Waiting in the Dark
The Latecomer's Guide to Advent: Week 2
From June 2022 to August 2024, we were nowhere.
We weren’t evangelical anymore. That door had closed behind us after years of theological disillusionment, but we also weren’t...anything else yet. We didn’t attend church regularly. Some Sundays we’d visit a church that people said we should try. Other Sundays we stayed home and made pancakes and called it Sabbath.
We told ourselves we were healing. We told ourselves we needed space to figure out where we wanted to raise our kids, what kind of faith community we wanted them to grow up in. We told ourselves this was intentional, this season of being unchurched. But honestly? Mostly it just felt like floating. Like being suspended between two worlds, no longer belonging to the one we’d left, not yet home in whatever came next.
For someone who spent his entire adult life in ministry, being church-less felt like walking around without skin. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t a pastor in a congregation. I didn’t kn…
