false choice. That believing without knowing is faith, and that one can simply decide to believe. Issaquah remains the place in this world where I believe His glory can most readily and brilliantly shine through me, and I trust that He’ll help me find my way there, or to someplace where I may more effectively share His glory.

I chose. I chose to believe in God the Father and Christ the Son and our salvation. I will choose to do so continually.

God gave me everything necessary for his glory to shine through me through intelligence, passion, and a challenge. Logic and learning have come easy. I did well in school with very little effort, even in the Advanced Placement classes. I enjoy learning a new skill every couple of years. I made my former career as a self-taught technology generalist and software engineer. The thrill of moving through and observing His glorious creation kindled and focused my passion. I’ve enjoyed cycling for as long as I can remember. I became enthralled with the views and challenges of the slog when I took up hiking with my grandfather. God’s glory has shown through me as He bolstered my resolve and saved me from my mistakes, but not their lessons. He’s given me the challenge of understanding and connecting with people. Community has always been difficult, distant, and fleeting for me. As an autistic person, connection will likely always be a challenge, and I trust God to keep me in that challenge as He has in my endeavors so far. I thank God for sending me out on my own to learn. I thank Him for patiently keeping me as I grow and explore. I thank Him for the opportunity to understand belief and to consciously and deliberately choose to believe. If I could go back to talk to 8-year-old-me, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t deny him the powerful, mostly fun, and ultimately necessary journey. I believe God made this path so I may share the power of movement and observation through His creation, building and participating in the community of His family, and sharing that belief is a conscious choice parallel to, not in opposition of, knowledge. I know logic precludes testing or proving God, AND I believe in Him and His Son, Jesus Christ.