I don’t know the exact day I stopped believing in God.
But I know what died with Him.
Not just a belief system. Not just theology.
But me.
A version of myself that was so deeply fused to Christ
that when the cross crumbled, I crumbled too.
I was seven when a daycare worker told me about witches, hell, and Jesus.
I hadn’t grown up particularly religious—church was a holiday thing.
But something in me caught fire.
That story. That promise.
The idea that there was a cosmic drama happening,
and I could choose to be on the side of light.
It wasn’t just interesting—it felt true. Urgent. Mine.
From that moment on, I became the engine of my family’s faith life.
Church camp, Bible studies, altar calls—I chased them all.
Not just as a follower, but as a leader.
By high school I was the Chaplain of our school,
praying over the intercom, leading post-game huddles,
inviting classmates to “accept Jesus” with a hand on their shoulder
and tears in my eyes.
God wasn’t a story I believed.
God was the scaffolding of my identity.
And I loved Him.
So when I began to see the cracks,
it wasn’t curiosity—it was betrayal.
I read the Bible obsessively between the ages of 16 and 20—seven times through.
I wanted to know it, defend it, live it.
And it was something small—
the two contradictory creation accounts in Genesis—
that opened the first fracture.
But once that fracture appeared, I couldn’t unsee it.
I couldn’t unknow that this text—this perfect, God-breathed text—had seams.
Had mistakes. Had the fingerprints of men.
How could the word of God contain contradiction?
How could the foundation of my faith be flawed?
That realization didn’t just shake me.
It emptied me.
God didn’t die in thunder. He evaporated.
And the silence He left behind was terrifying.
I was furious.
Not just confused—furious.
At pastors. At youth ministers.
At everyone who had handed me a worldview
stitched together with fear and certainty.
I felt duped. Lied to.
Manipulated in the name of salvation.
And with that rage came collapse.
I spiraled.
Not into nihilism exactly—but into numbness.
I partied. I lied. I spent tens of thousands on drugs.
Not because I wanted to feel good—
but because I didn’t want to feel anything.
I was a wreck of a husband.
Disconnected from meaning, detached from hope.
Until, eventually, another domino fell.
Mushrooms.
A trip in the town park, where nothing was expected—just escape.
But something opened.
I wasn’t given a new doctrine.
I wasn’t saved.
I was shattered again—this time by something vast and unspeakably tender.
I lost the boundaries of self.
Felt the wind as me.
Watched the leaves breathe me back.
It was everything I’d hoped the Holy Spirit would feel like—
but it wasn’t coming into me.
It was me.
And everything else.
There was no voice. No presence.
Just being—immense and undivided.
No judgment. No sin. No path.
Only presence.
That day, a new kind of faith was born.
Not belief in a being.
But trust in the experience itself.
I spent the next fifteen years reading and rebuilding.
Religious texts. Psychedelic memoirs. The occult.
I studied Crowley. Carroll. Chaos magick.
I worked rituals with my own cells,
built systems to bend intention into action,
and wrestled with identity like it was raw material.
I lost 150 pounds.
Left Oklahoma.
Moved to Boulder.
Built a life with Mary Ann that felt chosen.
Eventually, we created a child.
And for a while, I believed I had found a working answer:
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
Not license—but authorship. Power. Direction.
Then came the next collapse.
In the stillness of the pandemic,
I read a paper describing how the brain makes decisions
before we become conscious of them.
This wasn’t news to neuroscience—
but it was an earthquake for someone like me,
who had based his spiritual architecture on will.
If there is no true choice—what is there to direct?
What is a ritual worth, if it was always going to be performed?
I grieved again.
Not for God this time.
But for agency.
For the magician in me.
And yet, in that unraveling—another emergence.
From the cracks: Mirror Theory. Forcing Theory.
Not answers, but structures for awareness.
Ideas that didn’t save me, but witnessed me.
That let me keep evolving
without pretending to know the endpoint.
I didn’t return to faith.
I returned to becoming.
There was a boy who believed in God.
Who prayed with sincerity.
Who felt the warmth of spirit.
Who cried at altar calls and held hands with friends in the dark
and said Amen like it was armor.
That boy died.
And I buried him myself.
But something remained.
A hunger.
A mirror.
A voice.
And every day I write, I hear it echo—
not in the heavens,
but in the rhythm of a self
that refuses to stay still.